[nervouschimp]

I have been using 3DC on the mac, mostly for the retopology tools, but I just recently switched to windows 7 on a new fast PC. I experimented a little with voxels in the early alpha days, but it sort of felt like trying to sculpt something out of a bowl of oatmeal, and on top of that, performance was not good. After experiencing 3DC 3.2 on a blazing-fast PC with win 7 x64, I think the pretty steep hardware requirements of this program are it's biggest obstacle. I'm hoping with fermi 3D-Coat performance will really leap ahead, and voxel sculpting may become the preferred method for many 3D artists.

When I switched to windows, I asked pixologic to please migrate my zbrush mac license, and they said no, but they would be happy to sell me another license of zbrush. With the mac version now lagging behind the windows version for months, this made me very angry. Angry enough to start using 3DC for sculpting... and wow, this program is an entirely different experience on a fast desktop with windows 7. I don't think I can go back to using 3DC on the mac. I'm also unsure whether I even need zbrush at this point.

I am really glad I bought a win/mac license of 3D-coat to start with, but at the same time, I wonder why developers choose to license their software to an OS rather than their customer. If your program runs on multiple platforms, why not let your customers have the freedom to install it on whatever they choose? Why not just make the pro license of 3DC multi-platform? Why charge a premium for this? The way that Luxology handles this is very customer-friendly. You are free to jump back and forth between windows and OS X depending on your needs, and work environment. Like pilgway, their mac version is only 32-bit, so they encourage you to boot over to windows if your scene demands more memory.

Anyway, enough with the rant over licensing, my main point is to say that 3D-Coat has come a long way, and I just wanted to say thanks for developing this awesome program, and continuing to improve it at a rapid pace. I'm having a lot of fun rediscovering voxels now that I have the horsepower and performance to fully utilize it.

Thanks to Andrew, and everyone else who have contributed to 3D-Coat! Watching this program develop is really exciting.

[VolumesculptR]

Welcome aboard!

nervouschimp, on 01 February 2010 - 11:08 PM, said:

...Watching this program develop is really exciting.

Even more that this: You can even help in (in some measure, i.e. making cool features requests, catching/sending bugs ) development and make the program better as well.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thank you for kind words!

The reason of licensing issue is that porting to OSX/Linux was performed by guy who gets some % from OSX/Linux sales. If there will be no difference in licensing we will not know how to pay him. So we made small price difference to solve the problem.