Good question, icedeyes !
I guess the answer depends on what you want to do with the software you intend to buy. Since you already own an older version of LightWave (and thus already own a reasonable modeling app), I would like to suggest another alternative: Buy messiah workstation and spend the remaining bucks on the AoN shaders, rather than on Silo. 
So, you didn’t upgrade to LW8 afterall. 
Well, most of the newer choices you’ve enumerated essentially have some of the same shortcomings (no hair/fur, rigid body dynamics, etc…). LW 8 is essentially LW 7.5 except mainly for a Dope sheet, Rigid body dynamics and formerly-free modeling plugins. But, LW 8.2 which is due out shortly is supposedly addressing the long-standing UV distortion issue on subpatch models. I’m really looking forward to that.
I use Silo, myself, and save for a few features that it’s lacking, it’s a great way to crank out organic models. My latest work-in-progress using Silo is Scorpius from the Farscape Series. If you do the Silo route, remember that it doesn’t have a UV editor at this time and LW 7.5’s UV editor is really outdated by today’s standards (unweld and weld!). I would definitely consider using Wings3d or Blender (free) to edit the UV’s or perhaps an external UV editor such as UV Mapper Pro or UV Edit Pro(formerly free).
What is it you want to do is the main question here? What do you miss most in what you have already?
Lightwave[8] is rather lame IMO, 8.2 sounds a bit better but it doesn’t add any “killers”. It is rather expensive compared to what you get. One user on the 8.2 thread said something like “8.2 sounds cool but we are living in a 12.6 world” - I found that a very good picture 
XSI is very cool too, I use it as my main modeller instead of LW currently, but also it is very complex in some areas - if you love that - cool - otherwise you may be a bit “overwhelmed”…
messiah is a fantastic, fast and flexible animation package and has a very cool renderer that I personally prefer mostly over XSIs Mental Ray (if used together with my AoN:Studio and coming TLHPro tools that is Shameless self promotion, isn’t it…).
And I am sure we will see some very cool stuff comming from pmG in the future…
I don’t use Silo, but if you are into organics, you may think about ZBrush2 too. It is one of the rare really “new” 3D apps out there that changes how we think about polygons and modelling…
Good luck with your decission! 
Cheers,
Hey, nice model Gary.
I’m a Silo user also so and I would recommend it to anybody as a great poly modeling tool. I’ve used Modo also but to me Silo is just easier to use and “feels” smoother for some reason. 
Zbrush2 is a whoop ass program that I’m thinking about getting before I get Messiah Studio…I mean, unless you guys can convince me otherwise. I think having Zbrush first might be the route to take because for now I can use Cinema 4D XL (just got it, might as well use it) for rendering while I save up a bit for Messiah… Also, for those who’ve used Motion Builder and Messiah:Animate how do they compare? I know it’s silly asking users of one program to compare it to another, usually ends up with everybody saying to use their program of choice BUT, anybody care to give an honest opinion? I’m a complete newby to animation so I havn’t really touched MB yet so I’d be learning from scratch either way I go. Any info would be much appreciated.
Thanks, pnoland, I’m still working on his head gear.
I’d have to agree with Thomas about the current state of LW, it’s been relatively stagnant for quite a while. XSI “feels like LW 15” as someone else has mentioned. It really is a deep program with lot’s of power - for a complete modeling/rendering solution, it’s the bomb. I was a former Softimage 3d user back in the mid 90’s. But, I couldn’t ever afford it until very recently.
Motion Builder is great at “automation” as where messiah leads the way in “innovation”. Essentially, MB is great at motion capture and has some great “canned” biped and quad rigs that work great. But to create a custom rig is technically very difficult, if not impossible. But on the plus side, C4d supports FBX. MB, essentially, allows you to get to the animation quicker with limited time spent on rigging.
messiah, on the other hand, allows you go to “under the hood” to tinker and create all types rigs for winged creatures, six/four legged animals, fish, octupus, etc… so, there’s really no limit with it’s rigging possiblities - unfortunately, messiah’s connection to C4d has been a bit tenuous until recently. Fortunately, there’s a MDD reader for C4d now.
Hmmm, thanks for the reply Gary. I’m definatly leaning towards Messiah:studio now since MB is mostly used for mocap…which is still usefull so I’m glad to have that in case I need it. Now my other option is using C4D’S MOCCA for riggin, posing, and animating but Messiah’s auto rigger seems to be pretty sweet looking…I definatly would like to have that feautre. Argh, decisions decisions…
Thomas is right. I´m a LW8 user myself, and was disappointed.
Fascinating that the small pmg team is way beyond NT regarding innovation and even features. As Taron mentioned, good for them pmg isn´t going to develop a modeling toolset
It´s good to see that the attitude of the team has changed since the 8 disaster.
8.2 looks promising, but unfortunatelyit´sa little late and still behind the rest of the pack.
I´m not whining. Alternatives are cheap nowadays.
The future is already there, LW just needs a single new feature to be part of it.
A time machine
Just to clarify a bit here… MB is NOT just a mocap tool. It has excellent keyframe animation and editing tools… perhaps even more evolved in some ways than messiah. Where messiah really kicks ass is in its custom rigging and its rendering. I know because I own both. I use MB in video game production simply because it ties in with bone systems and weight maps in a host app much better than messiah (a necessity for game pipelines). For automated human rigs, MB’s are far superior to messiah’s. But as has been mentioned, messiah is a better rigging tool when you need anything else. This isn’t to say you can’t rig in MB, because I have and it’s not all that difficult. MB has some great constraints and such for doing custom rigs, but all of its cool character controls for its default rigs can’t be accessed for a custom rig, which is disappointing. There’s not comparison for rendered output though. Messiah rocks.
Thanks for the repplies guys… Ok… I have used lw since 1999, xsi (from the school i work for) since 2001 but i was intrigued by the rendering/animation tools of messiah studio since i show some tutorial vids about it… I was also impressed by the features of silo (especially the topology brush)… Since i freelance along with my normal work i want some software (that has modelling, rendering and animation capabilities) that can give me a good quality/price rating… The problem is that all of the mentioned solutions have a very good rating in this… I am really tending towards xsi now because it kind of works “with” me but i am always intrigued to new stuff and can make a quick switch through applications and the silo + messiah:studio 2 seemed like a realy nice alternative (i kind of got disapointed with lw’s animation tools so i rule that one out)… So, what do you think would be the best for me considering the affore mentioned?
Awesome James, thanks for clarifying that for us. I was under the impression that MB was best suited for mocap since the only training I have in it so far is creating a rig with Cinema 4D’s Mocca then loading that into MB to use some premade mocaps with…then back to c4d yada yada…
icedeyes, that’s a tough one. Silo with Messiah seems like it will be a great combo and for the price hard to beat. On the other hand XSI is a rock solid program also at a very affordable price…erm, so I’m probably not helping here am I?
icedeyes,
if you have already found a package that works for you and offers most of the features you want (no software offers all, I guess), then go for it! Buy it and then stop looking at other software for a while, save yourself the doubt and worries and produce art instead. Don’t let being “intrigued” distract you. Easier said than done, I know.
Marc
Having the Messiah Studio Pro/Silo and XSI Foundation packages, there really isn’t a clear cut winner, both animate great, both can build very nice rigs, both render top notch… neither one has hair (except in shaders) or have hard bodies… each has cloth simulation and soft bodies… both can do great fascial animations…
Pretty even for features, you just have to look at the demos and decide which one feels better to you. XSI has a larger and more active user base here and XSIBase, there are lots of plugins available, there is small rumblings of hardbodies and hair plugins… so it’s a personal thing from that point.
You choose
My 2 cents
Rich
Well, some of the great ideas of Messiah is, once you’ve come around to realize how comfortable and powerful it is after having bought the workstation version, it only costs you a quarter of the price of XSI to join into the ever growing professional version, which is filling up great features by the month. With it’s growing pool of interest and it’s beautiful internal architecture more and more 3rd party developers are joining in as well. So right now it is one of them perfect moments to get into it and join this exploding community.
Considering the investment all by itself, I think there’s very little question as to what to go for. And then realizing the little it takes to go fully into it with no restrictions should finally trigger the most reasonable impulse to join in.
Does this mean the workstation version won’t grow at the same rate as the pro version? Will updates or upgrades only available for the pro version at some times?
Marc
PS: And what about my still unanswered dual CPU-question (see above)?
NO! Workstation will get all the optimizations and a lot of the improvements as well. There are only a select number of really super special additions that will go to professional and we are doing our best to make them so special, that you are willing to reward us at least a little bit by upgrading then! We are actually living by your approval and not some other investor that would give us any chance to rest. Instead, we are constantly working hard and actually very passionate to make this thing worthy of your support, as weired as this may sound. Very ancient concept of trade! I personally like this a lot better in a philosophical way. Practically it just means a lot more damn hard work. SO come and get it! You’re getting far more than just a piece of software with it! I constantly put all my research into it, which usually was good to make companies richer…now it may just do that for you!
As for your dual CPU question…a little bit strange question. You can choose to use one or two threads, which will use either one or two of your cpus or threads in case of hyperthreading, which works beautifully. You actually can still make changes while it is rendering, but I can’t recommend it much. You may have two messiah’s open with prioritizing cpus accordingly. So i hope that kind of answered your question.
Okay, I sat down and watched all of the videos on the pmG site and …DAMN! The animation tools look slick and easy to use which seems like it would be a nice starting point for me. I’ve been trying to learn MOCCA the past couple days but M:S:W just seems like it’s leaps and bounds easier to use. The fact studio supports sub pixel displacment and fast GI is the icing on the cake. My question now is does messiah studio workstation come as a boxed product or is it a download? Also, I didn’t see any info on the site but is it hardware locked so I’ll have to have a dongle or software locked? Just curious cause I believe I’m putting in my order this friday (nice getting paid on Christmas eve ;)) …also, be prepared to answer some questions when I get it. The material editor screen shots I"ve seen floating about seem baffeling. I’m too used to Cinema 4D I guess.
I pretty much gave up on MOCCA, but I’ll keep it around because of Cloth. I am looking forward to C4D support in PointOven, so I can get the cloth animation in messiah when I need to. The displacement in messiah is not sub-pixel, it is sub-poly and other than PRMAN, there probably isn’t any other renderer that has such fast displacement. And messiah is dongle based.
Cheers,
Yeah, sub poly…that’s what I meant. I have C4D 8.5 so I don’t have the clothide that 9 has but I don’t really see myself needing that for a little while at least. I guess I won’t mind a dongle on here, never used a program that needed one yet. Thanks for all the info, I’ll be looking forward to using Messiah soon.
Sorry being Interrupt.I just feel that the messiah avi or quicktime tutorial not enough.i hope pmg can add more bout the tutorial so that user can get the benefit .oh.i am new user of messiah.did u all agree that?motion builder had lot of tutorial free for download.not to said pmg website no tutorial.just hope that they add in more .like put in some bginner,intermedia &advanced avi.for user to go in.may be this way easy to get in more n more user use it.this is just my own opinion.may b i am wrong.that all.
I just saw the demos. Looks really nice for character animation! Man, I sure wish there was a Mac version! :banghead: