After months of sitting on the fence wondering if it would be worth the considerable price tag for someone like me with a small budget, I decided yesterday morning to bite the bullet and purchase ZBrush3.
I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was as I filled out that form, paid my $610USD, and anxiously awaited for the download to complete. Man! I can’t tell you how excited I am that someday I may even be able to get it to start up!
Yeah, that last sentence was sarcastic. I’m actually in a blind rage right now, because ZBrush crashed when doing the online activation thing that software makers seem to be so very fond of these days, and almost universally do very poorly. Right when it went to activate, it crashed with some message about tablet-something-or-other. Well hell. I have a Wacom installed, but it wasn’t attached, and I can’t imagine that would cause things to blow up. Would it?
I tried restarting ZBrush several times, and each time it would just crash instantly to desktop after the splash screen was shown. Naturally enough, I decided that this was a good time to reboot and re-install the app. Now, however, I just get a message saying that something was wrong with my license, and asking if I would like to recover. Damned right I would! Who wouldn’t want to actually use the product they spent so much money on? So it tells me to call customer support and give them this code…. Okay, well…. They aren’t open on Sunday, better wait until Monday.
That’s frustrating enough, but then Monday finally arrived and I’m getting all excited again thinking that customer support can help me out, right? Wrong. The guy apparently has "seen this before" and throws up his hands in defeat, asking me to send an email to the support team (which I did yesterday for f***’s sake) and they will get back to me in 24-48 hours.
Um… What? I have to wait yet another twenty four to forty eight hours for them to "most likely" get back to me? What the hell kind of customer support is that?
So far I’m completely unimpressed, Pixelogic. You fail for customer support 
UPDATE:
What I have to say is really not worthy of a post. In point of fact, the only reason I have for saying it all is a bit of a “screw you” emotional rant about Pixologic, the makers of ZBrush, who have the most apathetic (and consequently pathetic) customer support I’ve ever seen.
Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to expect that when I’ve paid $600 for something, I should get a little bit of help getting it running. The customer support personnel at Pixologic give you this incredibly bored-sounding “walk through the steps on this notecard” kind of help, and when that doesn’t work, they ask you to send them an email which they subsequently ignore. It’s been a week, three phone calls, and four emails since I purchased ZBrush and they haven’t bothered responding in any meaningful sense.
I did eventually find a workaround that involved installing ZBrush on the wrong damned machine rather than the one I actually bought it for, but since I’m clearly going to wait for weeks for them to get around to responding I’d surely love to get some use out of this expensive software.
Okay, rant over