3D Coat’s pricing looks pretty good.
Perpetual License: €379
Subsequent update at 45 Euros (from month 13+ following the purchase) or 90 Euros (from month 25+ following the purchase) with another 12 months of free updates. Considering the amount of new features added in the updated version, this is a reasonable price. (10% price of perpetual license per year)
It’s actually even better than that. Not only do they have the perpetual plus upgrade at 45 euro, but they have a regular monthly subscription at 20 euro, they have an annual rental at 150 euro, and best of all, they have rent to own - 7 or 11 monthly payments that total the cost of the perpetual licence, and then your year’s included upgrades start at the end of your payments - so the total cost you get to spread over time is around that of perpetual + upgrade.
Also I’ve been playing with it, after having not used it for years, and it’s really good - there’s also no polygon limit except what my PC can handle, which in the end was >200m polygons before it became difficult to use normal clay brushes. And the people on the Discord were super helpful - very unlike the Pixologic Discord.
The Pixologic Discord is FULL of Blender Users since the whole Maxon Announcement. they want nothing more than to destroy Zbrush in every aspect, cause they think of Zbrush dies, suddenly Blender Sculpting will “Get Good” somehow. anytime anyone even MENTIONS Maxon or Zbrush in there, someone (Usually 3 or 4 people) will pipe up with “BLENDER IS FREEEEEEEE!!” like that makes a difference to anyone who wants to use a Quality product for their job lol.
i hope to my CORE that a yearly upgrade isn’t $660 GD Dollars, but i guess we’ll have to wait and see.
and i tried 3D Coat, and it feel terrible coming from Zbrush as well, no Sub Divisions, it all feels incredibly unintuitive, hell id rather downgrade to Zbrush Core than go to 3DCoat for Sculpting.
that STILL Doesn’t mean im paying Maxon $660 for a YEARLY UPGRADE Though. but im starting to firmly believe Pixologic is lying to us, which is Devastating after all these years. that or since Maxon now owns them, they feel they don’t need to tell the Pixologic people anything, which i WOULDN’T DOUBT AT ALL EITHER! they should have their heads examined for letting a huge company like Maxon take the Reigns of their Baby. its like letting Uncle Creepy babysit your favorite kid.
I made a ton of macro for free and on demand from different users request. I am glad to read such of comment, man.
please be honest next time… just one guy did that, the other users are just worried about the current situation nothing else.
Nicolas
A lot of the Blender guys have been banned. but when i was in there yesterday it was a Zoo. incredibly offensive “memes” and other garbage being pumped in there. i am being honest and im not happy about what ive been seeing in there.
Btw you do know there is two different Zbrush Discords, right?
Edit: i just checked and i see i wasn’t in the “Official” one, i was in a Discord just named “Zbrush”
EDIT : No , nothing like that has happened on the OFFICIAL Discord Server.
Nicolas
Is this thread invisible in the Zbrush “Community” section? I had to find it with search.
If I’m logged in it’s showing as the top non-stickied thread for me, just above the Free Application Discussion thread. If I’m not logged in though it doesn’t even show me community to see this.
@Kerwin, Check on the bottom of the thread if it is set on Tracking or whatever but not Muted.
Thanks guys! Somehow, I muted myself. 
My senility must be kicking in. 
and i tried 3D Coat, and it feel terrible coming from Zbrush as well, no Sub Divisions, it all feels incredibly unintuitive, hell id rather downgrade to Zbrush Core than go to 3DCoat
3DCoat has subdivisions. It’s the ProxySlider in Surface Sculpting mode. I’m new to it, so I’m not sure what the effect is in Voxel mode, but in Surface mode you generate reduced or decimated levels.
But also, 3DCoat doesn’t particularly need them because it uses your GPU too, so Voxel mode (sort of the equivalent of dynamesh) can freeze areas and you can add local detail. And because the retopology tools are so much better than everything else, there’s no need to move to an external program to fix your topology.
You just have to learn it, like you had to learn ZBrush.
Seriously ? Sorry to hear. I loved his tutorials.
Well, im currently buying 3DCoat, cause i figure its just one more tool in my belt. even if i don’t use it for anything but Retopology, but i don’t see it being better, or even nearly as good as Zbrush, sorry but just my opinion. id rather keep my 2022 license till something MASSIVLY better comes along, than downgrade to sculpting with 3DCoat for no reason. i mean, i got everything i need in 2022 anyway.
Have fun learning Blender
Zbrush just crushed on me for no reason deleting a low poly subtool. Hello Maxon
What I’m wondering about is, if down the road, I have to reinstall and/or reactivate, will I still be able to do that? Right now, we are using the Pixologic license activation server, but what happens if and when it switches to a Maxon license server. Do they still, legally have to allow me to use the software or can Maxon say “That was Pixologic policy but now it belongs to Maxon and we don’t legally have to and you have to buy it again”. Does anybody, definitively, know the legality of a situation like this?
Not cool dude… don’t wish that on anyone ;_; lol j/k, i use Blender for a few different things. just NOT Sculpting. that’s uh… that’s a bridge too far.
@zber2 Autodesk bought Softimage from Avid, and changed the licensing to their own, which meant that after 3 years they would “retire” older versions of the software, and not allow them to be reactivated. Below is an email response when I asked to re-activate it after a drive failed in 2012.
" Automatic reply: Need to re-activate XSI Foundation 6.02
Software Retirement Notice
In order to maintain a high level of support for our Autodesk® Softimage® software customers moving forward, please be advised that historical versions of Softimage products (versions prior to Autodesk Softimage 7.5) will be retired effective August 1, 2011. If you intend to move a historical version of Softimage from one workstation to another, please do so prior to the retirement date to make sure that you will be able to re-activate your license."
Hardware failures, upgrades of machines etc. and your license is gone, and they wouldn’t reactivate it.
Is this legal? Presumably it is, sadly. Is it right, moral or fair? I don’t believe so, no.
And this is my concern of what will happen if people don’t keep up with potentially expensive upgrades or subscriptions.
I hope this isn’t what happens, but I’ve been bitten by it in the past, so I’m certainly apprehensive now too.
I agree, 3DCoat for sculpting is totally not at the standard of ZBrush - but I’m also wondering if there’s a bit of modification of workflow to get it to work the same way. Like we’ve had this way of working with ZBrush for years, and that’s why we’re so fast, but the fun question is how to we analyse our own workflow and start to create equivalencies in other tools. I’ve started with some of that, as time allows, and with some help, but this weekend has been a question of how do we want to proceed if we can see the future of ZBrush marked by Maxon’s very first action: without any information or knowledge about future plans or updates, they immediately change the licensing terms and start rolling out upgrade costs that reflect what they think we’ll pay for it rather than what they’re adding that justifies that.
3DCoat is certainly not slow, at least not on my hardware, and it’s not wanting for brushes - and I hadn’t paid much attention to it because I use Houdini and it has vellum for cloth, and that’s a real simulation. But apparently cloth dynamics have been in 3DCoat for about five years. They are, in fact, far more stable and accurate compared to Zbrush dynamics I guess simply because like Houdini it can use the GPU for far more accurate floating point calculations. And it can certainly beat ZBrush in terms of polycount - there’s no memory or cache based limits.
Thing is, in our team here we have no reason to upgrade ZBrush but every reason to start exploring alternatives - Maxon’s recent history with Forger (Forger Classic abandoned, the exact same program released as Forger Subscription) concerns me.
If we plan to use 3DCoat for retopo and UV instead of Houdini anyway, then we already made it part of the pipeline, so starting out sculpts there and passing them to ZBrush to take advantage of the detailing brushes we know before we retopo in 3DC isn’t a huge pain. We’re not jumping away from ZBrush just yet, but with the range of specialist tools available to us outside ZBrush we don’t see why we should be trying to make ZBrush that one program that we use. It’s really good at sculpting, but average at a lot of the other things Pixologic have tried to make it do. If it were still Pixologic or the update costs were more reasonable, or if it had taken them longer to make these licensing changes, I might feel differently about it - but as of now, if we’re not getting feature updates and the features they currently have are better done in Houdini, 3DCoat, Substance or Mari, which we have to have anyway, then ZBrush can just be the sculpting solution we originally got it for.
I’m sorry it took some time for me to get an answer here, but I can now address what people have seen for perpetual licenses on some reseller sites.
The price list that they drew from was in error and there should NOT have been an “Upgrade to ZBrush 2022” product.
There is no information at this time regarding how often feature upgrades will be available for perpetual licenses or what the cost will be. That information will most likely not be decided until the first upgrade rolls around.
Thanks!