3Drendero posted at 2:13PM Wed, 20 February 2019 - #4346526

Octane is 600$ for any app. Same price for Carrara and Lightwave. Carrara is about 50$ vs LWs 995$, so LW better have 20x more features... But for 995 you can get a modern 3D app like Clarisse iFX 4.0 that does 3D and compositing with "a bazillion polygons" in new Hollywood movies. Still requires Zbrush and Maya (or Carrara, LW, whatever) for modeling, but 20 years newer than Carrara, LW, Maya, 3dsmax makes it efficient. There is a free Clarisse PLE, thinking about trying it with Carrara...

Keep in mind, the most "state of the art" you get, the more complex and steep the learning curve. People had been suggesting Houdini in some forums I visit as an alternative to Maya, 3dsmax or Cinema 4d because Houdini is state of the art and infinitely more powerful than any of the aforementioned packages. They often cite various productions created with Houdini that major VFX studios have produced as an example of the power it can wield. So I downloaded the trial of that, or at least the free version they offer on their website and quickly found out that you pretty much need a PhD in computer science to do the kind of stuff you see big effect studios doing with Houdini. Houdini is SO complicated, node based for EVERYTHING. You have to build nodes just to extrude a face out of a cube for God's sake. Well, maybe not that much, but it's way more complicated to use than something like Cinema4D or Maya. I thought Maya was one of the biggest and most complex professional softwares out there, until I tried my hand at Houdini. I'll leave Houdini to the nerds. It's not an artist friendly software package. Yes, it's powerful and you can do anything with it, but at the cost of learning it for years and years.