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Your guess is as good as mine

I would like to see it. Perhaps with the increased use of OS X in the 3D-Modeling community, will warrant the relese of 3D Studio Max. Lets see how well Maya does.
 
I thought Discreet were porting it to the Mac??? that said... Discreet don't seem too big on the mac, so we could be in for a long wait on this one......

However... is 3D Studio Max any good (even though it's not on the mac yet)??
I'm not a big 3D person, although hopefully this is going to change soon, as I recently got Maya, and am teaching myself this package... and must say I'm most impressed......

What strengths do various packages have?? for instance Cinema 4D, Lightwave etc.......
 
I saw Alias Power Animator in 1998 and all I have to say is that, that software was made by a supreme intelligence. The rest are just try ons.
 
That's a good one. I've been using Lightwave for a 3-4 years now and absolutely love it. I got the personal edition of Maya and played with it a little, but never really got far, I have too much still to learn with Lightwave.

But one of the biggest issues with the port is support of 3rd party plugins and addons. Both Mac versions of Lightwave and Maya do not have as many options as the PC versions and this is a significant issue. Some day it might eventually even out, and if Max gets a port, it will be in the same boat.
 
Max rocks for games

According to a couple of my friends, 3D Studio Max is really conducive to character design. A lot of game studios use it over Maya for its ability to be customized, plug-ins, and third party software (Maya has all these attributes as well, but 3D Studio Max is just more fluid in terms of getting characters into games.) I used to use it back in the day, but I prefer Lightwave now to Maya or 3D Studio Max
 
if anyone wants to learn maya or 3d studio max, go to http://sv2.3dbuzz.com/index_sv.php and just sign up for the free cds. i signed up about a month ago and i have recieved 2 cd's already. they send you them in easily to learn sections like chapters. i really learned a lot from them too

besides that, i think apple is about to break big into the 3d market for apple since they bought nothing real's shake. talk about a powerhouse program... i can't wait
 
Kewl..... cheers guys.....

I remember duke, you mentioning about the lack of plug-ins for Lightwave in another thread....... although the level I'm at the moment, I'm not sure whether this would affect me just yet...... but it's definitely a bad thing when there is a very real difference interms of functionality between the 2 versions...... lets just hope that 3D on the mac does take off, so that developers see it as a viable platform.....

Some of the guys I used to teach were heavily into Lightwave, and used it for character modelling.... and the stuff they were coming up with was pretty fantastic...... so that perked my interest in this package.... although I've yet to buy it....... I bought Maya because of hearing what people had to say about it...... so opted for Maya over lightwave as a "My first serious 3D package" I figured that if I was going to devote time to learning 3D, then I might as well start with a good one......

As for what I want to do with 3D.... well I have no career aspirations in this field just yet..... amd very interested in juxtaposing live dDV footage with 3D stuff....... and wanting to try alittle bit of character design....... automotive/ mountain bike design and dare I say product design.... although no need to worry yet guys..... I have no plans to model a G5 just yet!! :D
 
I've only done one serious character animation so far in Lightwave, but I'm working on a few others. Its great and the newest version of Lightwave is a definite improvement over 6.5 which I did the first one in. I'll post my stuff when I get it done.

What it really boils down to is that each of these apps does basically the same thing, what makes the difference is the animator doing the work. So I don't think it really matters what you use, you can get pretty much the same results out of all the packages.
 
I don't think we'll ever see max for the mac. I talked to a Discreet rep at sigraph last year, and he said that it would require a complete rewrite of the software. It is tied very closely to the OS, so it would be cost prohibitive to rewrite all the code.

As far as the maya lightwave max discussion, I use maya and have found that it is great as a high res character and hard surface modeling tool, and has good animation tools. The joints in maya are easy to use and the IK is good. And out of the box, no package can boast it's dynamics features. But what I think is the most important factor is what ya'll are going to use it for. 3Dmax has great poly tools, (thus it's strength in gaming) and I've seen some sick poly models done with max.

But in the end, all the software and hardware in the world can't make up for a bad artist, and a computer is just a really expensive pencil, so whatever package you use, remember that it's about style and technique. Then it really doesn't matter which package you use...

:( :(
 
3DSMax has got a lot of extentions and theres a lot of people using it. Yuo can easy get help with problems/tuts etc.

Maya is easyer to learn and work with. Maya is also better when it comes to animation.
 
I think it's bullsh*t that my friend has a copy of Maya Unlimited, and I can't even buy that for OS X, like I went to a Maya Seminar in NYC one day (gotta miss school for it :D ) All it was was like this "buy this yadda yadda..." But as soon as the guy mentioned that it was not the 'Unlimited' version, i.e., no fabric or fur renderers, etc. A whole bunch of people just kinda asked some questions, got up, and left. That was heartbreaking, it's like the guy was showing us some REALLY cool stuff, but as soon as he's like "...they may add it later if the userbase becomes large enough...", it turned alot of people off, how are you going to get a large user base if you're not giving people the whole product? In my opinion, that sounds like a plan that was designed to fail...maybe not for you or me, but no serious design studio would bother if it wasn't a full featured product.
 
I totally agree, and that's one of the biggest hurdles Apple is going to have if it truly wants to compete in the 3D arena. But they might surprise us, and I'm still waiting to see what happens with the buy out of Nothing Real.

I'm going to stick with Lightwave for now, it does pretty much everything I want. Maybe someday I'll move over to another or learn it to round out my skills, but its just not worth it at this point.
 
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