[ceenda]

I've been playing around with the Maya Personal Learning edition, basically just to have a knowledge of the program should I need to use it at any point. The department I work for could easily afford either Maya or one of the educational licenses, however, any work that I did using it would be the copyright of the department and not my own. Therefore, I'm just looking for something that's a bit more affordable and could still provide good results that would look good in a portfolio.

The main areas I'd be after are:
Good animation tools.
Export to MOV or AVI. (though maybe this depends on codecs installed?)
Good range of deformation tools.

I thought about Infini-D, after looking at some of the Rustboy work but the package has since become something else.

I tried searching the archives but nearly everything mentioned is either MAX or Maya.

[EDIT - oh, by affordable I mean < $400]

[ March 24, 2002: Message edited by: ceenda ]

[tayete]

Well, it depends on what your definition of "affordable" is.
If it is related to price, then Milkshape, Blender (recently in bankrupt but the program is still available in many places), are free.
Nendo is quite cheap.
And now Maya has a learning edition with all its features, but won't let you sell your output or use it for proffessional works.
3ds Max has its g-max program, that focuses on games and it is free too, but it doesn't have all the original Max features.

If for "affordable" you mean quick learning and good results, the options are those you said: 3dsMax and Maya. Both have their pros and cons (I prefer Max just because I handle it better, though its renderer is worse than Maya's).

One warning though: None of them render clouds !!!

[freakophobia]

for beginners people recommend cinema4d XL coz it has the easiest GUI/menus possible. they say 3dmax and maya are way too confusing to learn the basics wif and i agree. when i started in max2 it was real hard coz of the millions of options and sub-programs. anyways i explored new options daily until i got satisfying results and then i went back to photoshop and 2d but thats a different story. However my advice is: buy a good book with a tutorial CD-ROM/sample scenes and a DEMO version of max so you can try it yourself =), hope this helps...


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freakophobia

[ March 24, 2002: Message edited by: freakophobia ]

[Pat]

Animation Master - A lot of high-end features for a low-end price. I use it exclusively.

-Pat