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Maxon Announces an Agreement to Acquire ZBrush


HappyPolygon

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I see some comparison here between 3d coat, blender sculpting and zbrush... 
And as much as I love the first two softwares, I will be honest, there are miles, miles of distance between them and what Zbrush is capable of... 
Blender sculpting is getting up there, but still.. the brushes, I dont know.. I dont feel 100% control of what I am doing. But of course, the easy access to poly modeling is really awesome, since zmodeler has an extremely clumky way to work...  I work with Zbrush for about 3-4 years, mostly for character design and some hard surface and detailing. The interface is scary as hell at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes so fluid and highly customizable.

3D Coat is a great software, but it is voxel sculpting, a totally different beast. It is great for some things,specially quick concept, but for fine detailing, not so good. Also, 3D coat is very unstable.. whenever I am doing retopo, I keep wondering "ok..will the symmetry break now? will the software crash?" I just paid for their new update, and the software still continues with this trend...  I ended up buying Retopoflow 3 for Blender and never looked back.

I think this is what upsets me the most. Each update Zbrush received, was awesome, for free, and really made sense for when they were released... compared to the laughable pathetic updates C4D has received over the past 2 years. If Pixologic started charging for updates from next year, even at a higher cost, I am 100% sure the customers would be super ok to pay for it. Heck.. I was starting to feel weird not paying for these!

After Redshift got acquired by Maxon, the same thing happened. In a whole year, a big part of the updates were just fixes for bugs created by themselves on previous iterations. Not to mention the passive agressive/patronizing tone some of the developers there seemed to have adopted.

For me it's clear, there will be no benefits for us after any business move involving Maxon.
Specially under this current leadership. It is just crappy news all around.



 

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15 minutes ago, FLima said:

I see some comparison here between 3d coat, blender sculpting and zbrush... 
And as much as I love the first two softwares, I will be honest, there are miles, miles of distance between them and what Zbrush is capable of... 
Blender sculpting is getting up there, but still.. the brushes, I dont know.. I dont feel 100% control of what I am doing. But of course, the easy access to poly modeling is really awesome, since zmodeler has an extremely clumky way to work...  I work with Zbrush for about 3-4 years, mostly for character design and some hard surface and detailing. The interface is scary as hell at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes so fluid and highly customizable.

3D Coat is a great software, but it is voxel sculpting, a totally different beast. It is great for some things,specially quick concept, but for fine detailing, not so good. Also, 3D coat is very unstable.. whenever I am doing retopo, I keep wondering "ok..will the symmetry break now? will the software crash?" I just paid for their new update, and the software still continues with this trend...  I ended up buying Retopoflow 3 for Blender and never looked back.

You are definitely correct. 3D Coat unfortunately suffers from being unstable and unpredictable, but for the price its very tempting and good for some things. I think brush related, in the newest version things got much better. Now, regarding Blender, it seems like there will be a lot of upgrades in 3.1 with sculpting.

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1 minute ago, Igor said:

You are definitely correct. 3D Coat unfortunately suffers from being unstable and unpredictable, but for the price its very tempting and good for some things. I think brush related, in the newest version things got much better. Now, regarding Blender, it seems like there will be a lot of upgrades in 3.1 with sculpting.

Oh, I need to catch up with what 3.1 is going to bring! 

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3 hours ago, Igor said:

Actually that's not the case at all. There were many people saying why the heck Pixologic didn't start charging instead of doing this. There are so many artists hating this move not because they will have to pay for an update, but because they joined forces with Maxon. Go and read comments, don't assume. I was reading just to see is it possible that only we in this community dislike what Maxon became, well Ill just say I was really surprised to see how many people share the same thoughts as we do here. So in the end, it was an eye opening for me and conformation that we are not alone in this so called "negativity". Artists are not stupid, and they know exactly what is going on. 

The big question indeed: “why the heck didn’t they start charging?”. I always wondered how pixologic could break even with free upgrades for more than 10 years. 

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Some very interesting posts on this thread.  Interesting that Maxon has become Adobe in terms of artists perceptions.  Some have stated that Maxon "rushed out" to purchase Z-Brush. I really don't think that was the case.  Acquisitions take a great deal of time to negotiate if you want to get a fair price plus there are regulatory considerations and due-diligence investigations in Z-Brush's value, debt, assets, etc.  In short, an acquisition is never an impulse purchase.  This is part of a long- term strategy.

 

So, what is the end state and what is driving this strategy?

 

Well, I do believe that pace of C4D innovation significantly slowed after R20.  Since then, it has been nothing but catch-up. Nodes could be source of innovation but is now only starting to show its potential -- in short, taking too long to implement and capture the market attention necessary to keep C4D competitive.  And that is the crux of the problem.  The pace of improvement is just too slow for C4D especially with Blender chugging along.    

 

To continue explaining the Z-Brush acquisition, you need to consider that the long-term strategy for Maxon is to grow Maxon One services more than any of its individual subscriptions or perpetual licenses.  Everything Maxon does needs to be considered with respect to Maxon One and Maxon One ONLY makes sense for users if it offers a suite of inter-connected applications that support the user's artistic goals.  Otherwise, save some money and just buy the individual licenses.

 

The core of Maxon One is C4D.  Everything connects to or uses C4D within the Maxon One suite of services. The value of Maxon One is tied to the success of C4D in the marketplace.  Unfortunately, C4D development is faltering as it is less innovation and more catch-up.  The big 2021 innovation for C4D was the new interface and that came out looking like Blenders with the added benefit of missing icons.  So, if C4D falters in the marketplace, then so does Maxon One.   

 

You have two choices if you want to grow the services of Maxon One:  More investment in R&D to organically grow the capabilities of its existing products or use part of that R&D budget for acquisition.    If your long-term strategy is Maxon One, then acquisitions can immediately feed into the value of Maxon One much faster than organically grown R&D funded projects.  Plus, the marketing is built into the acquisition.  Z-Brush is a well-known brand.  That brand value now increases Maxon One's brand value.  Plus, it sounds like Z-Brush was ripe for acquisition given their financials.   In my view, it was a no-brainer.

 

Now, I hate subscriptions especially when they take something away for the same amount of money.   C4D subscriptions did just that because you were paying the same but lost perpetual access.  In contrast, I looked at Adobe's Creative Cloud and saw more value in what they were offering in that there was a much larger suite of products to choose from for a fair price that was easier on the annual pocketbook with a fair monthly billing charge.  Maxon's started subscriptions with just C4D.  Now that suite of products is growing and if the price stays the same then the value of Maxon One increases with each new acquisition.

 

Give me a great deal of value for my dollar with a Maxon One license and giving up perpetual access now starts to make sense.  Unfortunately, I am not a sculptor, I don't use After Effects so I have no use for Forger, Z-Brush or Red Giant.  But should Maxon's acquisition strategy continue while keeping Maxon One subscription price's affordable (or offer indie pricing), then I could be enticed into that program.

 

What would it take?  Well, purchase Insydium, e-on, Jawset, Otoy, Embergen and the assets of Kitbash 3D and I think you may actually have something.

 

....or they become greedy blood sucking leaches and we all go to Blender.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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Just an advice if you are developing a product or service: never listen to Social Media. Only the angry ones post there. The happy ones never post. As seen in the twitter thread of pixologic: maybe 70 voice angry opinions and  create a frustrated impression. But also almost 460 like the announcement thread. So what to make of it?

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15 minutes ago, zeden said:

Just an advice if you are developing a product or service: never listen to Social Media. Only the angry ones post there. The happy ones never post. As seen in the twitter thread of pixologic: maybe 70 voice angry opinions and  create a frustrated impression. But also almost 460 like the announcement thread. So what to make of it?

I would say, most of them have no idea what just happened and what will happen. Also, there were many more posts, depending where you looking. Searching just @pixologic on twitter will show you far far more reactions. 

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I seen a lot of talk about missing icons in C4D and people thinking the same will happen to Zbrush.

 

Its like some of you guys dont even use Zbrush but are happy to find a new excuse to rant about Maxon. Zbrush already lacks icons, most of its tools are text only when you drag them onto the UI. 

 

If anyone can clean up Zbrush interface, is Maxon, not that I hope they will, but they do fix what isnt broken. 

 

As I cannot be more pesimistic about this adquisition, I can only look forward, so Im really hoping they add Redshift bridge to Zbrush or some UI love.

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Very unexpected. But an interesting development. Might this actually threaten Autodesk’s dominance a tiny little bit?

 

I hope it will lead to a closer (seamless?) integration between C4d, Zbrush and Redshift. And that the development teams can bring cool innovations to all the programs. 

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Best case scenario: maxon leaves pixologic alone to continue working their magic, and the development for zbrush continues like before.

Worst case scenario: maxon works their magic and zbrush atrophies over the years and leaves an opening for another software to usurp them.

In all fairness, the former is more likely to happen judging by maxon's acquisition of redshift which continued developing uninterrupted. Fortunately it seems that the brass at maxon is too preoccupied with subscription policy to spare any attention to hinder zbrush's future development. At least that's my silver lining 😄

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8 hours ago, Icecaveman said:

Per-Anders (who wrote the C4D mograph system and won an Academy award for it) on twitter, condemning this move and saying “It’s a terrible shame, Jaime should have talked to me first. They’ll find out though.”

 

Btw, I think he uses blender now.

 

He has a guitar. And he is musician.

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