By the way, "I'm Seeing Robots" is the most badass Kool Keith composition. Ever. Do yourself a favor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8fpnoBh8
Thursday, July 2, 2009
I'm Seeing Robots
Today I was haunted by some robot images, so I had to sketch them. I'm creating a motion graphics piece with these guys.
By the way, "I'm Seeing Robots" is the most badass Kool Keith composition. Ever. Do yourself a favor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8fpnoBh8
By the way, "I'm Seeing Robots" is the most badass Kool Keith composition. Ever. Do yourself a favor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms8fpnoBh8
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Caricatures!
There's an annual caricature show at work for all the employees to poke fun at each other. It's such a hoot we even used it as our SIGGRAPH booth's theme last year. It turned out to be quite the popular diversion at the trade show. We've held several caricature workshops at the Disney Academy over the past couple years, so we've all gotten into dabbling in the art form. Since I'll be leaving before this year's show, I'm going to miss it. So here are some caricatures of coworkers that I would have entered into this year's show.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Walkin' the Walk
Holy not posted in a while batman! Here’s why: the whole training department got cut so I’m out of work. The TBOS project has slowed down to allow me to turn my attention to things like making an income and all that miserable stuff. For those just tuning in, I’m working on a short film: www.balladofsinister.com and it was going to be done in two years but I’ll have to readjust that assessment due to career interruptions. There will always be unforeseen downtimes during a project of such massive scope. These downtimes are ultimately beneficial, as it allows me to step away from the project for a while, to see it with fresh eyes. As I haven’t shown any production work recently, I’ll post some character tests.
This first one is the protagonist’s mother. I was testing her rig and looking into getting some secondary action on the hair. I like to produce a quick and dirty walk cycle as the first “test” for a character I’ve just rigged. A simple walk can usually reveal problems in the model or rig. I put some of the character’s perceived personality into the walk to see them as in-context as possible. A well-designed rig should make animating a character’s personality traits intuitive, since the mannerisms of the character should be implicit in the design. The mother, for instance, has a passive, frail and meek persona. Her design is such that a few basic keyframes can convey this, even without facial animation!
For the priest, I wanted an arrogant and self-righteous walk that spoke of his portentousness as well as hinting at some hidden guilt. On a technical front, this cycle was really done to test Maya’s nCloth and hair follicle systems, and how they can be made to collide with each other. His sash is rigged with Maya Hair (used as wire deformers) and his cloak is nCloth. This quick-and-dirty test shows they can collide with each other, and in the future I can adjust them to fix all the minor interpenetrations.
Finally I’ll post a turnaround of our main protagonist, Sinister himself. He is rigged, but I haven’t done a walk cycle with him yet. When my work situation stabilizes, I’ll return to working on him.
This first one is the protagonist’s mother. I was testing her rig and looking into getting some secondary action on the hair. I like to produce a quick and dirty walk cycle as the first “test” for a character I’ve just rigged. A simple walk can usually reveal problems in the model or rig. I put some of the character’s perceived personality into the walk to see them as in-context as possible. A well-designed rig should make animating a character’s personality traits intuitive, since the mannerisms of the character should be implicit in the design. The mother, for instance, has a passive, frail and meek persona. Her design is such that a few basic keyframes can convey this, even without facial animation!
For the priest, I wanted an arrogant and self-righteous walk that spoke of his portentousness as well as hinting at some hidden guilt. On a technical front, this cycle was really done to test Maya’s nCloth and hair follicle systems, and how they can be made to collide with each other. His sash is rigged with Maya Hair (used as wire deformers) and his cloak is nCloth. This quick-and-dirty test shows they can collide with each other, and in the future I can adjust them to fix all the minor interpenetrations.
Finally I’ll post a turnaround of our main protagonist, Sinister himself. He is rigged, but I haven’t done a walk cycle with him yet. When my work situation stabilizes, I’ll return to working on him.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The A-Team
The Animation Team. Not the hit 80's action drama.
The A-Team is like my fantasy football team, except they create animated movies for cheap instead of raking in millions in endorsement money.
Since I've devoted several recent posts to the gathering of resources when attempting to pull off an animated production, I put some thought into the most important resources: human. (Is it just me, or does the business term "Human Resources" seem derogatory? It's like cattle ... if cattle could be outsourced. Okay, I stand corrected. It's worse than cattle.)
Join me now on a thought experiment: let's figure out the ideal number of people to work on a CG-animated short film. And by "ideal" I mean "minimum" because the fewer people the better: less people who have to agree on everything, less to have to attend every meeting, less to track and organize, and the perennial favorite: less to pay (if they aren't volunteering or stakeholders). Also, less is more when you want to maximize efficiency. The larger the team, the more people tend to expect others to pick up the slack. Most importantly, if you get too many on your core team, your project suddenly blooms because past a certain tipping point you suddenly need HR folks (moo), production managers, accountants, yawn. So the ideal number I came up with: 6.
A small team will always figure out how their talents compliment each other efficiently. The ideal production team consists of two focus groups: environment and character. We’ll call them the Char Crew and the Set Crew. For a typical 3-to-10 minute short, I would propose a minimum of 6 dedicated artists with the following task divisions:
I throw this out there for debate. You're free to disagree. As long as we agree to disagree. Or else I'm filing a report with HR. Moo.
The A-Team is like my fantasy football team, except they create animated movies for cheap instead of raking in millions in endorsement money.
Since I've devoted several recent posts to the gathering of resources when attempting to pull off an animated production, I put some thought into the most important resources: human. (Is it just me, or does the business term "Human Resources" seem derogatory? It's like cattle ... if cattle could be outsourced. Okay, I stand corrected. It's worse than cattle.)
Join me now on a thought experiment: let's figure out the ideal number of people to work on a CG-animated short film. And by "ideal" I mean "minimum" because the fewer people the better: less people who have to agree on everything, less to have to attend every meeting, less to track and organize, and the perennial favorite: less to pay (if they aren't volunteering or stakeholders). Also, less is more when you want to maximize efficiency. The larger the team, the more people tend to expect others to pick up the slack. Most importantly, if you get too many on your core team, your project suddenly blooms because past a certain tipping point you suddenly need HR folks (moo), production managers, accountants, yawn. So the ideal number I came up with: 6.
A small team will always figure out how their talents compliment each other efficiently. The ideal production team consists of two focus groups: environment and character. We’ll call them the Char Crew and the Set Crew. For a typical 3-to-10 minute short, I would propose a minimum of 6 dedicated artists with the following task divisions:
Char crew
Modeler/Animator – a specialist in organic movement and character design. this person should have excellent drawing and caricature skills and would have taken part in storyboarding and visual development during pre-production. Can have several of these, as the extra modelers could also help out with the set crew.
Rigger/Technical Animator – someone to focus on the technical side of character rigs, to “own” the development of rigging systems. Should know anatomy inside and out and should be comfortable with modeling and cloth/hair simulations. They can also pitch in on animation, though they need not be as experienced in this since they will mostly be doing cycles for crowd sims, background characters, cleanup, etc. Should be comfortable with scripting and expressions.
Shading and Texture Specialist – should be a disturbing hybrid of computer scientist and fine artist. The resident Photoshop expert who paints photorealistic when need be but can also be painterly. Should know light and color theory and be willing to master shading networks and be able to procedurally simulate any surface type. Experience in fur and hair helpful.
Set crew
The DP/Head of Layout – ideally, this can be the same person is editing or directing the movie. should know classical cinematography techniques, lighting and some modeling. responsible to create the basic set design and “owns” the shot, controlling the webwork of file referencing and serving as gatekeeper of what is imported or updated in each shot.
Set Dresser – a wizzbang modeler and texture artist with lots of fine art and design experience, able to set dress and finalize any layout, interior or exterior. Should also be able to pitch in with lighting and effects. Prior research in architecture, graphic design and environmental sciences (like geology and botany) is helpful.
Head of Lighting – controls the color script of the film: continuity of hue, contrast and saturation in each sequence to heighten the dramatic impact of the story. Sets up key light rigs and render passes, maintains the render farm and serves as the main compositor on the film. A background in design and painting is ideal.
As you can see, the attempt is to consolidate everything that needs attention to as few “specialists” as possible. With these six working close to full-time (20-30 hours a week after their day jobs, assuming this is an unfunded short), you could pull off a fairly elaborate short film in a reasonable amount of time (6 months to a year from the time the story reel is locked?). Of course picking up volunteer help from outside the core crew is desirable, particularly in the areas of modeling, texturing and animation (because these are somewhat “portable” tasks, unlike, say, layout, which demands an insider’s full attention and access to the central data repository to maintain). You’ll notice I don’t include a full-time effects artist (assuming a combination of the Set Dresser and other technical artists can pull this off) but on a big effects-driven film, this could easily be a seventh key person. Also, if you are not so fortunate to have all of your artists technically proficient, the addition of a fulltime technical director (all-around tools programmer, system administrator and troubleshooter guy) would make an excellent addition to the core group; even better if he had artistic skills in one or more production areas to help during crunch times.
I throw this out there for debate. You're free to disagree. As long as we agree to disagree. Or else I'm filing a report with HR. Moo.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Software Part 2 -or- How to be Your Own Full-Service Animation Studio
Teach yourself animation:
http://www.thebeesneezeanimation.com/
The page belongs to Shawn Miller, animator at LucasFilm. Great links. Spend a day there.
Now, on with today's lesson. Software: what you'll need to survive. Or, a wishlist for the independent cg filmmaker. Last time we covered the all-important 3D app, so what else is there?
You need Photoshop. End of lesson. Seriously, if it's the only thing you buy outside of your 3D app, get Photoshop. Everything else is just icing on the cake. But this lesson would be boring if it was just cake, so on to the icing.
Painting on a 3D model is sooooo nice when texturing. By far the most intuitive way to handle things. Photoshop CS3 is teasing us with its ability to import 3D models, but we still do our painting on a 2D plane. Boo. (CS4? Fingers crossed?) Until recently, the choices for painting on a 3D model were twofold: Deep Paint 3D or BodyPaint 3D. And neither was perfect. BodyPaint 3D is probably the most vigorously updated of the two, but it has a learning curve for anyone who does not use Cinema 4D (which it is integrated with). Deep Paint has always been a bit wonky (and crashy) but it has some really awesome brushes. Trouble is, they moved the UV tools to a separate app, Deep UV, so now you need to buy a lot to get integrated functionality. For this reason, you may wish to just stick with Maya's own (limited) 3D paint tools until the industry puts up a stable, affordable, intuitive new standard. Any coders out there want to take this challenge? New industry standard 3D paint tool? Anyone? Here's a darkhorse candidate that was brought to my attention: Thirdbrush. Only thirty bucks. Haven't tried it yet. Send me your reviews if you use it.
Let's turn our attention to 2D apps. You'll need these for previs, storyboarding, conceptual art, matte painting and texturing, as well as fixes on final rendered frames. Corel Painter is the standard natural-media app, as it simulates watercolor, paint, pastels, etc. The main thing to note is that it is a painting tool, not a photo-retouch tool like Photoshop, so it does what you want it to: it mixes the pixels onscreen wet-on-wet style. Not too expensive, but check these cheap-to-free digital paint app alternatives:
Now image organization tools. Adobe Bridge is wonderful, and if you have Photoshop, you probably already have it. But also cool, each in their unique way, is Irfanview, ACDSee, and IView MediaPro. I use them all. Also, get Flipbook Pro so you can play back sequences of frames without making movie files out of them.
You'll also need presentation tools. Your short film needs a website, some business cards and publishing materials, and you'll have to make pitches ad nauseum. (Even if you plan to do your own funding and distribution, you'll end up putting together project pitches and portfolios if only to obtain collaborators). To this end, besides Photoshop, you'll want Dreamweaver (or some web app), Flash (maybe), Acrobat Pro (slideshows and documents), or Keynote (on the Mac). And MsOffice or OpenOffice. And CD and DVD authoring tools.
You still want to make a short film?
Now for the production apps. Google Sketchup can be handy as a previs app - mainly because it's fast and intuitive. Mudbox or ZBrush would be nice for creating high-res displacement maps or just for cool-looking previs work. They are competing modelers in the 3d sculpting paradigm (works like digital clay). Mudbox is by far the easier to use, but purists insist ZBrush produces higher quality results.
Editorial. You'll want Quicktime Pro. No faster way to make little movie files to pass around. You'll also want some image-format and video-format converter utilities. Find some freeware for this. After Effects for compositing and post (or Shake or Fusion or Combustion or Toxik). I recommend Sony Vegas for editorial on the PC: the app that "puts it all together" in the work reel. I use it for audio compositing too. Speaking of audio, you need an audio editor like SoundForge or Adobe Audition. On the Mac, use ProTools LE as your sound mixer (instead of Vegas) and Final Cut for your editing.
Now you can make a short film. With all that money you have left over. Wait, we forgot about hardware. I'll save that for a later post.
Don't cry. Think of all that money your short film will make. Oh, wait. Shorts don't make money. Well, it's still a small price to pay to be a YouTube hero. Have you considered sock puppets?
http://www.thebeesneezeanimation.com/
The page belongs to Shawn Miller, animator at LucasFilm. Great links. Spend a day there.
Now, on with today's lesson. Software: what you'll need to survive. Or, a wishlist for the independent cg filmmaker. Last time we covered the all-important 3D app, so what else is there?
You need Photoshop. End of lesson. Seriously, if it's the only thing you buy outside of your 3D app, get Photoshop. Everything else is just icing on the cake. But this lesson would be boring if it was just cake, so on to the icing.
Painting on a 3D model is sooooo nice when texturing. By far the most intuitive way to handle things. Photoshop CS3 is teasing us with its ability to import 3D models, but we still do our painting on a 2D plane. Boo. (CS4? Fingers crossed?) Until recently, the choices for painting on a 3D model were twofold: Deep Paint 3D or BodyPaint 3D. And neither was perfect. BodyPaint 3D is probably the most vigorously updated of the two, but it has a learning curve for anyone who does not use Cinema 4D (which it is integrated with). Deep Paint has always been a bit wonky (and crashy) but it has some really awesome brushes. Trouble is, they moved the UV tools to a separate app, Deep UV, so now you need to buy a lot to get integrated functionality. For this reason, you may wish to just stick with Maya's own (limited) 3D paint tools until the industry puts up a stable, affordable, intuitive new standard. Any coders out there want to take this challenge? New industry standard 3D paint tool? Anyone? Here's a darkhorse candidate that was brought to my attention: Thirdbrush. Only thirty bucks. Haven't tried it yet. Send me your reviews if you use it.
Let's turn our attention to 2D apps. You'll need these for previs, storyboarding, conceptual art, matte painting and texturing, as well as fixes on final rendered frames. Corel Painter is the standard natural-media app, as it simulates watercolor, paint, pastels, etc. The main thing to note is that it is a painting tool, not a photo-retouch tool like Photoshop, so it does what you want it to: it mixes the pixels onscreen wet-on-wet style. Not too expensive, but check these cheap-to-free digital paint app alternatives:
- Dogwaffle - free!
- ArtRage - free, or a 25 dollar fancy version
- Artweaver - free!
- Ambereh - a SourceForge project, lets you do collaborative paintings online (!)
- Wizardbrush - 25 bucks
Now image organization tools. Adobe Bridge is wonderful, and if you have Photoshop, you probably already have it. But also cool, each in their unique way, is Irfanview, ACDSee, and IView MediaPro. I use them all. Also, get Flipbook Pro so you can play back sequences of frames without making movie files out of them.
You'll also need presentation tools. Your short film needs a website, some business cards and publishing materials, and you'll have to make pitches ad nauseum. (Even if you plan to do your own funding and distribution, you'll end up putting together project pitches and portfolios if only to obtain collaborators). To this end, besides Photoshop, you'll want Dreamweaver (or some web app), Flash (maybe), Acrobat Pro (slideshows and documents), or Keynote (on the Mac). And MsOffice or OpenOffice. And CD and DVD authoring tools.
You still want to make a short film?
Now for the production apps. Google Sketchup can be handy as a previs app - mainly because it's fast and intuitive. Mudbox or ZBrush would be nice for creating high-res displacement maps or just for cool-looking previs work. They are competing modelers in the 3d sculpting paradigm (works like digital clay). Mudbox is by far the easier to use, but purists insist ZBrush produces higher quality results.
Editorial. You'll want Quicktime Pro. No faster way to make little movie files to pass around. You'll also want some image-format and video-format converter utilities. Find some freeware for this. After Effects for compositing and post (or Shake or Fusion or Combustion or Toxik). I recommend Sony Vegas for editorial on the PC: the app that "puts it all together" in the work reel. I use it for audio compositing too. Speaking of audio, you need an audio editor like SoundForge or Adobe Audition. On the Mac, use ProTools LE as your sound mixer (instead of Vegas) and Final Cut for your editing.
Now you can make a short film. With all that money you have left over. Wait, we forgot about hardware. I'll save that for a later post.
Don't cry. Think of all that money your short film will make. Oh, wait. Shorts don't make money. Well, it's still a small price to pay to be a YouTube hero. Have you considered sock puppets?
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Stuff You Guerrilla Shortfilmers Need vol 63: Software! Part 1 - The 3D App
Hey check this out:
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/
Saw these guys at work, and again at SIGGRAPH, showing what they did with free open-source animation software (Blender).
Funky thing is, you can browse their entire production repo here. This is wonderfully informative from a production management standpoint, as it shows how one group of guerrilla animators organized their stuff. You can even download the entire 200 Gig studio backup! Now that's what I call Open Source: even their techniques are transparently shared. The bigwigs here in Hollywood could learn a thing or two. Alas, we still barter in the antiquated currency of "ideas", as if a simple idea can make or break a film. Part of Catmull's keynote at SIGGRAPH addressed this issue. At Pixar, they build teams, and teams are their currency. Ideas are worth nothing in the hands of an inept team, but a good team can wrangle the gold out of any old idea. To reiterate: ideas are worthless. So we should all quit hording them. Let's open-source knowledge! It's the rising tide lifting all ships thing.
So here's the meat of this post: you need software. From the results of Big Buck Bunny it appears that free animation software has come of age. Put this with my previous post on production tools ("How do You Manage?") wherein I list free ftp services and the like, and you have a 100% no-overhead production. Except, of course, for the emotional overhead of sleep loss, eye strain, loss of family and friends from your withdrawal into the long-hours world of computer animation; not to mention all the hardware to purchase and maintain. But hey, nobody said filmmaking was easy; if it was, everybody would do it.
If you have a few ducats to spend on your labor of love, however, you can make your life much easier. In the following posts I will provide a rundown of the barebones software you'll need to think about when contemplating creating a CG film.
First: decide on the 3D app. This will serve as the hub of your data pipeline, so choose wisely, as it will effect all your subsequent decisions. The big contenders include the aforementioned Blender (pluses include that it's free and seems to be well-supported; the minus is there's not a huge existing base of users so expect a learning curve). For a small investment look into Animation:Master - you can get a web-based license for 50 bucks a year! It is purported to be oriented toward character animators - rare for cheap-end 3d software. Next step up would be Maxon's Cinema4d. Still cheap, although how cheap is hard to discern since they don't list pricing on their website. The brag the fastest renderer in the biz, and they have the schweetest 3d paint system with full Bodypaint3D integration. Some award-winning shorts have been done with it, but I don't know much else. At the next pricing tier we move into the ones aimed at the professional market: Lightwave3d, SoftImage, 3dsMax, Maya and Houdini.
Lightwave3D has excellent modeling and lighting tools, but with character animation tools that leave something to be desired.
For a higher price point, you can try Houdini, which is the de facto standard for visual effects, so it would be the appropriate choice if you have an abstract or effects-laden project. The downside is, again, weak character tools. Also a big learning curve. The full version is pricey, as in 8 thousand dollars -ish pricey, but you can get a stripped down learning edition for free, and a watermark-free version for only 99 dollars!
Next there's Softimage. I always forget about Softimage (almost forgot to include it) which is a shame because it is as full-featured and easy to use as any other, but for some reason hasn't caught on big in the industry yet (they were late arriving in the game with their XSI version, by which time most companies had gone with Maya). Comes in a variety of price points ranging from 6000-ish to a 500-ish educational version.
Lastly, I'll talk about the two I recommend for most serious projects: 3dsMax and Maya, both from Autodesk. Max is the industry standard in games, Maya the same for films, but they crossover everywhere so don't focus on that. From extended personal experience in the two apps, I'll say that Max trumps Maya in the realms of modeling and layout, whereas Maya is better for character rigging and animation. Neither has the best on-board renderer so they both rely on mental ray to be their "full featured" renderer - so I'd say that's a draw. Maya is more configurable and transparent, so it's better for those that like to drill down into the guts of the software; this is also its drawback, as it has the steeper learning curve. Max has a more logical interface, and lots of funky built-in effects and dynamics. Maya has Paint Effects, which is not comparable to anything else in any package. In the end, it's somewhat of a draw. Even price-wise, they have similar versions, and the obligatory free version for learning. I'm not going to start a flame-war by picking my favorite of these two giants: download the free versions of each and decide what's right for you. Alright I'll tell you: Maya. And Netflix is better than Blockbuster.
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/
Saw these guys at work, and again at SIGGRAPH, showing what they did with free open-source animation software (Blender).
Funky thing is, you can browse their entire production repo here. This is wonderfully informative from a production management standpoint, as it shows how one group of guerrilla animators organized their stuff. You can even download the entire 200 Gig studio backup! Now that's what I call Open Source: even their techniques are transparently shared. The bigwigs here in Hollywood could learn a thing or two. Alas, we still barter in the antiquated currency of "ideas", as if a simple idea can make or break a film. Part of Catmull's keynote at SIGGRAPH addressed this issue. At Pixar, they build teams, and teams are their currency. Ideas are worth nothing in the hands of an inept team, but a good team can wrangle the gold out of any old idea. To reiterate: ideas are worthless. So we should all quit hording them. Let's open-source knowledge! It's the rising tide lifting all ships thing.
So here's the meat of this post: you need software. From the results of Big Buck Bunny it appears that free animation software has come of age. Put this with my previous post on production tools ("How do You Manage?") wherein I list free ftp services and the like, and you have a 100% no-overhead production. Except, of course, for the emotional overhead of sleep loss, eye strain, loss of family and friends from your withdrawal into the long-hours world of computer animation; not to mention all the hardware to purchase and maintain. But hey, nobody said filmmaking was easy; if it was, everybody would do it.
If you have a few ducats to spend on your labor of love, however, you can make your life much easier. In the following posts I will provide a rundown of the barebones software you'll need to think about when contemplating creating a CG film.
First: decide on the 3D app. This will serve as the hub of your data pipeline, so choose wisely, as it will effect all your subsequent decisions. The big contenders include the aforementioned Blender (pluses include that it's free and seems to be well-supported; the minus is there's not a huge existing base of users so expect a learning curve). For a small investment look into Animation:Master - you can get a web-based license for 50 bucks a year! It is purported to be oriented toward character animators - rare for cheap-end 3d software. Next step up would be Maxon's Cinema4d. Still cheap, although how cheap is hard to discern since they don't list pricing on their website. The brag the fastest renderer in the biz, and they have the schweetest 3d paint system with full Bodypaint3D integration. Some award-winning shorts have been done with it, but I don't know much else. At the next pricing tier we move into the ones aimed at the professional market: Lightwave3d, SoftImage, 3dsMax, Maya and Houdini.
Lightwave3D has excellent modeling and lighting tools, but with character animation tools that leave something to be desired.
For a higher price point, you can try Houdini, which is the de facto standard for visual effects, so it would be the appropriate choice if you have an abstract or effects-laden project. The downside is, again, weak character tools. Also a big learning curve. The full version is pricey, as in 8 thousand dollars -ish pricey, but you can get a stripped down learning edition for free, and a watermark-free version for only 99 dollars!
Next there's Softimage. I always forget about Softimage (almost forgot to include it) which is a shame because it is as full-featured and easy to use as any other, but for some reason hasn't caught on big in the industry yet (they were late arriving in the game with their XSI version, by which time most companies had gone with Maya). Comes in a variety of price points ranging from 6000-ish to a 500-ish educational version.
Lastly, I'll talk about the two I recommend for most serious projects: 3dsMax and Maya, both from Autodesk. Max is the industry standard in games, Maya the same for films, but they crossover everywhere so don't focus on that. From extended personal experience in the two apps, I'll say that Max trumps Maya in the realms of modeling and layout, whereas Maya is better for character rigging and animation. Neither has the best on-board renderer so they both rely on mental ray to be their "full featured" renderer - so I'd say that's a draw. Maya is more configurable and transparent, so it's better for those that like to drill down into the guts of the software; this is also its drawback, as it has the steeper learning curve. Max has a more logical interface, and lots of funky built-in effects and dynamics. Maya has Paint Effects, which is not comparable to anything else in any package. In the end, it's somewhat of a draw. Even price-wise, they have similar versions, and the obligatory free version for learning. I'm not going to start a flame-war by picking my favorite of these two giants: download the free versions of each and decide what's right for you. Alright I'll tell you: Maya. And Netflix is better than Blockbuster.
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