To be perfectly honest I don't really get it. I've downloaded demo versions of many of those apps and I'm serious its taken me a couple of hours to put a cube on the screen. Perhaps it is because I am such a novice that I really don't understand the difference.

But its the prices that get me. Sure if I were developing a large scale feature animation I could justify those costs. I remember a few years ago if you wanted to buy MS Word it was around $800, sure if you happen to be a business and use it all the time. But for home use where someone might use it once a week, I don't think so.

The big I see in some of the "pro" products are the resources for learning them. Lots of books, schools, tutorials etc. While there are resources for learning tools like Carrara and an awesome forum like this one with people willing to help, it's still more difficult to learn things beyond the basics or maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Still I've yet to find a good book on Carrara.

Vampires