ZBrush and Maxon
I didn’t want to mention this on the blog but because I have a ZBrush license it is relevant.
It turns out that ZBrush has recently changed their license terms for perpetual licenses of ZBrush which is probably something to do with the recent joining of ZBrush with Maxon.
Something to be aware of is that if you bought a full ZBrush license after December 29th 2021 you now only get access to critical or bug fix updates instead of major feature updates. As you can read on the licensing option types from the Pixologic website:
Feature upgrades would require the purchase of an upgrade license (pricing and frequency yet to be determined)
I was hoping this would not effect me since I purchased my license way before the changes under the impression that I would get lifetime updates for doing so, but it looks like that will likely not be the case.
See their upgrade policy for details, but looks like only get 1 year of updates as a prior user to the 29th December. I see why this makes good business sense for the company and this is pretty standard practice with most software these days, but it sucks for new users.
Hopefully my version of ZBrush will be fine for some time anyway before I need an upgrade, I probably don’t even use 90% of the capability of the current software yet as someone new to digital sculpting.
This change in licensing is definitely something to factor in for anyone looking to start digital sculpting using ZBrush going forward. Hopefully Blender will continue to improve its sculpting tools (I’ve heard they are pretty good), but I have to say I still really love using ZBrush. Perhaps I’ll use Blender and 3D Coat for more sculpting as well given the situation.