as a student i can get some hefty discounts on lightwave, 3ds max, maya etc…which S/W would you recommend of these (or another)??
price is an issue, but not that much of an issue…learning curve is more of an issue
thanmks a lot!
LW give you a lot of bang for your buck.
But… if you’re getting educational discounts the playing field is leveled a bit.
As always… it depends on personal style and what type of work you would like to create.
Try Truespace at www.caligari.com It’s easy to use, and a great program to get into 3D with. You can also purchase some excellent tutorials from off their website which are great for beginners.
You didn’t say what your focus would be, and recommendations might be different if you are going to focus primarily on either model-making, rendering still art, or animation. For example, if your goal is to produce Poser models and models and textures for sale, my recommendation would be different than if you were intending to produce animated shorts with lots of character animation.
My 2.5 cents: Mental Ray is apparently shipping with at least a certain version of Maya, if not the whole line, but the learning curve of Maya can be a beast if you are a relative newcomer to 3D modeling/rendering/animation. Check out the Alias|Wavefront website to see which versions include Mental Ray and how much the student version is. MR may not be included with the student version.
LW is pretty good, and I would imagine that its student price compares very favorably to Maya’s student pricing. However, LW is not the ultimate in animation, currently, if that is a consideration. I know that a lot of people prefer to use the combination of LW and Messiah, with LW being used for modeling and texturing, and Messiah being used for its animation capabilities. I am impressed with the LW renders I am seeing from the recent LW versions.
There is a similar situation with Max, animation-wise, with people either using Kaydara MotionBuilder, or Max’s Character Studio. In the past, Max was not really up to par rendering-wise, and third-party renderers were much preferred, but I understand that the latest Max renderer is much improved. Still, the best Max renders I have seen have all been done with 3rd-party renderers such as Mental Ray, and with Max, these 3rd-party animation and rendering plug-ins cost a lot of extra money on top of what is currently the most expensive 3D application. Maybe its student version is comparable in price, but between Maya and Max, at full price, I would coose Maya, since it comes with a Mental Ray plug-in and better built-in animation capabilities, in my opinion.
If I honestly think about it, LW 5.0 modeling/texturing/rendering wasn’t really much easier to learn for me than Maya’s, and Max is generally accepted as being a little harder to learn than anything else. When I learned polygonal modeling on LW 5.0, there was not as rich of a 3D tutorial selection on the web as there is now. I would say that currently, the edge for ease-of-learning for you as a student might be with whichever has more FREE tutorials available online, and my feeling is that LW leads Maya in that area. I’m not sure where Max falls on this scale. A few hours of Google-ling should give you a feel for the number of different tutorials online.
On the other hand, a good book can often go farther than a thousand poorly written, incomplete, and dodgy web tutorials. As far as 3rd-party books go, they all have quite a few written for them, with Max probably having the most. A few quick searches on Amazon.com would answer this question. Once you find the book you want, do a search for it on AddAll.com to find the cheapest one offered on the web. You might get a great book, lightly used, for $10-20, which would be worth it to avoid the time and trouble with searching for and working through some of the weak web tutorials out there.
You could buy apps like Animation:Master for less than the student versions of the other apps cost, but DON’T bother. You get what you pay for!
I am not a 3D animation expert, however, and these opinions have been picked up partially by personal experience with LW 5.0 and 7.5, A:M 5 through 9.5, Maya 4.0 PLE (no Mental Ray), and by several years of reading the web forums.
I checked out the Maya student prices a while back. If it is still the same now, you should note that each license lasts for 1 year maximum. You would have to renew your subscription each year, and when you are no longer a student you are given the oppurtunity to upgrade at a ‘special’ price to the full commercial version. So this might not end up being that cheap.
thanks everyone for giving me your collected experience. i think i’m going to d/l the demos for lightwave and truespace and see which one is “easier”. i am interesed in modeling and rendering, but not animation.
thanks again 
Try also the last version of Amapi !
Pilou
Ps
From your last post I think that Zbrush is not so bad