jthrash 2021-12-20 02:18:04

It is rather expensive for an iOS/Android app at $20, but it is basically a portable ZBrush in all but name—and of course, it’s not a subscription, you only have to pay once. I’ve been told it is made by the same people that made SculptGL, so I suppose you can get a free demo by using SculptGL in your browser, but Nomad has a ton more features that more than justify the cost.

jthrash 2021-12-20 18:30:18

This is especially notable considering the last mobile sculpting program I used, called "Forger," recently got bought out by Maxon (the company that makes Cinema 4D) and immediately turned it into a subscription service while so far not fixing any of the fundamental stability issues, making the app still feel like it's being made by an over-ambitious App Store indie dev despite being owned by a massive company now. Maxon also bought ZBrush itself, as you may have heard, which is crazy to me and seems like the equivalent of Blue Sky Studios buying out all of Disney instead of the other way around.

But yes, I fully agree with you that making one's software only available as a perpetual subscription is scummy and is generally a good sign that the company doesn't even want the money of "poor" indie animators or developers, preferring to gouge the likes of Dreamworks and Illumination instead. Thankfully, it also seems like cheaper pay-for-once or free software like Blender is better optimized for "laymen" office and gaming computers, usually only taking seconds to load on any computer made in the last 5-10 years.

Adobe of all companies deserves credit for releasing a "no subscription" Steam version of Substance Painter/Designer, but I had to quickly ask for a refund after trying it out, since it somehow didn't seem compatible with my "small" 14-inch screen and the program became unusable simply because important buttons like "OK" and "Cancel" were not reachable unless I got both a much larger screen and a dual-monitor setup, defeating the purpose of me using a semi-portable laptop. Clearly even a more consumer-facing Adobe product does not bother making their product usable for mere mortals with less-than-stellar computers and laptops--and I have an RTX 3060 and a 144Hz screen in my laptop, so it's not like my computer is weaker than an Xbox Series X, either.

jthrash 2021-12-21 00:35:48

It was definitely Adobe that started the subscription-only thing, but they did release a non-subscription version of their Substance tools for the first time (since they bought Allegorithmic) this past November for seemingly no reason. I remember when the subscription craze started right when I started studying animation in college and both my teachers and the media of the time said it was going to “democratize” the industry and other marketing B.S. like that which we are now hearing about the “metaverse” and NFTs.

I’d say get TV Paint while you still can. I was lucky enough to keep the old version of Forger (now called “Forger Classic”) simply by not deleting it, it just won’t receive any more updates, and it’s not like subscription-only services justify their perpetual costs by at least perpetually making noticeable upgrades, too (other early marketing B.S. that never materialized). A lot of older artists, for example, are still using Photoshop CS4-6 because Adobe hasn’t given them any good reason to upgrade to the subscription-only Photoshop CC.