Hi Najafi,

a little price comparison first:

maya complete: 1999 USD
maya unlimited: 7000 USD
softimage XSI: 7000 to 13000 USD
max 5: 4000 USD
lightwave: 1595 USD


I'm currently working with LightWave mostly, but am in the process of gathering information about maya and decided to add a seat of maya to my toolbox soon (only waiting for one more payment, impatiently).

The most obvious difference between maya and LW is that LW consists of 2 programs; the modeler and layout (referred to as LightWave). The modeler is used to , well, model things ; ) and layout is the program where you setup your scene, lighting and animation. This is a pretty unique concept that might seem a little strange at first glance but it really has some advantages. Some people even run them both simultaneously on a dual monitor setup. The next thing is that LW has no real NURBS, it's strictly polygons, and the modeler is considered the best polygon modeler around. Then there's the renderer; LW's renderengine renders 160 bit floating point, resulting in extremely vital images which can even be saved as HDR. It can also use HDRI's as lightprobes to light your scene without a single light, copying realworld lighting scenarios. Since version 7.5 the GI renderer can calculate up to 8 indirect bounces.

Now maya surely can't keep up with the LightWave renderer, but from what I learned until now (by searching the web, purchasing maya 4 fundamentals and watching some gnomon videos at a friend's and playing with the PLE a bit), maya clearly has some impressive advantages over LightWave. To my knowledge they are: raw animating powers! I just loved clusters, sculpt deformers (especially the flip mode) and lattices, blendshapes, wrap deformers (!) and the construction history. Rigid body dynamics too is something LW doesn't have (you can fake it to some point, but well...). And workflow enhancing thingies like the hotbox and marking menus (made my first custom mm yesterday : )) are very cool too.

There are lots of studios working with both maya and LW. Mostly using LW/maya for modeling, LW for texturing, maya for animating and LW again for rendering (eg digital domination, read about their awesome adidas commercial on cgchannel...).
To pass files between the two there are either some free sets of scripts or the beaver project, so everything runs pretty smoothly.

So, I'd say maya and LightWave make a killer combination, don't you agree? : )

Here in germany everything is pretty much max contaminated. How I see it, max is said to be the game industries darling (even though LW was used to model the highrez models for doom 3).
But I don't aim for games, at least not exclusively. So I don't want to jump on that train. And by the way; *if* everybody was using max around here, this would be one more reason to NOT. = )
Granted, max offers access to the most 3rd party renderers, but splutterfish is working on a port to maya for brazil : ))

So, quite a lengthy post I guess; just ignore if I bore you. : )