> You might want to look at Silo: http://nevercenter.com/ Very intuitive,
> great feature set, *MUCH* easier to learn than MAX and it outputs code
> suitable for POVray. Oh, and it's far less expensive than buying MAX...
8^)

I'd second that, bought Silo myself. It's one of the best subdivision
modellers out there, and bigger companies/applications are starting to copy
tools the folks from Nevercenter invented months ago... Drawback, of course,
is the lack of animation, you can only use POV-Ray's functionality to
animate stuff, and POV-Ray doesn't have support for keyframed/interpolated
meshes or such.

If you're (for starters) just into doing some CG-Still Art, Silo + POV-Ray
is a very cheap way to go. I also think you get some insight knowledge doing
stuff with POV-Ray, which Click&Go-Applications like Cinema4D or Maya won't
tell you about. IMHO you're a more powerful CG artist if you know of the
possibilities that are available to you, instead of relying on tutorials or
stuff some guys somewhere on the world encountered and used "by chance" in a
proper way.

And thus, Silo can give you powerful modelling experience, and POV-Ray
powerful rendering experience. For things like Compositing or Animation, I'd
have to admit that Maya/3DS-Max/Cinema4D might be better. And as Mike put
it, use the trial versions and choose the one that fits you best. (Note
though that 109$ for Silo and 0$ for POV-Ray is much less than something
around 350$ for a Student Version of Maya, if I'm not mistaken, and this is
especially important if you're just getting into CG and don't know if you
should rather focus on something which, after using your new App, you find
to be implemented better in a different App).

Regards,
Tim
-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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