I saw this listed over on cgtalk yesterday and read up on it today. I was personally interested in messiah:studio before they released the new versioin 2.0 with all the new rendering features (micropoly displacement, sss, etc) and it also has the xsi/maya-style shader tree, plus messiah:animate’s great animation tools all for $299! it’s like the XSI foundation thing, it’s a single seat license meant for single artists without compromising the integrity of the product. I thought it would be a great co-companion for blender at a reasonable price.
I’ve really gotten into blender lately and i’m excited to see what Ton has in store for the 2.37 animation rewrite.
here’s the link to the cgnetworks article: cgnetworks article
and the link to project messiah’s page: pmG site
i think it’s worth considering if animation and rendering are high priority on your list.
This is a very interesting move I think, since this is the exact same price as Hash:Animation Master. I think this was entirely on purpose and Project:Messiah Group is trying to lure some of Animation Masters potential customers away.
From my understanding Messiah isn’t nearly as ‘complete’ as A:M, but A:M has a lot of ‘strikes’ against it that arn’t nessecarilly related to its feature set (and some that are). If you can put up with modelling character only with Hash patches your good to go (polygonal objects can be imported as ‘props’ and textured/rendered just the same as any other object, you just can’t modify their model…)
I don’t think Messiah studio has things like hair, rigid body and soft body dynamics ect which Animation master does reasonably well (the new hair system is supposed to be dynamite actually…) . In terms of the NLA tools the two are probably equal although Hash got there years before Messiah (and most other apps as well.)
It will be interesting to see how well this works for Project:Messiah Group and whether it will make a considerable dent in Hash’s sales.