You are completely right however I was talking from an individual artist perspective and in that case the mist cost effective solutions are blender, Maya lt and houdini indie IMHO.
Houdini Indie being cheap means nothing if you're a commercial studio where it's $3k for a license or $7k if you want the fully featured version - indie is also limited to 3 licenses per studio. Maya on the other hand is $1500 per year - which one would you buy for modellers if it was your business?
Maya is your only realistic route if you want to learn something you'll use at work. Compared to max its a terrible modelling tool but it does work (mostly) and it's very extensible. Blender will not achieve penetration in large studios - largely because of licensing issues. Houdini is very expensive and offers basically…
I have no idea what "licensing issues" you think there are preventing adoption of Blender. The list of studios where at least some artists use Blender has some very big names on it. And if you think Houdini has "fuck all" benefit for modeling, go create three hundred unique rock meshes and come back to me. I wouldn't…
Houdini indie has all the features of the full version, you can install and use it at the same time on 2 PCs and it costs only 180 € per year or 200 $ with the 2 year sub plan. The only limitation is that you can make a max of 100k $ per year. Also the apprentice version is free for non commercial use. The only cheapest…
No well, Houdini for normal modeling is not hard. It's slower compared to other softwares like Modo, Maya or Blender because it's based on circular menus that can be interactively changed based on the activity that you want to do. You have 2 menus: Desktop menus that are the equivalent of the group menu set in Maya that…
For modeling it's a matter of preference nowadays. The real difference comes when you must do more technical work such as uv mapping, retopo and similar. In that case there are softwares that are more advanced and fast than others. Blender was my first software, then i switched to Maya and used it for 5 years, in the…
Hi, thanks for your reply. It seems that Maya wins out, I think at this moment, 3DSMAX is similar enough to Maya that it is not worth relearning the software at this stage. MAX does a pretty good job with UV's, it's bone and animation tools are garbage but I find direct modelling quite easy. Houdini seems promising, but as…