Thank you for the links. It might be interesting to find out what is a favorite tool among furriers for doing 3d. We can create some nice pie charts out of it...

If we get enough people to participate... I have seen all kinds of applications used by furries, depending on how accessible it was (bought? torrented? freeware? work expense?) and how easy it was to use.

Hash Animation Master has been popular at a time.
Poser / Carrara are favored by some for their ease of use and the wealth of predefined content.
Maya is of course the favorite of animation studios, if you can afford it. Has become cheaper since the start of the millennium, too, but is still a professional app and therefore expensive.
Cinema4D is easy to use and offered cheap versions earlier on, but has raised its pricing to rival the top 5... I love to use it, but then I am comfortable with it and don't mind the price so much.
Blender is free and therefore most accessible financially... but its reputation as being complicated and cryptic keeps people from trying. Recently the 2.5 offered a new interface but it will take some time for people to become accustomed to the "new Blender".
Sculptris is also free and - judging from the sculpts that pop up here and there - is intuitive and easy enough, but it is limited because it is ONLY a sculptor.
ZBrush is the commercial big brother of Sculptris.
Lightwave is used by some furries; Timothy Albee did Kaze with it. I hear some harsh critique of the application though, and since the CORE failure, it seems to have fallen out of favor.
3DS Max is used by game studios... haven't met a furry yet who uses it, to my knowledge, but there is this game developer meet at EF which I have not attended yet, so perhaps there are some. Since Autodesk owns Maya, Max, and XSI all together, the future of the single applications seems to be questioned quite often.
Houdini? Very expensive and a specialist for effect work; have not seen that used by a fur.

There are some other cheaper apps and even freeware apps, but they don't seem to have many users.
I couldn't even begin to guess how widespread the applications are.

Actually, Houdini is quite expensive if you go for commercial use. However, in a case of non-commercial use they offer a limited version (Learning Edition) for free and unlimited version (Starving Artits) for less than USD 99.

Interesting. These days you really have to study the fine print of the licensing conditions as well before one decides on an application...

Student version? Learning edition? Noncommercial (hobbyist) edition?
Limited in functionality / output? Watermarks in renders?
Only available with a student permit? A teacher's certification? The school's confirmation? Limited to 1, 2, 3 years?
Writes files that can later be read into the commercial version and vice versa, or is a one-way street?

Not to speak of the update / subscription conditions and the registration necessities, or the restrictions in render nodes and parallel installations.

Unless, well, Blender. Duh.

It wouldn't surprise me if Maya was used for game development as much as max, FWIW. I know the old wisdom is "Max for games, Maya for production", but my own experience in the games industry, and friends in production industry, seems to fly in the face of that. It's all anecdotal of course, but I suspect that there is a large portion of legacy in that thinking.

Of course, this is another area where pie charts would be handy. Hell, pie is always welcome as far as I'm concerned.

I'll have some apple pie then.

Yeah, the market is always in motion, and those ancient side remarks like "XSI is used mostly for..." may not hold true forever (if they ever were true to start with). Especially since there is no official statement "We mean program X to be used for Y and only Y" issued by any company since it might limit buyers' interest. (Well, Autodesk could do something like that since they own three major CGI apps and need to differentiate them to the market... then again, I would not really be surprised if the apps sooner or later all converge in functionality and ultimately merge.)

I wonder whether there is a regular kind of dependable survey on these things - who uses what for which purpose, and how many active installations are there? Yeah, kinda borders on company secrets...

Haha, I wouldn't be too quick to eat pie. Unless it was for the sweet, sugary goodness. As I said, its all just anecdotal. If you were to step back further, you might see a pattern.

I noticed that Autodesk recently came out and said essentially that they aren't going to focus on Max's animation tools anymore, and were essentially going to focus it more on the modelling side of things. I honestly don't know what their strategy is. When they first merged, I assumed they would eventually integrate the features of both into a super package, but clearly thy aren't interested in committing to the investment it would take to do that. But they also aren't interested in having multiple generalised 3d packages going into the future either. Do they hope to specialise their titles in the hope of selling multiple programs for the same workflow? (i.e, max for modelling, Maya for animation and rendering?) I don't see how that's possible to achieve. Third party tools and scripts will keep both packages somewhat general well into the future, even if they don't develop for them any more. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I think I just rambled.

It is definitely hard to guess company politics. Looking back, I wouldn't even know why Autodesk bought two other complete packages...

- They can't cancel them, eliminating the competition - they'd lose customers by the hundreds
- They can't really integrate all apps - the program cores are completely different.
- They can't specialize the apps too much - it is unlikely that customers of one package will suddenly pick up the others at enormous cost just to fill gaps that Autodesk created *on purpose*

- They might want the experienced workforce (how many did they fire already?)
- They might want the patents and algorithms, as far as applicable

Or perhaps it was a move to improve first quarter results. Companies do that.

I'm feeling kinda lucky I'm not working with any of the three.

Always good resources.

Damn skippy you need to add a link for Blender... lol

heres a good resource for textures as well::

http://www.cgtextures.com