The fact that you can embed your models into your website for people to tumble around, and get up-close and personal with your topology is incredible. While it produces good results and all of that, the thing that makes me most interested in it as someone who will be looking for a job soon, is the marmoset viewer. u/Tits_mmp brings up some good points of marmoset too. then I'd say look into Arnold as a stepping stone to something more used by the industry like VRay. If you want to show off textures, prove you can create displacement maps (for demo-reel stuffs), create complex materials, light your models with something more than an HDRI, or shit even create an environment to put your model in. If you just want to show off a sculpt with a clay shader, I'd say keyshot 100000% because its so simple, fast, and the bridge makes it quite the treat to work with. Judging by your post though, I think it really depends on what you want to do. It's very simple and straight forward, and it handles geometry like nobodies business (not as well as keyshot, but I think that has to do more with it being restricted by Maya). I've been using Arnold all throughout school, and while I personally feel like I'd rather work exclusively in VRay these days, Arnold is great at producing clean results with little headache. I think there was some stipulations, like you couldn't batch render with the free version, but I don't recall exactly.
#DEMO ZBRUSH 4 FULL#
An individual academic license may be upgraded through Pixologic Support to a full commercial license at any time, receiving a discount of 50 off the current commercial price at time of upgrade. I would say start looking into Arnold now that it ships with Maya (2017). The only limitation is in the license itself, which allows ZBrush to be used strictly for non-profit/non-commercial purposes.