I’m not seeing anything about the Keyshot Bridge on the My Licenses page, only Zbrush 2022.0.7 and the archive 2021.7.1. Am I missing something?
Thanks again for all you’ve done for the community over the years!
Hi Aurick,
I fully understand the concerns of IAML. We have the exact same issue at the place I teach. Are you saying there is a $10 student version of 2022?
At the moment, we have floating licences of 2022.0.7 which we use, and cannot justify the costs of 2023 for a cut-down version of a renderer we have no intention of using or teaching. The decision to try to get everybody to pay for a renderer in order to access the latest version of ZBrush is not sitting well with those of us who either don’t need a new renderer, or don’t have the resources.
Maxon need to offer ZBrush upgrades that are sculpture based (the bread and butter business) and not there purely for the purposes of trying to get people to buy and use their other products. To then sell it at an extortionate price is the icing on the cake and loses the goodwill of the userbase which Pixologic had built up over the years. It is genuinely sad to see them being used as pawns here. The latest update was pitiful, in that all of the efforts were patently put into grifting Redshift rather than adding the creative tools and technologies that made it so popular in the first place. The lack of innovation in this release was disappointing to say the least. I’ve always loved the ZBrush updates, but this the poorest update in living memory.
If you want to kill ZBrush in colleges and schools, keep charging for features nobody wants or can afford.
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I saved up for years to buy the Zbrush perpetual license so I could hopefully one day work as a professional. It seemed like a great deal and you all seemed like a company that actually cared about its users. And that same year you all sold out to MAXON and now want to charge me $700 to “upgrade”. You have crushed my spirit. The only thing I can hope for now, is that I get good enough anyway and people stop caring if I use the latest version of zbrush. Which I guess good luck with that huh? I should have known better.
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700 for slime and a better zremesher? Nothing to blow your skirt up about that is for sure. Keyshot bridge is better anyway. Not worth the license not worth the upgrade. This 2023 update was nothing more than a patch for the pre-Maxon Pixologic folks. Maxon has ruined Zbrush like the single pay Forger. The future of Zbrush is kicking it out the door. Nomad and Zbrush 2022 for ever! What a waste.
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The price got leaked last year and the community at large didn’t like it then and still don’t like it. I recommended $150-$200 annual with each missed upgrade year being 50% of that plus the new upgrade. Clearly they weren’t listening to that. Respecting the artists in that way would keep growing the userbase and keep a constant flow of R&D cash. If Maxon wants to argue that they aren’t getting a fair split of VFX revenue, most artists wouldn’t disagree with you. On that front I would say work with the artists to renegotiate a better split with the companies actually making the billions of dollars rather than trying to jam the artists.
Going this cashgrab route is just going to run artists off to blender, 3DCoat, Nomad or one of the many other options that are popping up daily. Keeping your dignity will make-up for a lot of deficiencies in software. Hopefully, Maxon will rethink their perpetual license pricing soon.
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Unforunately I have to agree ! I love ZBrush and want the amazing ZBrush team to make a good living. I would be willing to pay for upgrades on my perpetual, but Maxon’s new pricing strategy is killing it for me.
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Maxon had a choice between getting a reasonable cost amount for an upgrade, and all the non-studio users buying it each year, or losing out all those users altogether by pricing all non-commercial users out of buying the upgrades. They chose option 2. Sheer greed means that I can’t justify paying the upgrade price. Not that 2023 seems a significant upgrade even for a more reasonable price anyway.
A £200/$250 upgrade price, seeing as how we already bought it at the full price from Pixologic (and for new users to rent it for a year is £322), the perpetual upgrade price is a kick in the teeth (and a stab in the kidneys when your down, along with it), might have been reasonable. Over $600+taxes is not.
Competing sculpting and texturing apps (with a blue and yellow dripping sphere logo) seem very much more consumer friendly for hobbiests and indie users, and their upgrade pricing is an eighth of Zbrush’s. There are also more and more tutorials being developed for it, which should encourage more users in that direction, although they don’t have the same level and range of tutorials as yet to be fair. But once upon a time, ZBrush was the crazy weird outsider, with only a community to support each other, and a small range of tutorials. Now Maxon doesn’t support that community.
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2023 isn’t a yearly upgrade at all. There are a few point release features added, but mostly tweaks to Zremesher, fill mask, and the local symm. Otherwise there’s nothing, really, for a yearly update.
Most of the work seems to have been put into Maxon’s Redshift integration, rather than core Zbrush work, and Redshift is an extra charge so that’s an absolute waste to most users, paying Maxon an extra bill just to get the GPU version, because let’s be honest, who on earth wants to go back to CPU rendering in 2023? What a joke.
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So you BUY a perpetual license for a given year, but you don’t get the new features for that year? That’s downright scummy and misleading.
I’ve been a ZBrush fan and amateur for a long time. But this whole license scheme is ugly dumb nonsense. What a way to destroy your user base. You could have probably done just fine no longer having free-updates, maybe releasing light/medium/full versions of Zbrush and just charging $200 a year, and instead it’s this Maxon predatory moneygrab.
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Literally every company out there that offers perpetual licenses offers free updates with bug fixes AND features for that yearly version of the software. A couple of days ago when I purchased my perpetual license, nothing on the website indicated that I will be cut from new features for Zbrush 2023, the very software I bought the perpetual license for. This is straight-up a deception, why isn’t this clearly stated on the perpetual license details page? I feel like I got scammed.
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For most users, a subscription is the best long-term value.
Please see What’s the difference between Perpetual and Subscription? – Knowledge Base (maxon.net)
It clearly breaks down perpetual license entitlements.
Also, if you purchased the perpetual license within the last 14 days, you can get a refund on that purchase.
Just don’t understand how Maxon is able to get away with this. If you pay for a 2023 perpetual license for Zbrush, you should get all the new features for 2023 in addition to bug fixes. I will not give Maxon any money until that policy is changed. Other apps and applications I have upgraded to for that year give you all of the new features for that entire year. What is sad is so many of us want to pay for these new features but will never pay for a subscription, especially to Maxon. This is echoed by so many users of a 2022 perpetual license.
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No worries Maxon you can keep your stuff, I’m not here to fuel or sustain corporate empires. My old license can stay in limbo and rot, I moved on haven’t looked back since. Blender is a fine software, its license just works.
For most users, a subscription is the best long-term value.
For most users… oh the irony in this just scroll all the way up after you lock the threads! 
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I completely agree. I see no value in a subscription for end users. I have a perpetual license and the upgrade fee is like purchasing a new license all over again. Absolutely ridiculous. I am not asking for free updates which we have received for many years. We are all hurting with rising costs for food, services, bills etc. I am happy to upgrade my perpetual license, just make it affordable for artists like me (who receive no income for my work and time) to continue using Zbrush with all the new updates. Locking the updates to subscription only is terrible and unfair, especially to all the loyal customers Pixologic had. I see so many leaving to learn Nomad Scupt or Blender which are also great tools. I love Zbrush, and hope to continue using it with the new updates and stability improvements on Mac.
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I bought a perpetual license shortly before the swap. Just one last update and now, for some reason, my zbrush crashes almost like clockwork. Every hour just about it just dies. Could be because I tried to dynamesh, could be because I deleted an item or masked something. It will even do it on save which is by far the most infuriating example.
It’s so regular I’ve gotten pretty good at saving just before it happens. Like I can sense it. It doesn’t feel at all random, but something that occurs only after the last update.
I hate the fact that I paid for this but for stability I have to go and learn Blender. Especially after being sold it as ‘they’ve always given updates!’.
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I am a public high school teacher in Arizona and a hardcore zbrush amateur since 2009. I have loved zbrush so much over the years and have recommended it to my students and gotten so many hooked on its wonderful interface, tools, abilities and community.
Maxon, you have taken that away. I cannot recommend zbrush anymore to anyone for any reason - not even a little bit.
This system was a thriving ecosystem and you have now put your stamp of greed on it. The sculpting tools in Blender are rudimentary compared to zbrush but I will gladly switch over with my students and never look back because at least we will have something that moves fast, is unrestricted and has potential moving forward.
I feel so sorry for the employees of zbrush - what a beautiful, thriving, community they built over the years with such an amazing tool and now it is this -
Good bye - I cannot believe this has happened - what a shame
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I own the legacy version of zbrush until 2022. I was planning to buy the perpetual license again next year, then i see this in the perpetual policy:
“Perpetual users purchase a license to use the current base version (e.g. ZBrush 2023.0) of the software and are entitled to receive bug fixes and security patches for that version. These updates are essential for maintaining the stability and security of the software, but they do not include any new features or functionality.”
I am sorry but don’t we at least get 12 months of feature updates?
The annual update fees are like getting a new license all over again.
To make it even obvious, there is no discount for perpetual license during zbrush summit.
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Haha… yeah i own a perpetual that lasted until 2023 and i thought no point in upgrading when the “upgrade” is basically the same price i paid for the first license… but had plans to “milk it” a little more until upgrading but as of today reading something different where a perpetual is year based… and to THAT amount? You got to be kidding Maxxon… Putting this into perspective for any serious Music Sequencer like Cubase i have upgraded almost every year since 15 years where a yearly upgrade is about a fraction of the full cost.
Why can’t a perpetual license be set to a sensible amount?
And here i thought Adobe was bad… You are clearly taking the cake here Maxxon
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@LordPotus and now they’ve made updates exclusive to subs. It was always coming. The over-priced perpetual upgrade was always a thinly-veiled and clumsy attempt to force everyone onto subs. It didn’t work so now they’ve just abandoned perpetual users altogether. And STILL Redfshift GPU is an extra sub. A year on and I still haven’t seen any Zbrush user using Redshift.
The whole sordid affair has been pretty much a disgrace, but expected from a company like Maxon.
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