Is Maya any better?

Can't say for sure as I haven't used it much but since most animation studios use maya I suppose it's at least a bit better option. I regret that I didn't use it for all these years, instead of max.

I really like Maya. I've used it in preference to 3DS Max for quite a while, and it's great for rendering fur. ^^ It's as capable as 3DS Max, but with a different workflow. And texture-mapping is so easy! ^^

Your rendering on a lap-top? It will die. Besides 1-2hrs per frame is pretty fast considering.

All stuff I've done in last year or so has been animated and rendered on my laptop. So far it has stayed in one piece. :) But this really warm weather combined with 55 hours of 100% processor use can't be good for it. I can't afford to buy a new laptop if I melt this one. :o Heh there's no way I could render 2280 frames if they took few hours each. :P

Well ya know as well as anyone you really need a large frame workstation for this type of work. Especially if you ever want to do free-lance 3D work. Otherwise it's impossible to make commitments and deadlines. And yes your laptop probably is hating you. They are not designed for hard processor work.

What do you recommend, if not 3ds Max?

Well, Anything is better than max. XSI, Maya, Lightwave, blender. Personally I'll probably switch to blender and / or maya. We'll see. But I've had enough of max.

I've got good reports from Poser 7.0, but I've been told that v8 is not an intuitive switch.

Blender is, of course, free, which makes it an obvious choice to try out. I've also heard good things about Misfit Model 3d, which is also freeware.

Poser, while cheap and fairly easy to use is a very limited program when you compare it to the autodesk family of programs like maya, 3ds and motionbuilder. On top of its limitations, compatibility issues the quality of the program is just poor. The UI is, as is the programming.

I've got a CADD Cert, and I've used Autodesk programs like AutoCAD and Inventor. Freeware alternates are just as good, if not better. Hell, Google SketchUp is practically identical to Inventor, except you can't make a three-section drawing, with an isometric scaled representation in the 4th corner, with a couple of clicks.

Blender explicitly is compatible with Maya and most other programs, like any good program should be.

I've never used those programs, just poser, max, maya and hopefully soon motionbuilder. I've used poser at length and while i can hardly call myself a pro, it's painfully clear that poser is extremely limited when you compare it to other (free) tools that are out there. For all the problems grimm is having with 3ds, moving to poser would not be a step down, but a fall down a flight of stone stairs. :)

Which version are you talking about? I've been told that version 7 is great, but 8 is a fall down a flight of stone stairs. That could be your problem.

8.

That said, I have a hard time believing 7 would offer more and better features, or have more cross compatibility with other 3d programs than 8 does. I don't know of course, but people have advised me to stay away from poser for those very reasons. Seeing what kind of options maya and motiobuilder offer I can't blame them, the ceiling is definitely higher.

Well, my fiancée, who owns poseur and maya, tells me that 7 is more intuitive and easier to use. However, YMMV.

Personally, I just downloaded Blender 2.57 and... wow. The interface is logical and user-friendly, if a bit differently set up. Fortunately, it's well documented with an online manual set up in a wiki format. And it's FREE.

To give you an idea of how easy Blender is to use, however, they've got your 'how to make something simple' guide here.

Granted, at first, you're going to want your 'hotkey cheat sheet', but once you get it internalized... it's an exceedingly powerful modeling program.

I've heard differently about Poser. The stories I've heard is that Poser is great for still images, but the second you go in to animation, you are in for a world of hurt because anything longer than a simple loop, and the program just crashes on people. I've heard of people howling over how awful it was to push out a 45 second animation because the program just kept crashing on them. This is anecdotal, yes, but it is from numerous artists I've talked to.

I've only heard of one thing bad about Blender and that's the bad GUI. This is partly from a steep learning curve which I've actually had experience in trying to learn. I've gotten as far as duplicating basic shapes and UV wrapping cubes, but I couldn't get any further due to lack of time. I'm sure if given enough time, I could learn Blender sufficiently to do some things though.

As for keeping laptops cool, I can't recommend enough buying a cooling fan for laptops (Antec is one such company that sells those things). In general, it just extends the life of a laptop a lot - especially ones with a very poorly designed heat sink. That may help with the high resource intensive stuff if you don't have one yet. Worst case scenario, find the coldest floor in your place (preferably a basement with a concrete floor) and just set your laptop on that. Every half an hour or so, move it over the width of the laptop so it can offload heat on a continually cool surface.

Just some thoughts/ideas of course.

In general, it just extends the life of a laptop a lot - especially ones with a very poorly designed heat sink.

My old Dell D600 has case-scarring from where the heat warped/discolored the plastic. XD

Don't tell me you're still rendering at a resolution of 1000+x something with more than 24 fps.

I've been having a blast with Blender, but the GUI has been notoriously difficult to get used to. Once you can get past the learning curve you'll realize that Blender contains a lot of features that can rival most professional (and very expensive) software.

Ah well, i dont mind the wait. ive never used any animation programs in my life other than blender so i wouldn't know anything heh

Bashing max because of rendering times? That's low :) Max has nothing to do with it, you can choose any rendering engine that suits your needs and would perform faster.We still use max for everything in here, and have no problems with it - MAX has most intuitive user interface to the day. I'd suggest you trying out third-party render engines like vRay, FinalRender or even one integrated in max - MentalRay. As for render times, we have animations render to up to 3-4 minutes per frame, and it's on quad-core systems - it's normal. Just make sure you optimize your render engines memory usage so it wouldn't resort to virtual memory and you're good to go - virtual memory is on your HDD rather than your RAM, and HDD, as you might know, is one of the slowest hardware pieces to the day in your computer, if renderer starts using it for storing stuff, your renders will become turtle slow (no offense turtles :D )

No, rendering time is just the last thing that made me change to better software. If scene has 1 light and no FG & GI everything as low quality as possible without making the result look shitty it shoudn't render 1:25 at 1024x5xx resolution. And that's on a quad core system with 4 extra simulated cores. I should probably use scanline instead of MR since it might be faster. Gotta try it if I get to render the animation someday. If I'd use Vray or some other better quality renderers they wouldn't really make the rendering time any shorter. The opposite actually.

I'm also fed up with random crashes, ancient bugs that are not fixed, New features bought from seperate developers and then added to a semi-hidden new menu somewhere and forgotten then, never updating them or anything. And then stopping developement of possible older version of the same thing. So if the old version worked fine enough, but missed important features, they add new better one which is so bugged it's not useble and then they stop updating both of them. I also hate new bugs added in every version (and not fixed) consentrating the development to extremely useful things like viewcubes and idiotic viewport filters... One other great thing is how they removed all simulations which were in Reactor and added only a rigid body simulation instead of that. Because there were so few people using those simulations in their opinion. There goes rope, softbody, ragdoll, some kind of water surface simulation, and various others. Just like that. Blender has real fluid simulation, smoke simulation rigid body, softbody etc... They're not perfect but useble. Oh, and I don't even bother to compare UV unwrapping tools.

I also hate huge amount of popup windows - open rendering settings and material editor and you don't see your scene anymore. Bad viewport performance - max 2012 isn't much better. Skin modifier is PoS. Blenders automatic skin weighting system creates useable results just like that (for fingers too) and it takes minimal weight painting to adjust it. And I actually like to do weight painting in Blender mirroring works there and I can bend both hands in different poses while still in painting mode, and see the effects of weighting changes on both hands simultaniously. And the mirror tool in blender beats max's mirror & symmetry easily. Oh and the soft selection system is just perfect in Blender. You have to try it to believe. Who says that Max has the most intuitive ui to the day hasn't tried better options. It probably has the worst ui ever.

When animating in Blender it rather nice to have the animation running (or a specific part of it looping) and any curve editor changes show instantly without any stuttering. That way it's much better to get the result you want.

Oh, and Blender has free easy to use online rendering farm system. That's rather nice too. Can't be used for porn stuff though, but for everything else it's rather great.

I have 8GB of ram and Max has never used all of it. So I don't think that's causing problems.

Oh and with Blender I can make commercial projects legally (got student version of max) and for free.

Damn, that's a lot of text and lists only few things that piss me off in Max.

Oh and even though I don't know how to use blender's fur system properly it still is way better that hair & fur in max.

Well, whatever works best for you :) I enjoy your work and will be watching your progress. Will be interesting to see how easy/hard the transition to another software will be.

Best of luck!

I had the misfortune to use 3DSmax in high school when I took computer animation. Struggled with the program, and on top of that, the license for the program ran out during 4th quarter. x_x