As you may recall, I had planned to spend some time trialing Lightwave and then concurrent to that I was going to trial Zbrush. This weekend, that just passed, was when I intended to start the Zbrush trial as I have already started the Lightwave trial.
I’m not entirely sure what happened. I went to get the trial of Zbrush only to find it no longer available. I can’t tell if it’s been unavailable for a while and I was working under a false assumption or if it just recently, and abruptly became unavailable. I don’t recall seeing any notice and I only found one reference to it on the forum, so I’m perplexed.
I am also annoyed. Yes, I know, the company is under no obligation to offer a free trial of their software, it’s sort of a courtesy. Or more like a drug dealer. Still I would like a chance to try the software before I shell out the cash for it. At this point I’m stuck trying to decide what to do. I still have more than 60 days on the extended trial I got for Lightwave. I can just continue with that and see how I feel about it in the end. I can wait and see if Pixologic offers a new trial of Zbrush. I could try Sculptris, which someone seemed to think might make a good trial. There are reasons I don’t consider that an option but I won’t go off chasing that topic. Or I can take a moment, remind myself of my greater plan and the reason I was considering the software in the first place.
The original point was to find a relatively inexpensive yet professional grade software package to do 3D modeling in. This is as an intro back into that realm and to find out if I will actually use it and become proficient at it. Zbrush does still meet that. There is another possibility that I may look into before making a final commitment.
Autodesk make Mudbox for about $100 more than Zbrush and it does much the same thing in general. As my end goal is to get to the Autodesk products it may be an option to just start with them.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet. I was almost convinced to just purchase Zbrush, but the new wrinkle of Mudbox means I’m going to have to do a little more research first. As always, stay tuned.