xsi costing???

[flip3r]

hi im just curious. how come xsi is so expensive!?!? i mean i love xsi 3! and i dont wanna use anything else, but some companies cant justify buying xsi essential for 6000$ when maya 5 complete is just 2000$...

so their asking me to learn maya... but i really dont want to... hehehe... i wish i could convince them to pay the extra bucks.

[veritas167]

it's because XSI is the best! i've tried maya, but i find you can do more quicker with softimage. besides, next time if they have a problem with it, have them buy a student version first, show them what you can do, and then convince them to buy the program. it worked with my parents, maybe it'll work with your boss.

good luck and happy animating,
Ken Matthews

[ruddy]

uncletoon,
Would your parents like to adopt a 54 year old boy?
I'll be good!

-desertboy

[johnjoe]

I think the quality have a cost ...

• In maya you have 36 ways to do one thing but there is 30 ways who are bugged and don't work.
  Maya can do anything ... but with a quality level very low

• I've ask at Alias W.F. - Paris -what kind of Mental ray(Mental ray, MR universal, or MR batch, node lock or not ...) must i buy ?
  they answer me they don't know because they haven't any contact with Mental Image ... !!! and they don't know how it works !!!

• I've seen a maya 5.0 demo
  65% of the news in maya have been copied in XSI 3.0 and it's less useful and powerful than in xsi.
  Paint effect don't work with Mental ray.(to rendering paint effect in Mental ray you must convert in polygon, and the result make me laugh !!).
  Maya rendering is always unuseful, bump, aliasing, and motion blur are really a shame !!!
  Hardware rendering can't be use for broadcast works, and Mental ray can't work in hardware ....

• Maya on the paper, is cheaper but if you want to buy it, you will see ... if you want a network license, it 's more expensive, if you want some help, they'll try to sell you, their dvd of help and it will be more expensive etc ...
  and the hotline is really a shame too ...

Than, you can do what you want but try xsi, try maya, and you will see, xsi is more powerful, more useful, and
in xsi all the tools works ...
And if you are working in the broadcast domain, xsi will be better, with a mental ray perfectly integrated...

christof.

[unchikun]

Even though XSI is superior to Maya in many respects it also falls behind in many others (nurbs, dynamics, soft bodies etc). XSI has it's own host of problems in a real-world production environment. The business model of paying a premium for a supposed "killer 3D app" doesnt hold true anymore, just ask A/W

Take a look at the forums on highend and the number of posts for each app. Not a scientific analysis by far but go to different forum sites (ie cgtalk) and you see the same pattern. If anything, softimage pricing is preventing a larger market share.

For the price of one XSI advanced license (~$15k), I could get 2 lightwave licenses (~$3k), 2 messiah animate plugins (~$2k), 2 souped up pc's (~$4k), money left over for a tropical island holiday for 2.

It's not the software, it's the artist right?

[jeff-jones]

he has a point, the program for the most part, doesnt mean you will get better results... its the skill of the artist using it.
I've seen stuff made on maya that made XSI work look bad, but i've also seen XSI work that is so realistic, it's scary...

even 3d max has the capability to keep up with them.. although it ends up being more expensive with the plugin renderers and such... i mean look at the warcraft 3 movies... pretty damn good if you ask me.

I personally like XSI, only because i have already learned how to use it through the EXP release of version 3.
Maya PLE, isnt enough for me... its too limited.. and gmax.. ugh...

so its just a matter of preference, skill, and money. The service that Softimage Gives you is what you're really paying for, at least thats how i look at it.