um, as far as renderers go, Discreet own mental ray I think. Or at least they were the people licencing it out these past 3 years. And Max 8 is a complete rewrite and well under way for a 2005/6 release.
THe higher prices have allways been there in Europe, for students they have actually improved. When I was a student the educational version wasn't avaliable to EU students at all, only Educational establishments could get it at the educational price. My uni said that they could buy me a copy for 1000lbs (most UK prices are LBS for dollars thats pretty normal too).
3dsmax has a pretty good UI that's easy to use and plugins use the standard UI formats, certainly no harder than Maya.
XSI is by far the youngest and has had the best opportunity to learn from seeing what the older apps do. Max codebase is 1 or 2 years older than Maya and 3-4 years older than XSI's thats true.
Max is used more and more in Visual effects, more so than Lightwave by some margin these days. Allthough ALias and softimage have allways ruled that sector.
Max still dominates the games industry, and a large portin of Cad visualization, as most people prefer max to VIZ.
Discreet also own combustion, which is pretty much as industry standard for post effects in the TV and movie industry, along with their other tools. Max has also brken into the web based 3d in a big way, and has outsole all the other 3D apps ar least 5-1.
Lightwave has the smallest userbase, and if anyone is going it will be them. I'm just glad that XSI made it as it was pretty ropey for a number of years, and part of the reason that they may have released the low price version might have been to increase market share, as they don't have a very big one thus far. Being the youngest, and people moving to other Apps when they were floundering ion the verge of bankruptcy between 1999 and 2002.
THe higher prices have allways been there in Europe, for students they have actually improved. When I was a student the educational version wasn't avaliable to EU students at all, only Educational establishments could get it at the educational price. My uni said that they could buy me a copy for 1000lbs (most UK prices are LBS for dollars thats pretty normal too).
3dsmax has a pretty good UI that's easy to use and plugins use the standard UI formats, certainly no harder than Maya.
XSI is by far the youngest and has had the best opportunity to learn from seeing what the older apps do. Max codebase is 1 or 2 years older than Maya and 3-4 years older than XSI's thats true.
Max is used more and more in Visual effects, more so than Lightwave by some margin these days. Allthough ALias and softimage have allways ruled that sector.
Max still dominates the games industry, and a large portin of Cad visualization, as most people prefer max to VIZ.
Discreet also own combustion, which is pretty much as industry standard for post effects in the TV and movie industry, along with their other tools. Max has also brken into the web based 3d in a big way, and has outsole all the other 3D apps ar least 5-1.
Lightwave has the smallest userbase, and if anyone is going it will be them. I'm just glad that XSI made it as it was pretty ropey for a number of years, and part of the reason that they may have released the low price version might have been to increase market share, as they don't have a very big one thus far. Being the youngest, and people moving to other Apps when they were floundering ion the verge of bankruptcy between 1999 and 2002.