I am currently attending school and its time i pick up Zbrush. I have seen some deals on it through student discounted websites. If i do purchase my key through one of the sites will it be a full version? or will i have to rebuy it in the next update or in a year?
Second part, Ill edit this away if asked too. Can anyone recommend a student discount site to pick zbrush up?
Pixologic makes student pricing available for non-commercial (non-profit) use through specific resellers. You’ll find them listed under their own heading at http://pixologic.com/retailers/#academic
I recommend checking with a few of them as each set their own pricing and qualification requirements. It’s also possible that your school’s purchasing department already has a relationship with one of these companies.
There is no expiration on the academic licenses. Nor are there any functionality restrictions or watermarks. The only thing different is the non-commercial requirement for use.
All academic licenses receive the same upgrade benefits that commercial licenses are eligible for. So any academic license will receive free minor upgrades for one year. Major upgrades are going to be charged for, at a price that will be determined with the upgrade. The upgraded license remains subject to the academic/non-profit restrictions. Should you ever wish to upgrade to a commercial license that can be done through our support department. The price for this is 50% of whatever the current commercial price might be at the time that you upgrade.
In my opinion it’s better to just get the commercial version. The price difference between the two is not that big. I’ve gotten a couple of licenses from Novedge.com (They are a licensed reseller). Their commercial Zbrush is $576 and their educational one is $428. Only a difference of about $150. That price is only good until July 26th and then it’s increasing by about $100 (Pixologic is also increasing their pricing).
So I would just recommend getting the commercial version if you can afford it. If you end up not needing it later it shouldn’t be hard to sell for a decent price, getting most of your initial cost back. That’s cheaper than getting the edu version, in my opinion.
I thought, as I read here that many people wrote, upgrading since V 3.5 or so always was for free, that the upgrading is free for longer than one year and also includes bigger upgrades like from 3.x to 4. Did I understand something wrong?
It was one reason for me to decide for ZBrus and not other 3D progrrams???
mawag01
Upgrades have been free for me so far (started v3 several years ago, though I’m sure I’ve seen people who’ve had it even longer say the same). The academic version might not follow the same upgrading structure however, and there most likely will come a day when Pixologic will have to start charging for major updates even on the commercial license.
Thanks for your answer. That’s what I know from the forum. And that’s one of the reasons, why I decided for ZBrush.
But from the quoted text above, I’m really surprised. In one year, there normally comes one minor but no major update.
And as is written by Aurick, the upgrade benefit of the student-licence is identically to the upgrade-benefit of the full versions.
That’s the reason, why a statement of Aurick would be apreciated.
And as I tried out, the ZRemesher still has problems (spirals instead of circles, very big problems with low poly-counts of about 100 or 200), so I’m awayting the next update 4.7 to correct these problems.
mawag01
Thanks to everyone here. Really helping me save some dosh. Since i will be getting a commercial license i have a question. Lets say i install it on my laptop but need to reformat a month or so later. I understand the key is only for one machine. is there a way to uninstall then reinstall feature?
All you have to do is dectivate the license then re-activate it once it’s on the new machine. You would deactivate it through ZBrush in the ‘Plugin > Deactivation’ menu. Look on page 19 of the ‘ZBrush4.0_whats_new.pdf’ in your Documentation folder or see below.
