3d modeling and animation

[kostantinos]

maya and softimage/xsi have native linux versions,both in about 6000 for the advanced version
anyway,you can buy xsi foundation for 500(no hair and rigid body-good deal)
cheers,kostas!

[SCO]

No not solaris....why? for the sake of god..
Solaris is sun's *.nix system. SGI has it's own IRIX.

Linux is supported since it's open source and has a large userbase.
Solaris has the same small userbase as IRIX.

Maya is for:

MAC OS X
IRIX
WINDOWS
LINUX (officially RED HAT supported distro)

Personally i got maya also runnig without fuss on:

- SuSE
- Mandriva

Solaris is a damm good OS, it's just a small group of people in the Linux Community don't like it because Sun dont like Linux. I use what works, and what suits my needs. Im not even bias against Windows, even if it's a crap OS. I still use it because of application support, and in my opinion that's what Windows Is good for, app support.

[carbon8]

I am a XSI user on both Windows and Linux. The XSI disks come with the installation for both OS's. I believe Maya is the same way. If you have a legit copy of it you should be good to go.

[GNOME_n00b]

k3d is a good (gtk) application to use
http://k3d.sourceforge.net/

[keurt]

go to http://garbure.org/ a distributuion name Ratatouille was created by La Ménagerie(a movie production studio). On that distribution there is a lot of program for animation and they put exemple and tutorial.

[techieMoe]

I wiped out and closed the poll, because as has been stated before, the distro is largely irrelevant. It's the rendering program you use that will make the difference.

[grimR]

im a new linux user.
i had been using 3ds Max in windows, and had the same problem when i moved to linux.
I now am learning to use Blender i must say it is very weird when you come from 3dsmax but if u get acquainted its real fast to model. (not as powerful though)
But then i found a maya version for linux. It even came in rpm and installed flawlesly in Suse 9.2. the only problem is that my linux distro uses alt key to move windows around, and so i cant use alt in maya which really sucks.
But besides that Maya 6 unlimited works perfectly in linux.

you can always change the keyboard controls so that it would not interfere with maya

[zachm]

yeah, look in the help documentation in maya under the linux install section, it will tell you which settings make it so you can use alt again. I run both XSI and Maya on linux, currently under FC4, and other than some distro related BS, they run sooo much faster than windows. Especially in the rendering department, which is where speed really matters in 3d. As far as price and speed, I would really suggest XSI, as there are integrated migration tools if you are coming from another program and Mental Ray is fully integrated as opposed to being a separate module. And a base version is literally THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS cheaper. (in my opinion, the whole program is way better and put together more solid.)