What animation software programs are generally considered “top” and are widely used today?
3ds, maya, lightwave
those are just the tip of the iceberg
blender’s getting there as well 
and best of all - it’s free (compared to the thousands you’ll pay for the other “industry standards”)
Blender is not free. You have to promise to pay it forward and write some end-user documentation (manual, reference, tutorials) or contribute to development (C, Python).
papasmurf, if he loves the program, i was assuming he’d do something of the sort anyway 
I was under the impression that Softimage (XSI) was also a major animation/modeling program, along with it’s integration with Mental Ray.
Cheerio,
John
Just a guess…
Most widely used animation program: Microsoft Powerpoint.
shudder
Oh no… please no! If you are right freen then something must be done. To arms!!
I also seem to be getting that signal, at least they are positioning themselves as a superior content creator for games in particular (this includes a massive amount of tools for animation.)
Its nice to have something other than Autodesk in the animation area, even if it is Avid.
Games are a whole other animal. Everyone uses either Max or XSI in that industry. If you go to a movie studio or something similar, they are either running custom in house software, or 1 of the big boys (like Maya, Max, XSI, etc) but Max and XSI are much more popular in the gaming industry.
Mirai of course!
Actually SI, is regaining ground. Their old package (pre-XSI) was very popular in the industry.
Yeah, SoftImage|3D (not XSI) was the Rolls Royce in the 3d industry…
…and so where their pricings.
I’m glad those days are over!
hehe and that didn’t include the tens of thousands of US Dollars needed to buy the SGI to run it on 
@yodasmeagol:
They all have their strengths and weaknesses. There is no one stop solution. For example Epic made UT3 and GoW in Maya AND Max. Although in a games based workflow they are all exporting to a working proprietary format.
In film/video/TV it’s generally all about compositing, so long as a package can push out something good like openexr with all the passes, or all the passes as separate targa sequences then that will do nicely.
What a lot of people don’t realise about 3D is the end result and generally take compositing for granted. The end result will always be a render (2d) which then will most likely only be a small portion of the entire scene which is being made.
oh and @Blndr08:
exactly man, coca cola don’t know or don’t care that I am doing a fluid sim for their new flash banner in blender and not realflow or fumefx in maya tehehe their graphics guys just want tga’s or tiff’s
I have donated some blend files to the community.
My best Modeling Sample ( Blend File ) I have uploaded for the community and more will come soon.
http://blendermodels.org/models/misc/kkrawal.blend
Please press ALT+A when you open this file.
http://blendermodels.org/models/music/tuba.blend
kkrawal, shouldn’t you have started your own thread for that? :eyebrowlift2::spin:
I am trying to pay my way. This was a very tough modeling. I have posted the picture in lots of forum of 3D Animation and Modeling. Some of my friends working with Big Apps they are finding tough in their package to mold like this which I have done in Blender. They may not leave their app, but they will sure download Blender and go ahead. One of my friend wanted the OBJ file of that model, I told him, download Blender, Open this file. Goto File->Export->OBJ and you will get OBJ which you can open in your app.