Change to lightwave?

[Mikkel Jans]

?!?! Since when is A|W about to go down?!?
Maya is more stronger then ever and it keeps growing.

[Calle]

I'm reffering to these threads.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4661

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4658

[Ed Lee]

I've read the threads u posted. And it seems to me there are greater men (I use that term loosely) who have bigger things planned for 'us" in this wild biz of graphics tool making. Yeah, the economy ain't what it used to be and peeps are not buying as much as they used to either..and in order to continue with purchases the software giant decides to do the unthinkable - price wars.

Have u knoticed it lately? LW drops their price and Maya too drops their price. Before that Maya ports over to Mac and yeah the whole Steve Jobs thing could be in the horizon as he has ways of making things happen. It's just an economic ploy and the programmers and engineers at A/W grumbling tho understandable are caught in this supposed transaction. It's become a "cat and mouse" game in software developement. And in the end we as users benefit.

I'm thinking seriously about making the purchase since Maya's within my reach price wise and to think that it's around the same price as LW is highly desirable ( a very, very aggressive marketing campaign by A/W). Softimage is also being aggressive with their XSI giving away free demo's even. I don't know what's happenig with Mirai - they've been pretty quite. AND Max....they've got some kind of twisted attitude that they can compete with Soft and Maya and handing out 15 days (only?) demo cd's. How lame.... if anybody, they should be the one who should lower the price now or should have a long time ago.

As for Maya going down? I don't know about that as too many companies in high-end strata have been relying on this fantastic tool to create fantastic images. It's only gonna get better as more and more projects will use CGI.

As for comment Maya driving studios out of biz? They said the same thing about SGI's and now they've come out with NT's. I think A/W is doing something similar to make it affordable to the market that's out there and they're tapping into it like LW, Max have over the years. And since the price is manageable (to some) more great artists are gonna be using it to create great images. Or I hope so....

Ed--

www.edleeart.com

[Lyr]

I don't understand how you are getting the idea that A|W is having problems. They restructured thier business and regrouped everyone in Canada so they could afford this price cut, how do these actions indicate A|W is in trouble? If anything it should be Newtek, Discreet and Soft that should be worriying.

As for switching to LW (I originally learned 3d on LW), A few days ago when Newtek dropped the price I was entertaining the idea of buying lightwave since I am graduating soon and would not be able to afford a seat of Maya, but now since AW dropped thier prices to very competitive levels I have tossed out any such ideas of changing packages. After using maya for 3 years and experiencing the flexibility and power I get with MEL, and Maya's renderer (I use a composite shading model that LW can not do) I could never imagine going back to LW, especially when there is only a $500 difference in price. Not too mention all the procedural animaiton and modelling tools you get with Maya. However if you don't build shading networks, don't use any of the procedural funtionality, don't use MEL to automate tedious tasks and just push all the premade buttons and use the factory shipped interface and settings then perhaps you should switch to LW.

[Tudor]

What do you want to do in 3d?

I am a user of both LW and Maya and I find strenghts and weaknesses among both.

It is not the program. It is the artist. If you learn one program and then are forced to change to another it is not a total waste. I got my job without ever having tried Maya. 1 month later I was up and running with Maya.

My personal favourite is Lightwave. Simply put it gets the job done faster and with better quality.
If you are going for a big studio I would stick with Maya though.

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