Here’s some good news for Intel Mac owners upset about Maya 8…
http://www.newtek.com/news/releases/08-01-06f.html
The competitive upgrade price of $495 (from Photoshop!) sounds pretty good.
Any Lightwave/Unity users out there?
I use LightWave–the Universal version should be out around the time I get my my first Intel Mac. (NewTek has previously said it would be out after LW9, but before the end of the year.)
And I assume it will saturate as many cores as you have, too. I aim for 4 
But I wouldn’t assume the worst about Maya–I believe they have already said they will make Maya Universal. (I think there was a link to that statement on the NewTek forums, of all places, but I don’t have it.)
Yes, but there was a post on CGTalk yesterday from someone identified as an Alias employee who said the person who had promised a UB version had been gone for six months!
The issue seems to be (pure speculation) that Apple has not yet commited to a 64bit version of OS X. Make of that what you will…
I think I’m going to bite the bullet, and LW seems to be the only thing I can swallow in terms of pricing. I’m serious about at least giving it a true attempt at making games witht he tiny bit of time I do have, and bought the Unity pro license.
Maya’s only available to me in inconvenient fashion (older version, older computer, not even sure I should legally be using it even though nobody else does atm), and a bit too costly from what I can see.
I bought a new iMac, Unity, so I guess there’s no point in going insane trying to get blender to work smoothly and then using a PC or parallels to use milkshape.
GameSpace was a bad idea, but I might just stick with that shareware-feeling PC app.
LW is probably the only thing I’d invest in at this point.
I need animation and ease of implementation dang it. 
And is money the only reason you wouldn’t consider going with Cinema 4D? I’m very curious about that app, but I’ve never been able to get “into” it. I wanted to download a Mac demo, but the only thing I could find on their site was the PowerPC and Windows versions.
Cinema4D has even better integration into Unity than Lightwave.
I like LightWave, but it depends on Alias’s FBX exporter–an added step, and one that has caused me a problem in one instance (textures didn’t carry over until I fiddled).
Also LW9 will be Universal, but isn’t just yet.
Glad I spent some time researching. Cinema 4d does in fact look like where I’m going. I may even enjoy using it. 
I’ll sleep on it, and hopefully not have a reason to get more expensive packages than the baseline $695 app.
(Well, any real benefits from the additional modules for Unity?)
Direct support w/ Unity, interface seems very intuitive based on the bit of time with the demo (this is what I like a lot about Cheetah3D), reviews are overwhelmingly positive and it’s not frickin’ gameSpace.