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December 10, 2003
Apple gets a little discreet?!
I’m officially holding my breath for this rumor to be true. MacRumors has caught wind that Apple may be in line to purchase some of Discreet Logic’s video products — specifically, Combustion, Cleaner and 3D Studio Max. Cleaner and Combustion are already great Mac apps, but the line that I’ve gotten from a number of Discreet reps over the years is that 3DSMAX will never come to the Mac. This stems mostly from back when 3DS was an Autodesk product, and Autodesk had a little falling out with Apple over AutoCAD back in the day, and has pretty much tried to stay clear of the Mac ever since.
Now, of course, that Apple has gotten itself a bonafide 64-bit UNIX-based platform to work from, it makes a lot of sense to re-consider a port of 3DSMAX, and if Discreet won’t do it, Apple will for sure if they get their hands on it.
Ever since taking 3DSMAX classes in college, I’ve yet to find a Mac-based 3D program that I like as much. I’ve been pretty much sticking with an old version of Infini-D (v 4.5), which they no longer make (bought out and used to make Carrara, which sucks). I’ve tried them all, it seems — Maya, Electric Image, Lightwave, Cinema 4D — but haven’t been satisfied with any of them compared to 3DSMAX. Part of it is definitely the learning curve. Having been “raised” on 3DSMAX and Infini-D, everything else just seems foreign to me. Part of it is that those other apps just aren’t what I’m looking for. Lightwave may be close. Maya is a little overkill. Electric Image seemed nice, and dvGarage’s nice little 3D Toolkit was certainly attractively priced, but wasn’t set up for the production-style that I like. If 3DSMAX comes to OS X, I can finally say bye-bye to Infini-D and Classic Mac OS for good!
Posted by paullheureux at December 10, 2003 02:01 PM