Whats Your 3D Progam Of Choice? & Why??

I use maya just because back when I was seriously trying to get a job in special effects that's what people seemed to be using. That and I liked maya's scripting language. Other packages do have scripting languages yet, Maya's was the only one that didn't seem like a bolt on afterthought tho. . .that's just my opinion of course.

 

Okay I know everyone has their preferences and that's fine, but I must respond to this post:

Actually, Max's renderer is better, you can setup the quality as much as you want, plus it has the ability to add much better renderers which isn't availible for Lightwave, such as Mental Ray, Brazil, V-Ray and others. The Lightwave renderer is as good as it gets.

Oh great, you get to spend more money on plugins because the built in renderer is a piece of crap! Excellent! Lightwave's renderer is great, you don't need anything else.

Plus Lightwave is a slow program which is another reason that I use 3ds Max.

Slow on your PC, perhaps...I've never heard anyone complaining about Lightwave being "slow."

Besides, Lightwave costs $1,000 and Max costs $3,000 so it's better by price also, I don't mean cheapness, because Maya costs $6,000 and we all know how good that is

That is the most ridiculous, inconceivably bad reasoning I have heard on this forum, no offense.

IMO, the only reason Max is so popular is because it is so widely available to pirate and download for PC users.

 

i'd have to agree with you fox.. that is kind of a rediculous statment.

in all honesty i've seen much better stuff come from cinema 4d than max, and whats the price difference there?

my point.

and the lightwave renderer has various quality settings as well.. you can change all sorts of things, modify things .. etc..

Also i'd like to point out that lightwave works fine with 3rd party renderers as well. Renderman and others support lightwave scenes.. granted its not fully integrated or whatever like xsi is with mental ray. In fact 3dsmax wasnt just began integration with mental ray and from what i hear its completly buggy. But take that as you will..

fox also has a good point about max in his last statement as well.. and no reason to question it.. how many times have we warded off 3ds max questions that could have been solved by reading the manual that came with such an expencive program?

I respect max.. Dr Jones has done great things with it.. and that shows what it can be capable of. I dont mean to put it down in any way, im just pointing out that you are mislead about other applications.. take ur statement about maya for example.. maya is a good program too, but i've seen things done in max that are better (in my opinion naturally) or XSI.. jsut because its worth a fortune doesnt mean that its better.. what about houdini:master? and its some 40k or so price tag?

personally im most interested in XSI.. and maybe will get my hands into it when i've got the time, but with my upgrade to lightwave coming in the mail soon i might be distracted from that for a bit

in the end use whats best suited for you, you're the one that has to use it the rest of the time.. the differences in the software at this level are not very much ..

 

lots, i thought you fell off the earth...

 

I use Max. It's easy and effective and its interface suits my needs as a guy with an attention span too low to check the manual for what the different words mean.

I do think the higher end pieces of software are awesome, but since I don't have that kind of money, I can't speak for how good they are in the user friendly realm.

I like to think that quality of work is partially the artist, partially the tools, partially the lights, and pretty much entirely the rendering engine's. If you create a magnificant piece of work in a program with a poor rendering engine or bad lighting system, you're screwed.

All opinion though.

-Will

 

I'm not trying to create any conflict here, just moderately curious...but what specific options does Max's native rendering engine have that makes is so much better than LW's?

 

hehe sevenjedi

i've been kinda quiet lately due to computer troubles.. open gl is busted so anything that uses it basically wont work.. (lightwave and many games) but workin on a solution .. so i should be up and running in a bit..

As for max and lightwave renderers... well from what i've seen the max default renderer do (now) i'd say that it is pretty competative. But this is an area of lightwave that hasnt been developed that much recently, unlike max.. it will probably recive an update in the next revision (due out soon) but i dont expect a big leap (since the now year and a half old lightwave render engine.. can still keep up, granted not in speed.. at least from what i hear..) i'd say at this point its probably the toolset and the abilities of the artist that will really make the biggest difference between the two..

tho my roomate claims the max renderer still seems a bit cartoony..

As for past versions of the max and lw renderers the main difference was that the default max renderer was a scanline renderer where lightwave used a ray traced renderer.. this means that lightwave used actual mathematical formulas to calculate light rays.. this allowed the shadows reflections and lighting of the scene to produce a more realistic picture than the older scanline engines could. with lightwave's renderer you could produce a more accurate fuzzy shadow using area lights, and a few very basic volumetric effects (at that time).. the disadvantage here is this made the lightwave renderer slower and max's faster.. so i guess it was a tradeoff..

 

sorry to hear about the open gl troubles, lots...

 

Yeah that is a flaw in Max, they don't have all the stuff that people want to do, like water and such or other things, and then you have to go buy plugins and stuff. But I just haven't tried to really use Lightwave for stuff, for some reason it was just really slow for me, I would try to select some vertices and it would take forever before they would be selected. I think that would be a problem with my computer since it really isn't good. But with the renderer, you actually make the image on just about all of them look really good, it's just a matter of options and speed. I just found that Max worked better for me. The main thing that made me not like Lightwave is that it looks much different than the other applications, it doesn't make it any worse, I just found that hard to use. You should just try the application and see which one is best for you.

 

I use 3ds max more then any of my programs, just because its easy to use.But I hate lightwave with a passion, to me its very limited and the renderer on their is "to me" complicated to use,or maybe i just dont know how to use the program very good, and its hard to learn and use the program all over.Maya is a good modeler and renderer and its nice and fast.So is softimage,"but i got problems with softimage right now so i cant say much about it".but 3ds max is the easiest program for me,its user friendly, and its easy to learn after u mess with it for awhile.

 

yeah lightwave's UI is different ill give you that .. but thats why i liked it more than max or maya.. *shrug* im odd tho

 

Your not odd if you like one program over another, it's just the program that you are best at using. They use basically all the programs for commercials and movies, it's just your choice of which one you want to use.

 

not what i meant.. but ok