I don't know about you guys, but in my opinion, the more useful features a program has, the better. And all the features in Maya are useful. Anways...

the_brein > '...the cost of learning maya takes the fun out of it...'

Yeah, I agree. I went to my local Borders, found that they only had about ten books on Maya and three whole shelves dedicated to photoshop (seems to me computer arts is 2D-centric) and nine of the books cost more than hundred. The Alias 'Maya Basics' was I think $105, so in the end I got the books on the more advanced books and tried to figure out the basics myself, which wasn't to difficult. I find that you can learn a lot about Maya if you tried to make something and figure out how to make it by using what you know, the books, Maya's help and of course, experimenting.


the_brein > '...the length of time it takes to complete a project is ridiculous. im currently battling with this one. no matter how good your workflow is, youre gonna have to invest 1000 hours to model a character...'

I once read an article about pro who was discussing making really detailed sport cars in Maya. Most of the models, excluding texturing, took him over a month of full time work. So I guess its pretty normal to spend a bit of time on making things.