dr_bernie posted at 4:42AM Wed, 31 August 2016 - #4281004

Well it all depends by what you mean by affordable.

For $199.- subscription fees per year you can get the full-blown Houdini. This is the most pro that a 3D app can get. If you have pro aspirations then this is the way to go. Houdini will open the door to the most prominent production studios in the world (while Carrara will only get you laughed at).

I am only a hobbyist doing occasional 3D for fun, so Houdini is way above my head, but if you consider that 3 years of Houdini subscription will only cost you $600.- then I am sure that you will agree that this is the software deal of the century.

I'd like to chime in about Houdini if I may. Not every large production studio uses Houdini. If you research it thoroughly, Houdini is primarily used as a VFX package in combination with some other large all-in-one solution like Maya. The strong point of Houdini is the incredibly powerful particle system and scripted, procedural workflow it can bring to a VFX pipeline, and that's primarily how it fits in. The people who specialize in Houdini are usually technical specialists focused on high quality particle effects and physics sims. However, it's usually tied tightly to Maya in one way or another along the pipeline. Honestly, the most "pro" application you can get in the world depends entirely on the field of 3d you are interested in.

For film and VFX you will likely find 90% of the really important studios use Maya. Perhaps half of those use Maya with Houdini in some way. If you are interested in next-gen game development (which is approaching the technical aspect that CG movies were doing about 5 to 10 years ago anyway), then you'll likely need to learn 3dsmax or Maya LT. 3dsmax is also found in some VFX studios too, but not as much as Maya, and usually only in the modeling portion of the pipeline. If you are looking to get into architectural visualization or television mograph stuff, then you'll likely encounter most studios using either Cinema4D or 3dsmax also.

Head over to CGTalk, hang out there for about a month in the forums and you'll see what the big studios are mostly using.

I think Carrara or Blender are great for the hobbyist. I lean towards Blender myself as an independant freelance artist, because it's far superior in the modelling aspect, but nothing seems to compare to Carrara for working nice with Poser stuff. It's ideal to get your feet wet with a real 3d package from Poser before moving up to something more.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.