Originally posted by philip - liquid.arts
time to throw in my 2 cents I guess.

this kind of tool-loyality is pretty unique to 3D artists. I have never heard about 2 painters argumenting over the make of brushes they use like this. Looks like the companies behind those 3D apps did quite a good job at biasing their customers.

After all it's the artist not the tool that does great artwork.
I have seen crappy work done with 3dsmax and I have seen incredible work done with Blender.

That doesn't mean I don't have preferences. I certainly have.

When I started out with that whole 3D thing, I couldn't afford *any* of these packages, so I settled for Blender. Over 1 year I earned enough money doing 3D to pay for my rent, car and food and was finally able to purchase a more pro tool. But which one to go for? Maya Complete was 7500 USD back then, so it was clearly way out of my range. 3dsmax? Still pricey, but I played with a demo version and it was easy to set up a scene and render. I didn't even think of modeling anything though; too scary (all those panels and menus, Blender didn't have menus; I just memorized about 20 Hotkeys). Oh and that crappy Scanline renderer... So I wrote it off as an expensive plugin API. I was in need of a highend renderer; even with Blender I went for photorealism and had a tough time: no raytracing, shadowmaps limited to 2k and spots were the only lights that could cast shadows. Next was a demo of C4D. Oh boy, that GUI felt like a crappy plastic toy about to break. So I moved on to the LightWave galleries and got impressed real quick. I ordered my seat without even trying to model a thing in it; it didn't matter; that was the renderer I just plain *needed*. Full HDRI support, radiosity, 160 bit floating point render engine. Wow. And even the modeler worked for me. More than that; I fell in love with it almost immediately. Still the best poly modeler in my opinion (though Wings 3D looks impressive too). Notice that I skipped the part where I sat in front of my brand new LightWave for an hour, absolutely clueless. 2 different apps?? How do booleans work? Why can't I re-edit a curve after creation? But eventually I learned all of this. It's all about motivation, passion and commitment.

Anyway, I just recently added a seat of maya to my toolbox and am very impressed! The same day I finally received my serial number and authorization code, a|w announced to bundle mental ray for maya 1.5 with maya 4.5 for free. Wow. The way the maya interface can be customized and added to is unique. The ability to build shader networks in the Hypershade is incredibly useful. All in all maya feels like working very close to the code. Good thing. I'm still familiarizing with maya (due to time constraints) and am thinking up a "first project" but even so I feel it's easier to grasp than LW was when I started. I'm very eager to set it to work on something useful... will do it immediately after my next 2 or 3 gigs are finished. (oh, and a LW-maya-LW pipeline is pretty common in the indusry )

So, with this said, I believe max can't really keep up with these 2. The only advantage may be the availability of plugins and 3rd party renderers as I see it.

And there's more to a prog than just the code; the community. I still believe the LW community is very special and unique, but when I was so kindly invited to this board by Kevman I found out there's at least one very friendly and open minded isle in the sea of maya arrogance!
I posted a render done in LW in the forums and didn't get bashed. That's very special. I have seen maya boards where newbies get constantly flamed for asking "silly" questions. Lots of RTFM. They even advised newbies to search the web for 3 hours, read the manual, search the web again for 3 hours and only ask their question if they haven't come across the answer by then... excuse me your majesty, but what is a Q&A forums use then? If there are people experienced enough to just answer the question in a few seconds, why don't they do it? And if they don't bother to do so, why do they reply at all? Strange behaviour. I like to figure out by myself as much as I can, but I don't frequent forums where newbies are treated that way.

You have a very special place here. Don't break it.

(and forgive me for this lengthy post)

Originally Posted by