Places I’ve worked in the past I’ve had to use Autocad and Archicad, but I never use them for my own work.
It’s Max and Rhino all the way for me. Max for conceptual stuff and mass/form studies, and Rhino for stuff which needs to be precise and accurate to the nth.
funny, i mostly got jobs in the past where i rebuilded modells made in rhino or autocad, because they where to heavy. I mean to much polygons, bad tesselation, not smooth edges, no filet edges etc…
Well don’t say rhino is bad, but nurbs simple not good for an advanced animation job, where you have a polygone limit. And you need 4 times longer…
Therefor I don’t know any software doing better modelling then Max. But well a better Nurbs feature is missing.
I enjoy working with Softimage|XSI, I like the interface.
Although I’m only now starting to get the hang of it, I’ve been so use to using Max I had to learn where everything was again.
I think modelling can be much easier in XSI and I like the Explorer better than just the modifier stack. The rendertree can be more confusing than the Mat Editior but it gives me a more visual understanding of how they all work together.
Well that’s my opinion anyway.
Of course Max is much easier to learn and has wonderful plugins like Vray
Although I sometimes use Autocad to layout my floor plans, ALL my work (commercial and personal) is modelled in Lightwave and transfered (if needed) to MAX via Deep-Exporter.
I find it works surprisingly well, even UV maps are intact, and Sub-division surfaces (cages) subdivide using meshsmooth as expected.
BTW - Forgot to mention, I bring the models into MAX as OBJ files.
seems that every one is using somthing else ( based on the small group ho posted here so far )
maybe VRay can go all the way and become a stand alone renderer ( just a an idea ) cutting Viz/Max ( or any other big/expensive ) as a ‘middle man’ and become a powerfull renderer for all users of the modeling spectrum
maybe give it a little push folks… and get some more info in here.
I do all my modeling in Max also, though I do depend on Autocad to clean up linework to be imported for Architectural stuff. The snaps and constraints are more than enough to get a building modeled. With the introduction of the poly, more complex objects are easier to model too. Best of all I don’t have to deal with the import/export hassles (missing or double faces, bad smoothing, extra or unwelded verts, etc).