Interest in 3D animation? Get Messiah Studio Pro for $40 ($1200 retail value)
projectmessiah.com
projectmessiah.com
"messiahStudio can be used as a complete stand-alone animation and rendering package, or as a powerful addition to Modo, Maya, 3DMAX, SoftImage XSI, LightWave, Cinema 4D or an in-house proprietary application; through extensive animation export capabilities (fbx, mdd, collada), Host Connection plugins and Host API."
When I read this the first time, I assumed that "animation" meant modeling as well, but only because I don't know very much about this whole process.
Thanks for pointing this out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Use_in_the_m...
Studios usually don't advertise the tool used in a production to the general public. The trend is shifting in favour of tools like blender though. Blender is also doing a lot of heavy marketing to those segments through their open movie and game projects. I can see a day in the future where studios contribute significant developer time to a project like blender in lieu of expensive licenses for something like Maya or 3DS.
Working with blender is fundamentally different at the most base, intuition-sensitive level. Not better or worse, but different.
It will be worse if you're coming to it already familiar with Max and Maya. You'll rub against the grain of the program. Of course, the same is true of moving between any programs that are cosmetically similar but based on different interaction models.
I found MAX very easy to use. Maya was harder, and Blender (before 2.5) was extremely difficult to learn. With the 2.5 release, though, they really improved usability of their program. I'm really surprised, and am now trying to use Blender for everything as I enjoy it most.
I use it for everything: App Icons, textures, explanatory animations, diagrams, and of course 3D. Try it, it's incredible (though the documentation needs some love)
Just this past week, I've started on Blender. I've been following it loosely since the late 90s, but this was my first real go at becoming proficient. I first tried 2.49, but found it extremely aggravating. Moving to 2.5 was a tremendous improvement, making Blender's unusual workflow slightly more obvious, but there's the rub.
Blender, in its origins, was designed with a very different set of basic interactions than the leading 3d animation packages. In time, as they've added more features, they've slowly moved the experience to be more in-line with Max and Maya, but these alignments apply pretty much exclusively to the newer, high-level features. The core interactions for moving/rotating/scaling, viewport movement, selection, and other "basics" are completely different.
If anyone else is just picking up the program, I'd encourage you to share any good resources or tips you've found for overcoming the initial grind. Here's what has helped me most:
Take notes of all the keyboard shortcuts you encounter. Sure, there are existing lists and cheat-sheets, but writing them out has really helped me memorize them. As I'm following the BlenderCookie videos, I watch for the interactions I don't yet know and immediately jot down the details. Don't forget, many of the commands are highly context-sensitive.
Said search turns up quite a few rapidshare/torrenting links, but with a price point of only $40, I don't see why anyone would go that route.
For a hobbyist, this might be a good value, but if you're looking at it for semi-pro use, it might be a better investment of time to build portable skills in a more widely adopted platform.
edit: comparison here: http://www.thepixelart.com/10-best-real-time-animation-tools...
I like the idea; i'll leave them figure out if it makes business sense. One thing certain: if their retail price had been $100 on special to $40, I would not even have clicked.
Still, for $40 how can you go wrong on a piece of professional software?
Wine is great but for 3D stuff (including games) I've found that its usually more trouble than its worth to get it configured right for my specific systems.
tl;dr -- Apple is at least partially to blame for the slow move to 64-bit apps on the Mac platform.
I don't think that, after creating carbon and delaying OS X in the first place due to the demands of microsoft and adobe, that Apple should feel at all guilty, when those two companies do not keep their promises to migrate to cocoa after nearly 10 years.
This is especially heinous given that cocoa is a much better platform, is relatively easy to work with, and if the underlying code was written at all decently, the migrating should not be very difficult at all-- maybe a year of effort while working on the next version, and that's being generous. And as a result of doing that migration, even back in 2000-2002, they would have gotten more stable, better performant apps. They just couldn't be bothered, and so for that entire decade from Microsoft and Adobe we've gotten clunky, crappy apps that just have more features piled onto them every year. "64-bit" is just one of those features.
Apple create carbon to soften the transition for these two companies... but they never bothered to transition.
Further, Apple didn't drop 64 bit support for carbon, it never existed. This phrasing is one of the lies adobe has told about apple in their ongoing war. 64-bit carbon support was on a roadmap at one point, but they decided not to do it because the original mac OS X and consequently carbon are fundamentally 32 bit and it involved too many resources. I'm sure they did some exploratory work, but the claim that they "dropped it" is a claim that they shipped it and then reneged.
That adobe has been able to lie about this and create an impression in you, and many others, that apple dropped support and "forced" people is one of the reasons Apple is so reticent to talk about future plans.
That people are blaming Apple for this when Adobe and Microsoft sat on their asses for a decade, I just don't understand. (Well, actually I do.)
2] Wait a while, put it on "sale" for $40, tell everyone they are SAVING THOUSANDS.
3] Profit.
If it were really worth $1,200, people would pay $1,200, and they'd charge $1,200.
Let me know when Adobe and Autodesk start selling their stuff for $40.
http://projectmessiah.com/x6/products.html
The people who are only willing to pay $40 are not the main demographic that messiahStudio is marketed to.
I honestly expect a bit more business sense on HN.
1] Build a great piece of software, worth every nickel of $1200. 2] Release it to a crowded field where you are a small fish in a big pond, overshadowed by players like Adobe and Autodesk. 3] Drop the price dramatically and take a hit up front to build your customer base, because you believe in your product. 4] Profit.
I have no idea which of these two scenarios is closer to the truth. I have never used this software. I am, however, glad for a world with startups and innovators.
Messiah is actually pretty great at what it does though it must be getting squeezed a bit by Blender3D with the strides that (totally free) software has made in usability over the last year or so.
I do find it a little bit curious that they (pmG) haven't defined what either their goal is or what the timeframe for meeting the goal is. I doubt they are doing anything underhanded, but if the "goal" is not met in whatever the "timeframe" is, it'll be pretty easy for people to make a case that the whole thing was a PR stunt rigged from the start.. of course, then they'd be on the hook for who knows how many refunds, which doesn't come for free.