I really like Cinema 4D. Back about 5 years ago I was teaching at a community college (part-time) and was looking for a better program to suggest to the school to teach. (They were using Bryce at that time.) I tried several try-out programs and tried to see what I could do purely by intuition without a manual. I couldn't seem to do anything with Lightwave. Same for another program which i can not recall anymore. But Cinema 4D I could figure out part of it in a couple hours. Back then Maxon was nice to its prospective user base and gave all kinds of discounts (like C4D 6CE version for a small fraction of its original price.) But they don't do that anymore. Also I now don't teach any longer. The school downsized its part-time faculty after budget cuts. So I no longer qualify for academic discounts.
My experience in 3D is that I am self taught. I am 50 now and when I was in college I took the one and only computer graphics course. (about 1980) In that class we shared a single PDP-11 machine and drew lines, boxes, and circles using a graphics oriented version of BASIC. We stored our programs on 8" floppies. :-) (Hey, at least it was a step up from punch cards.) Yes, RealSoft looks to have some power, but it looks like you have to be somewhat of a motor-head and open the hood to fiddle with torquing bolts and otherwise get your hands greasy to access it. For teaching 3D I would not use RealSoft. For personal (and maybe professional) use, Im still going to give it a try. Be prepared for many more questions. And please, do not take some of my criticisms as an insult. -- -- Henry Tjernlund http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?username=henrytj http://www.modelmayhem.com/HenryTjernlund http://imdb.com/name/nm2519729/ http://www.myspace.com/henrytj http://henrytj.deviantart.com/
