Yes, back in the day I was considering buying 3DC and heard about this, so I went and saw that he indeed had written not to use his software to create that type of art. Right then I decided not to buy it as I felt that he could at some crazy moment decide to pull the software from the market if too many people did not heed his warning.
Now that with this ZBrush situation I was considering buying 3DC, I could not keep that old testament warning off my head; I didn’t know he had removed it.
It’s a weird one, alright. Aside from financial resources, I just can’t see what possible help Maxon could be to the ZB dev team? Redshift instead of Keyshot? I don’t see any other possibilities. But yes, I’d definitely reiterate that if Pixo maintain creative control then development will continue as before, uninterrupted. What else could happen? And what possible benefits can Maxon gain beyond financial gain? Tech-wise, it’s a dead end for them.
Yeah, it was a pretty terrible business model. 
His religious zealotry aside, the man could be considered a programming genius. In those early days of 3DC it was just him, alone in his bedroom. I have to respect him for that. He kept going, expanded the team, and I believe he’s still the lead programmer.
I was soo close to spill my coffee this morning when I’ve seen that line at the modo forum 
Well a larger company bought a smaller one. Its deeply anchored in economics, its pretty much an implicit rule in a markets lifespan. The goldrush is over the market gets denser. But to me Zbrush is still a pretty unique product with their unrivaled performance and overall its a very mature tool. I am sure we will see some sort of coupling with C4D, for whatever reason. But not sure if it will be that interesting. And yeah maybe its just that, financial reasons. But to some degree this can also mean that some more ambitious plans for zbrush now become feasable. Lets hope for the best. If Maxon is clever, they dont change Pixo internally and just offer them more room to grow.
I believe that retirement is the most likely scenario here. Now, Follygon, one of the beta testers, said that he knows the Pixologic team, that it is quite small, and that all of them are positively excited about the Maxon thing. If that’s true (some random person posted in Facebook that they were actually quite devastated - no sources for it though), if that’s true, how could it be?
Maybe all of them in Pixologic are looking towards retirement? Hear me out: if the team is small and they are really united and friendly (a family, even!), could it be that some of the money that Maxon is paying will not go only to the owner(s) + higher ups, but will also be distributed amongst everybody in the Pixologic team?
Yes, they will move to Maxon, and if everything works fine, great! If not, well then, goodbye and thanks for all the fish!
Which also spells doom for the future of ZBrush. One of the things that really amazes me is how seamlessly they managed to deliver new functionality many times in a year and without any major bugs and crashes. They must have exceptional IT developers. And if this team of developers is small, it means that if they leave then no one will be able to replace them and pick up from where they left. And ZBrush will become very quickly a bloated, soulless husk, hardly resembling what it once was.
Yes, I’ve no doubt it’s solely rooted in economics. I was more pondering the software side of things. As I posted earlier here, the only outcome I can see that would dramatically benefit Zbrush development is if it gets a core rewrite to a true 3D program. Other than that…
coupling with C4d? does anybody outside of motion graphics even use this program?
I had been wondering these last few months where Joseph Drust disappeared to, but he has since moved to Ubisoft. Now I’m wondering if he left because of this?
Follygon was always going to say something like this. There’s no way he would state his true feelings in public when the news was announced. I’ll guarantee that there’s not a single ZB user who greeted this news with even a shred of positivity. The outcry online is pretty much Adobe/Allego 2.0
Haha yeah they have their markets they are more into, but honestly C4Ds UI/UX is and was very intuitive and approachable very early and for many tasks tools are interchangable. Maybe new markets are what C4D hopes to reach that way, I really dont know. For Zbrush I think the goal could be less about if its true 3D or not, in some aspects they already are and always were, but a core rewrite could exploit heavily unsused gpu ressources for central parts in their engine. They are mainly CPU bound and they are not fast because of it, they are fast even though they are CPU bound. Updating their underlying engine to use and exploit what a system has to offer nowadays could very well push the tools limits.
I watched the “end of an era” video posted above, and for the first time in “don’t know how many years” I decided to press the “Dislike” button…
It should be clear by now that Maxon is just another adobe/autodesk, and one no longer need to look for an explanation for why they bought x or y company, they secured a certain mograph community, they milked them and are still milking them, but it can’t last forever, instead of spending that money on improving their main product, they instead invest it in other products that can bring new blood (redshift, red giant, zbrush, etc…) more cash flow, more companies acquired, more users, rinse and repeat.
User x comes for software y and stays for the whole package (all apps playing well together “the adobe way”).
Come on, don’t you know you can make artsy fartsy NFT renderings using C4D? 
Definitely worth some praise. Autopo was the first auto-retopologizer, before ZRemesher surpassed it, although Autopo is still one of the best algorithms. I’d still love to play with 3ds Max’s auto-retopologizer, but I’ve planned a return to Mac next year, so I won’t invest in Max anymore. Otherwise, I might very well have gone for an Indie subscription, which I think Maxon should offer as well.
Some of the best concept designers in the world use cinema 4d mate. Steven messing, wojtek fuss, ash thorp … just to name a few.
To me, the fact that C4D started as Amiga software is of course a big +1. 
But Blender’s predecessor was also developed on the Amiga, and Blender itself was developed on a Silicon Graphics machine. 
C4D seams to be pretty widespread in Germany. At least I know a bunch of freelancers and a couple of advertisment studios who use it for all kinds of stuff besides Motion Graphics.
Personally I never understood the appeal of it but is seems to be rather popular around here.
C4D is also, like 3ds Max used for Archviz, since it belongs to the same parent holding company, the Nemetschek group as 3 architecture software (Archicad, Allplan and Vectorworks). Though I wouldn’t be surprised that a large portion of the user base, the architects, switches from C4D + Corona to any Unreal engine powered real time rendering application soon.
I’ve worked with a C4D trial version in the past, to check it out, because at the time it was one of the prime choices for macOS. It has got some pretty nice features, such as a solid spline toolset, extensive motion graphics tools, Max-like modifiers and a flexible non-destructive OpenVDB system, although that rapidly becomes very slow once your construction gets a bit complicated.
Even C4D’s native sculpting toolset is not bad (although not Blender Sculpt Mode or ZBrush by far). Also, if you like Octane Render, C4D is one of the host tools where Octane is pretty tightly integrated.
Will that change pricing ? What about perpetual licenses and upgrades ?
About Maxon pricing is always high, and upgrades are not always that great.
Let’s hope this will not lead users to buy expensive Maxon they don’t need to use Zbrush, or downgrade Zbrush upgrades quality due to subscriptions.
But who to blame ? Pixologic never charged for upgrades.
While they would have been incredibly fine financially with paid upgrades, and without needing such acquisition.
Let’s hope this will turn out well.
C4D is an attempt at a complete 3D software that does everything like Blender, but in reality the sculpting in C4D is pathetic compared to something like Z-Brush… Maybe Maxxon hope to actually integrate at least some of Z-Brush’s tools into C4D?
What would the timeline be 5 years? 10 before it is remotely on par with Zbrush, 15 before full feature parity is reached? By then C4D will probably require a core rewrite, if not already (don’t have a clue on it’s development). That’s a pretty long term investment wherein shareholders need to be kept satisfied. Not to mention that according to benchmarks in the edit mode performance thread on Blenderartists, C4D performs slightly slower than Blender 3.0. Where would the window be for performance improvements if Max on doesn’t want to upset the current Zbrush user base?