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Originally posted by Melkor:
**I don't like how you've rated them, unless you've used them all to some extent. From what I can gather it's more Max and Lightwave on top with Maya just behind(For it's poor interface and difficulty to use) with something of a large gap to Carrara, Infini-D and any others and a little bit further down would be Bryce.
As far as I can tell it's almost impossible to rate the programs, you can put them in sections but they all seem to have their ups and downs.
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Now I can tell you that lightwave and Max are definately behind Maya in power and ranking. I love lightwave's interface, but it is too far behind maya to be concidered an equal product, especially in the realm of character modeling and animation. Maya has a relitively good interface, it is actually quaite accessible. Furthermore its built-in support for hair, cloth, fluids, and most importantly paint tools (as well as a host of others) makes it by far more powerful than the other two (in my oppinion, max just sucks). Now I havent palyed enough with PRM and the other pixar products to comment on them, but the latest vers of maya does have a production renderer (mental ray) built in, and is quite effective. Anyway, i am now a Maya junky, and have not used LW in quite a while. They are really going to have to make some big steps with 8 to make me upgrade.
But on topic, I would be happy if bryce just permenently died out, i have no love for it, at all. I think terragen shows the most promise, but landscape modelers dont really intrest me any more, as they dont really hold any advantage over all-in-one packages like lightwave and maya.
Joe
P.S. Does anyone have a list of changes that are going to be implemented in LW 8, I scanned newtek's forums a while back, but i really didn't see anything. Thaks.
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