Game tools & Financing

I believe this can be a very beneficial thread for people like me who force ends to meet lol.

Right now, I'm trying to scour the net to find a place to finance game dev software (such as ZBrush).
So far I've ran into 'novedge.com' it says it's easy to apply, but see no button to apply for it anywhere.

So for me, trying to get ZBrush (Right now I got ZBrush Core), but would rather just finance a big (to me) purchase.

So do you happen to know of any places that allows the financing of software like ZBrush?

For me it's related to ZBrush, but any other websites to finance any other game dev software is fine. So this can help everybody find the tools they need, with a financing option involved.

Not everybody has 800+ dollars to throw immediately like buying a cheese burger lol.

 

blender + instant meshes ?

 

So OK I just checked your FB page and it seems you're modelling a raptor or something.

Anyhoo, this would be my workflow in blender.

1. Grab a 2d image of internet showing side and front view of raptor etc or your own concept art
2. Use skin modifier with mirror modifier to get basic topology down

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3. Subdivide mesh for suitable vertices
4. Go into sculpt mode and enable dynotopo
5. Start sculpting basic forms going more detailed stage by stage.
6. Retopo manually using bmesh plugin or use instant meshes of github.


*Note inside blender you can use your own photoshop brushes to get intricate details like scales etc.

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Side note: carefully watch your topology if its wrong to begin with you ain't going nowhere.

I basically whipped this up in about ten minutes using the above workflow - it's pretty crappy. But is forms basically everything you need to get going, you could even apply rigs and bake the high res mesh as a normal mesh, for game usage.

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Point is cost = 0, give blender enough ram and UI responsiveness is comparable to zbrush, also recommend using a wacom tablet for sculpting.

 

Also this is a highly instructional video for sculpting for beginners when it comes to getting the form down.

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And instant mesh (free) topology below in case anyone was wondering, zbrush uses remesher which is more sophisticated of course but still:
https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes

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I want to know about financing tools, not a Blender and instant meshes. (I've already got ZBrush Core), which suffices and works well for sculpting, just not the extra good plugins that Zbrush full version has. So I can utilize all the really good tools, such as UV Master, and ZRemesher, Sculptris Pro, not to mention all the really good brushes, custom brushes, etc.

Blender is nice for what it is, but it is nothing like a true sculpting program.. I've used regular full ZBrush in the past, so it's not that I haven't used the stuff and realize their usefulness to speed work flow up. Just a matter of finding another avenue to acquire it without up front 700+ dollars. E.G. - Financing.

I mean I see where you're going with this, which is not bad. I just wanted to know if anyone knew of any financing places for software for the likes of ZBrush, etc.

It's not the sculpting and such I needed ZBrush for, only the plugins and extra brushes and such.
The plugins and tools alone are worth the value to buy ZBrush, at least too me.

I wasn't trying to find an alternative, or even getting it cheaper. Just a different avenue of purchase.
Oh and that dinosaur is a Compsagnathus (A Compy). The little tiny Dinosaur on the second Jurassic Park movie that bit the little girl on the beach).

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Oh and that is a pretty good T-Rex Model for such a short time doing it

 

Yeah I was just trying to show you what blender can be capable of but i appreciate once you start learning one toolset its difficult to switch.

 

So you are looking for a regular business loan from your local bank? If you can convince them that your business plan is viable and will return money, they will happily give you a loan. As a general rule you should avoid online finance companies and the like. Banks tend to offer much better terms. As a less formal option you can also use credit card debt, again the terms are likely to be less favorable.

Otherwise you can reach out to the ZBrush developers and ask them to set up a subscription service. Despite the bad rap subscriptions get, they are a very cheap way to access software up front.

 

Yeah, sounds like you're after a loan or a credit card.

Before chasing up either of those things I would first make sure I had a convincing plan of how I'm going to use the money spent to make significantly more money in return. For instance, does buying that tool allow you to take contracts that are a) readily available specifically to you and b) you can not currently take due to a lack of appropriate tools?

 

^^ IMO I'd only consider dropping $800 if I was either
1)Top of my game in that field
2) People I'm working with are tied into using zbrush

Whether the OP feels he falls into those categories I don't know.

 

You get Zbrush 100 USD cheaper if you already own a Zbrush Core license.

 

No, I'm not after a business loan. I was talking more like a Rent-To-Own or Leasing and own at the end.
I know some softwares you can do this with, such as the Substance stuff.

Which in them cases I just buy them up front as they aren't much.
But like you can do monthly installments until you own Substance painter/designer/Bitmap2Material or if you can't pay it, they revoke your license.

I know that's done directly through Allegorithmic, but what I meant was, third-party companies that can do the same thing, E.G. - An Authorized retailer kind of company, even if it has an interest rate from providing a service.

I guess there aren't really any options for this, so I'm just going to save up and get it, nearly halfway there. Couple weeks I should have it.


But it has nothing to do with gaining a profit in return from it, I simply just want it because it's what I'm comfortable using and can speed up my workflow 10 fold (Figuratively speaking)... But again, I used to use ZBrush on a daily basis awhile back. So it's not that I don't know what it's about and how much it can help me with certain things to speed up the time.

Oh and also, it's not that a Loan hasn't crossed my mind. Just can't seem to find any bank that want's to give less than 3 grand. I don't need 3 grand, i need like 700 something dollars lol.. I know they can do it, they just don't like to do it.

 

Credit cards are the normal finance instrument for low value loans.

 

Honestly, I tend to avoid them things. They can ruin your life quick.
Yes generally at the persons own stupidity lol. Just prefer not to use them.

Reality is, it would be easier to just save up and get it and not have to pay anybody anything else lol.

 

Given you won't get a bank loan, you won't get a credit card loan, and the software product you are after doesn't have an installment plan, it seems like this is your only option.

 

Yeah, that's why I was just wondering if anybody knew of any third parties that worked like this.
You'd think with today how things are, rent-to-own, etc, are big businesses now days. They are virtually in every town and city in America at least. Perhaps this is an untapped market potential?

For example, found a startup.
Become an authorized retailer of whichever products (if they let you).
Figure out the legalities to things (which may be what's preventing it anyways).
And if you are allowed, given permission of course, rent-to-own licenses to customers.
If customer becomes delinquent on payments, revoke the license.
If customer pays off (with interest rate) for providing a service, they own the license free and clear.

Now of course this type of thing may not last very long, because a lot of things are turning to subscription based. In my opinion, at this point in time it may not even be worth doing, despite how good of an idea it may result in. A temporary solution isn't always a good thing when a month after starting it, everything you wanted to support this service for now goes to subscription based models.

So the question is, do you think ZBrush and companies that still do the pricing the traditional ways (One time, own forever, which I still prefer honestly), will stay at their current models, or do you think they will eventually switch over to subscription?

 

They sure can, if you don't have a plan.

If you get one for a specific purpose and then only use it for that purpose they can be pretty useful tools.

But if saving up is something you can do fairly easily then I agree that's the best approach.

 

i do hate the subscription model with a passion but i guess if i was them it would yield the best return for their software - and the end user can stop anytime.
as a student everything i use now is the cheapest most bang for my buck, bought outright.

some things i've purchased, affinity designer/photo and armorpaint (lightweight substance clone) and cloth 2.0 for blender which is like a (marvellous designer clone)

good luck man. i like the compy model, i decided to throw that t-res together cos of the new jurrasic park movie ha.

 

i personally think zbrush will switch to subscription at some point, when i don't know, as all the other software vendors are doing so.

The good thing, it brings about healthy competition in the market, i don't think affinity photo/designer would have been conceived if adobe didn't overprice their products so much.

 

There are plenty of loan sharks that will be more than happy to work with you. I know you don't want to use a credit card but the reality is that a credit card is far less likely to come with exorbitant interest rates. For the most part people don't go to non-bank third parties out of choice. They go to them because they have no alternative.

Apply for a credit card, purchase the software you need, cut up the credit card, pay off the credit card, close the account.

 

If you use a PayPal business account they have a pretty nice loan system in place, with no credit check. The amount they loan is based on your typical volume through PayPal, and they take a percentage of various payments you receive until it's paid off.

Edit: More details in my post below...

 

Didn't we just have a thread about drama where someone tried to do that on the assetstore but then Unity did not accept it and charged the bank account instead, oder something like that?

 

No, they did some weird account sharing payment scheme and the expected unity/PayPal to arbitrate their drama.

 

Maybe we're thinking of different drama threads? There were a few recently. I was specifically remembering it to be about the paypal credit option:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/a-friendly-warning-about-using-paypal-for-unity-purchases.525172/

But I don't want to re-read the thread past the first post. Just thought I should mention it as a general heads up to people considering using Paypal credit for purchases, because it seems their communication is somewhat lacking.

 

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isn't every thread some kinda drama

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especially when i'm contributing

 

Not sure exactly what happened in that thread, but I think they used the actual PayPal credit thing, which isn't what I'm talking about. That's just extended credit from PayPal, like a credit card. I'm talking about the PayPal Working Capital loan, which is something different. It's a loan, not a credit balance. Just for clarification.

 

Yea, I was thinking of a different one.

 

Move to sweden (High tax on salary) and create a LLC (Zero tax on goods), all of the sudden everything you buy on the company feels like Monopoly board game money

 

Spambot revived the thread but since no one pointed it out I thought I'd mention that there are credit cards out there with introductary APRs starting at 0% meaning if you qualify for the card you could purchase the software and pay off the balance without having to pay a single cent of interest.

 

For some audio software there is a rent to own service called "splice". So the idea isn't that far out there.

 

Has anyone found a new method of financing?

 

I was like what thread did I make cause I didn't remember it lol.
But then I was like Oh yeah after reading the first sentence haha.

But honestly, I haven't found one, but I did get ZBrush Core to Full Zbrush on a I suppose wholesale discount (or something like it) through one of their authorized retailers. Novedge.

$679 rather than $795.

Still expensive, but hey - gotta love perpetual and gotta love the $116 off. The only kicker is though - unless they changed it to mention it, once you order it you have to wait for them to manually do what it is they need to do as it's not an automated system.

I wouldn't be surprised if other tools can be on discount from there as well.
https://novedge.com/

Looking at their main page you can get full ZBrush for $746. Beats the crap outta $895

 

If I'm not mistaken, now's the last chance to buy maintainance renewals for the perpetual licenses of Substance tools, before they go sub-only forever. I'll probably go for it, but so far I'm only using older versions because the new ones that I tried all weren't stable enough. It's like rolling the dice on them putting out at least one version in the next 12 months that is worthwhile for me to upgrade to :-/.

 

With this kind of pricepoint, I'd likely just stick with blender/dyntopo.

I mean, you pay $0 for 95% of functionality $800 software offers....

 

Not really. ZBrush is pretty insane in what it can do. Blender is nowhere close to 95% feature parity. It may cover 95% or even more of what you personally actually need, in which case it makes total sense to stick with it.

 

This is not the case, as soon as I saw the email I got in contact with them.

They will continue to have a steam version and it will remain perpetual (EDIT: I had 'forever' here, but I can't say it will be perpetual forever, they just didn't say they were planning on changing it). END OF EDIT.


Not sure why they are keeping the steam version if they are wanting to move the website to subscription based.

But do not just go get the steam versions yet, the person who told me in the response back said that steam used to have something called a "Loyalty Discount", which would let you get SP and SD for 75 per year rather than paying the full 150 for each product for maintenance updates. They said you can check out social media pages and they gave me a link to the substance painter steam forum where they will let us know when the discounts are back up. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1194110/discussions/

But it was pretty noted that they are keeping steam versions and the same type of maintenance licensing.

@neginfinity - While normally I go straight for free software (cause who don't like it), but in this case, i've tried blender, mudbox, 3ds max, maya and none of their sculpting stuff really feels correct to me, perhaps it's cause ZBrush was my first experience with it and it sorta came to me.

But I just love the features ZBrush has - ZRemesher, ZSpheres, now they have Physics Simulations.
It's WAY more than just a sculpting tool. Heck the UV Tools are superb. Instead of trying to unwrap a model over hours, just paint over spots you want it to protect, etc and I'd say within 25 seconds you have a nice lovely unwrap (from the time you start painting to pressing Unwrap and letting it finish).

ZRemesher is probably my favorite part of the program though, automated retopology - press a button and adjust a slider.. If the result isn't what you like, you can paint some lines that try to guide the new quads on the retop.

ZSpheres are my second favorite - you quickly within a few seconds/minutes get a low poly base mesh for something - such as a person, animal, etc. And then you can begin sculpting the mesh.

It's really just a bunch of time savers that made it worth the price for me, not so much just the sculpting.

 

Well, for example....

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This would be largely equivalent to zpheres in practice. Skin modifier.

There are also physics, volumetrics, shadergraph (that runs in viewport in realtime), UV does not take hours (mark seams, press a button. Does require proper topology, though) and when it comes to things like retopology, chances are there's an addon that does a better job.

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And that's what I mean 95% equivalent. There's usually an option, but it may be non obvious.

Also, when I tinkered in blender with dyntopo, I think, ZBrush still required you to press a button to remesh the object. At least that's what tutorials demonstrated.

Hence the question.

The difference, as far as I know, is not THAT huge, but the things may be rough around edges, on other hand, they do get the job done.
But the price difference is between $0 and $800. Hence the question "is it really worth it"? Because for me the answer was "it isn't".

 

It is pretty fascinating to see what other programs do have compared to the expensive ones.
I don't know blender enough to argue any points, I just briefly tried it a few times and just couldn't get around to liking it even after the big update like last year I think it was.

 

Well, here are two demos I found in a half a minute. This is blender.

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"I'm not familiar with it" is a good argment, along with learning curve. Because it does take some time to get used to it. Once you do get used to it, it is very efficient.

It may be a good idea to revisit it and perhaps save the money. But either way, it is your money and your decision.

 

@N1warhead thanks for the info about the licenses!

That actually does come close I think. Haven't used zSpheres much.

Can it UV a 4 million poly mesh though? I never tried it. ZBrush can, and does a remarkably good job at it.

I don't understand, because in that video he exports to obj (which is painfully slow on a millions of polys mesh) and does it in an external program. With addon I was thinking of a python script, but that would probably be also slow.

The first one demonstrates well why I think blender is unusable for highpoly sculpting. At not even 2 million triangles it already lags visibly and would slow me down and annoy me while working, while zBrush would still be butter smooth at that resolution and can efficiently work with models that have 10 million and more. The polycounts used in highend art asset pipelines are simply too much for blender at the moment. I very much hope they catch up to some degree, Blender is one of my favorite tools for sure and I've used it since before it had a propper undo function. But zBrush is still waaaay ahead for sculpting and highpoly meshes.

For those that adopted zBrush early, it is actually incredibly cheap. The price went up over time, it used to cost like 300 or 400$ I think. And now get this, if you ever bought and registered it, all updates since then where free.
https://support.pixologic.com/article/336-upgrading-from-an-earlier-zbrush-version

So if you bought it once over a decade ago and use it professionally all this time for the cost of that one initial purchase, the price is a steal compared to anything by Autodesk or Adobe.

I'll give you that though: it's a bitch to learn, maybe even more confusing than Blender 2.49 and prior. The current Blender versions are definitely an easier entry into sculpting in terms of learning curve, but if you want to enter the AAA industry and its art pipelines Blender sadly still is a deadend for sculpting imho. For hardsurface modelling, Blender is great and we'll actually see more and more people switching from Max or Maya to Blender imho.

 

Blender can talk to anything that can talk to python, in which case the dude implemented actual retopology as an external compiled binary. This isn't done often. Also, that's not the only plugin I've seen.

However, in this case I have lacking expereience with zbrush retopology tools.

At very high poly count, yes, you're going to start running into issues and slowdowns, I won't deny that. Usable range is somewhere up to 1 or 2 million polys.

It can. But it will not be done instantly, and it will think for a while.

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Normally, you wouldn't unwrap a million poly polygonal soup,. but retopo it and unwrap the retopo. "Normally" means "in blender" that is.

Yes, I heard that opinion - that zbrush would've been a much more amazing program if it had blender UI, because blender UI is easier to learn. That's half-joking, but likely true.

Interestingly, I've heard zbrush is not very friendly towards pipelines, but then again, it is unknown whether this is true or not.

Either way, my point was that it might make sense to check if this kind of purchase is REALLY necessary and job can't be done by free tools. That's all.

 

Oh ZBrush has sculptris pro in it now too. (been there for a short while). Not sure if blender has an equivalent. Definitely useful for when you don't need an entire mesh being high poly. Essentially creates new geometry within the brush size, so the smaller the brush the more detail you get.

 

It has, it's called dyntopo there.

I didn't mean that in a sense of pipeline integration features, can't say anything about those. I meant it as "zBrush can work with those highres models, blender simply can't". I can sculpt on an 8 million vertex cube in zBrush just fine on my machine, in Blender a 6 million vertex cube slows sculpting so much down, I simply can't sculpt on it anymore. And models in AAA pipeline can easily surpass those polycounts. For these tasks, Blender simply isn't an option at all. For plenty of small sculpting tasks, it's perfectly fine of course.

 

It does.

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You can also pull geometry like that

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It's based on pixel size by default, so you can make overall shape with large strokes, zoom in and add details.

Also, you can even start your skulpt without Skin modifier or zspheres - by pulling the necessarhy appendages from a sphere.

Here's the important thing...

Are we an AAA?

I mean we had a thread about that not so long ago. The general conclusion seemed to be that an indie should mind their budget and capabilities. Which would mean that you might not need a 8 million poly models in the first place.

So, it is true that zbrush will perform better on very high polycounts. However, the question is - do you need those polycounts in the first place.

 

@neginfinity just figured I'd let you know, not sure if you've ever actually used ZBrush before. But I forgot to mention there is an absolutely free ZBrush out there, but it's pretty dumbed down. It's an even more 'core' version than ZBrush Core.

I've never used this but here's the link to it https://zbrushcore.com/mini/

 

"*Free for non-commercial usage"

 

Oh wow, that's pretty dumb honestly. I mean I get it. But with all the crazy limitations you'd think they'd be like yeahhh let people do what they do lol.

 

Well, those kind of free versions usually come with strings attached, and restricting the lowest tier to non-commercial usage only is fairly common.

I remember when I wanted to take a look at houdini. Been a long time ago, but their entry configuration was also "non-commercial" (also watermarked renders and with restricted maximum resolution).

And that's why I'm not using Houdini.

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Also I did use ZBrush before, but it was a long time ago. Back then ZBrush actually was geared towards being a mostly 2d depth painting program where you could draw with multiple materials on a buffer, strokes would generate normals, and you could move lights a bit to adjust what it looks like. And the whole skulpting thing was very badly bolted on. I think sculpting a model generated a "tool" you'd need to position on screen or something like that.

I'm not sure what year it was at this point.