We run computer labs in the Visual and Performing Arts in a medium-sized University. We used one-time funding to get ZBrush initially because its cost (even for Education) was well outside our normal budget limits. During online learning early in the Pandemic, Pixologic was great to deal with and we successfully taught the course that used ZBrush. We budgeted for an upgrade fee but were pleasantly surprised when the upgrade was at no charge. We even added a few extra seats with the budgeted upgrade money recently. Big kudos to the Pixologic staff for years of great service.
The switch to Maxon and ZBrush 2023 is already causing us grief. The biggest “f— you” that Maxon did was making the ZBrush 2023 file format incompatible with ZBrush 2022. If our students want to do their assignments on their own computer, they pay Maxon USD$10 so they can do so, but they can no longer hand that work in unless they drop back to an intermediary format like OBJ. There was seemingly no need to change the file format, so we have to assume this is another move to drive people to subscription (or off the platform).
Those USD$10/6 months student licenses are not available for a computer lab in Education; we need to pay CAD$269 per computer per year to use one app (none of the other titles in the Maxon Suite are relevant to the academic programs we offer). In our case, that is over half of our annual lab operating budget for classes in Art, Music, Drama, and Dance. We would have to count on one-time funding to come up with numbers like that, which we would need to be a perpetual license (since we can’t afford that much each year).
It’s clear that Maxon really doesn’t understand the Higher Education market. Is the student deal good? Yes—the biggest impediment for student purchases is the hardware requirements for their software. Is the Lab deal good? No. It deliberately favours their existing Cinema4D customer base, as that is the only title that you can subscribe to individually. We don’t teach motion graphics here, we teach sculpture (and drawing and painting…). Maxon does not seem to understand art schools like ours that incorporate digital software in to traditional art forms. We only need the digital sculpting tools, yet Maxon thinks that making us pay for titles that we will never install makes it “affordable.” We would actively consider paying for upgrades (subscriptions are a non-starter for the aforementioned reasons) if it were in that CAD$99 per major version like it is with Cinema4D.
Finally, the documentation that we can see suggests that installation of version 2023 is done by installing the Maxon One app and then having the Maxon One app install ZBrush. In a computer lab scenario where admins do the installation, not users, that’s not scalable.
Honestly, we didn’t expect Maxon to change their mind, at least not quickly. We were hoping that we could stick with 2022.0.7 for the next 18 months to give Maxon a chance to see the error of their ways and come up with a plan that would address our concerns and thus keep us in the fold. By changing the file format, they have tried to make the perpetual licenses worthless for computer labs, so that is now forcing our hand. If we don’t see a change in policy by July, we will be forced to rewrite our 3D Sculpture course to use Blender instead of ZBrush. I feel badly for the great staff at Pixologic. It will be sad to stop using ZBrush, even with its quirks, but Maxon is clueless about schools like ours that use digital tools as a adjunct to traditional art forms as well as those whose funding model makes subscriptions almost impossible to implement.
So weep for me as I’ve oft longed for the new symmetry options available in the latest version.
