Maya 8

Maya 8 is a program that is used to make high end three dimentional scenes.  It is used in the professional movie making world to create annimation as well as special effects.  It is a very useful program but can be difficult to learn.  It has a very sharp learning curve.  You really have to learn a lot about it before someone can use it sucessfully.  At a first glance, it can look impossible to do anything because of the sheer complexity of the interface as well as how different menu sets, views, and pull down menus there are.  This is not the case at all, you can do almost anything… Once you learn more about the program that is. 

Maya 8 has really changed  from the previous versions.  Pull down menus are more spread a part than before with more features.  This can especially be seen in the polygon menu set.  Polygon has been split into two different pull down menus making it harder to find things in the begining, but you pick up quickly on their genius behind splitting it apart.

One thing that is very useful is the shelf.  It is customizable and has little icons that represent the most useful things in that specific menu set.  You can also add the functions that you tend to use often.  Another thing that I like about maya is the IPR rendering.  It is something that will render a small portion of the screen and keep rerendering it in real time.  It is especially useful for textures and lighting.  It makes it much easier than rendering the whole scene over and over again.  It also saves a great deal of harddrive space. 

I am still a beginer at using Maya 8, but I would jighly recomend the program.  It is very useful , just a little hard to learn in the begining.  My suggestion would be to get a book on it and go through any tutorials that maya 8 has provided for you with the software.  Overall, I would score this very high in my books and I am looking forward to getting good with it.