Quote - It may be that DAZ forced their hand by stuffing COLLADA export into DAS|Studio and giving it away free, and EF is having to accelerate their development and release of Pro, and make money on that feature while it's still fresh.

And "Bingo" has been called, ladies and gentlemen... ! FBX nobody really cared too much about becuase the format itself was, well... crap. Only a few high-end proggies even bothered. Collada OTOH? Judging by the instant hard-ons I see when I mention the word to the mesh-heads at work, I think it's prolly a damned good thing to have if you intend on staying in the 3D mesh programming game. > Quote - Not having the e-mail any longer, I'm not going to swear to the wording, but the impression I got was that Carrara 6 was being established as the next port-of-call for anyone using DS, Bryce, or Hexagon

D|S will be around forever, as an entry-point to 3D for those who want to give it a whirl, or who don't need retina-bleeding results. Carrara is one hell of a complete suite that's priced very nicely, and has the flexibility to grow. Bryce? Prolly will be kept in semi-legacy mode (I dunno, maybe they'll keep it up indefinitely). Hexagon? Heh.. Hehehe.. ROTFLMAO! (that means: it needs work. Lots of work.) > Quote - "Many, many" companies simply do not operate that way. They either develop and software with existing staff, which means that staff is fully utilized while this goes on, or they hire short term labor for the development effort and fire them when done.

Or option #3: contract out what you need done via out-sourcing or intra-sourcing. ;) /P