Unity is FREE

Pretty solid summary there nervouschimp. It's a shame Maya's price has been hiked up $500.

No, the worst GUI ever award goes to Max.

Here, I disagree strongly. In my experience -- and I really don't know Maya well -- Max has the best GUI of any major 3D package (and it was far from my first program, so it's not like I loved the first tool I learned), with one really annoying flaw: you create objects using the creation panel but modify them using the modify panel (why not just merge the two?). Once you get your head around this particular bizarreness, I really like Max.

Cinema 4D is a disaster -- it's actually both less capable and less usable than Blender in my opinion (I basically bought the top-rated C4D and Blender books on Amazon and tried to figure out both packages, and to my considerable surprise I found Blender more usable and powerful in pretty much every head-to-head comparison).

its hard for pros to adjust to all the blender weirdness

Blender is definitely one of the weirder 3d apps, but I don't think it's any weirder than XSI (which plenty of people swear by).

It seems to me the obvious contender you're ignoring is Lightwave. It's by far the cheapest of the full-featured options (even though you can no longer get a competitive upgrade for $500...) and has one of the best renderers and material systems. You do need to export to FBX, but plenty of people are successfully using it with Unity.
 
Max seems to have a bulky, weird interface that wastes a lot of screen space. I haven't spent much time with it.. only a few minutes. If it were mac native, maybe, but honestly, I'd rather learn blender than max.

I never got into lightwave. My first 3D package was Maya.

I watched the lightwave core videos on the newtek site and thought OMG, what are these guys smoking?

I always thought lightwave was for old people who refuse to move on.
 
Just as a small side note. Cheetah3D 5.1 will already offer a great enhancement when it comes to character animation.:wink:
 
I never got into lightwave. My first 3D package was Maya.

Ah well, I've observed that -- especially with 3d tools -- people tend to strongly prefer the first program in a domain they learn, or other programs like it. I started doing 3d with programs so horrible that it's inconceivable anyone would prefer them -- maybe that's an advantage.

The first 3D program I ever used and liked was Strata 3D, but I despise it now.

I always thought lightwave was for old people who refuse to move on.

So, basically, you haven't used it but you're prejudiced against it ;-)
 
So, basically, you haven't used it but you're prejudiced against it ;-)

No, I'm not against learning lightwave, but I figure since they are redesigning the whole thing, I might as well wait for a demo of lightwave core.

It looks like a new license at this point is 900 bucks. That's getting up there.

... I will admit that when I see bad FX on tv, I just assume it was done in lightwave :)
 
Sorry to jump into the conversation at this point - a few questions for pod.

Since I joined these forums I've always read your posts and I respect your opinion a lot. So I'm kinda curious :

you say Cinema 4D is a disaster - I'm curious to know why ? i know that Tim Danaher's brother Simon, uses it, and he's a bit of a 3D guru (maybe that's too cheesy, but I can't think of any other expression right now).

Also on Lightwave :

what are your thoughts about using it on a Mac ? NT's support of Macs has been questionable to say the least. Do you have the latest version, 9.6 ? What are your thoughts about its strengths, weaknesses, stability etc. Do you like Modeler ? Is it a good package for arch viz ?

Thanks.
 
Paul -- a good user can make good use of any tool, and Cinema 4D has a pretty solid feature set (character animation is a weak point) and a good renderer, so if you know your way around it you can do great work. Based on my time with it, it's much less usable and streamlined than other similarly capable tools I've used... Maybe I just haven't grokked it. I will say that its online help is absolutely terrible.

Lightwave's Mac support has been spotty over the years (I owned 5.5 which was horrible), although since 8.x I've heard it's been pretty good. A more important issue was that a lot of plugins were Windows only.

If you're going to invest $3000 in a serious 3D package you pretty much might as well buy a box to run it on. If I were getting paid buckets of money for my 3D work, I'd cheerfully buy a ridiculously fast PC to run 3D Studio Max on. If I were running a company or project involving 3D production, I'd simply give each artist whatever program -- within reason -- they felt would help them get the job done. A good 3D operator costs $110k/year -- if they're 10% more productive in XSI than Maya, they get XSI.

Nervouschimp -- a lot of bad SFX are done with Lightwave because it's by far the cheapest tool that will allow you to get your foot in the door of Hollywood (for Max or Maya, by comparison, you'll probably want to buy a separate renderer -- which drives the prices even further up). But if you look at what's done with Lightwave -- James Cameron's SFX house was pretty much a Lightwave shop, for instance -- it's right up there with the other big guns -- and $900 is a lot cheaper than $3500 (for Maya 2010) and god-knows-how-much for Mental Ray, Renderman, or Brazil. And Lightwave 9.x users have enjoyed something like three years of dot releases while Maya users have gotten to pay $900 for annual upgrades or $600 for annual subscriptions.

---

Personally, if I can't do something in C3D right now, the first thing I'll try to do it in is Blender (unless it's modeling-related... some people produce great models in Blender but I have no clue how they can stand it). Chances are if you can't do it in Blender it's because you can't find the documentation :)

Blender 2.49b is a ~15MB download, it's free, it launches instantly, it's amazingly stable, and it does pretty much everything. If I'm going to invest time in learning to do something in a 3d package, I'm sick of paying some greedy bastard $1000/year to keep using it for the rest of my life. (I'm looking at you Autodesk.)
 
pod,

as always, thanks for your reply. I assume though that you no longer have a current or even recent LightWave license ?
 
Just as a small side note. Cheetah3D 5.1 will already offer a great enhancement when it comes to character animation.:wink:

Sounds promising and I'm looking forward to it! New animation tools/options/improvements will definitely be a big plus looking forward.

Still learning to implement Cheetah 3D with Unity in my spare time; Unity requiring much learning on my end, as I'm new to more complex game creation programs. Glad Unity lists Cheetah 3D in the import manual.
 
anyone else get in on the tiger woods online beta? it's definitely the direction I want to see gaming going. it's pretty slick. runs well on my macbook. i suck. +15 on pebble beach. need to play a few more rounds.
 
anyone else get in on the tiger woods online beta? it's definitely the direction I want to see gaming going. it's pretty slick. runs well on my macbook. i suck. +15 on pebble beach. need to play a few more rounds.

Played previous versions, solid golf game. May get around to the 2010 version. The beta for 2011?
 
Got an email today. Looks like a quite big update. Has anybody tried it yet and how were your experiences?

Bye
Martin
 
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