Oh, and in case anyone is interested, here are some of my thoughts on Siggraph and the questions going on and so on...
Since this is the first time I had been there, I really didn't know what to expect and so I got a pretty good crash course in demoing soft and seeing it demoed. I felt like I was reasonably prepared and I think a lot of it was presence anyway and some of these crews looked like they had done it a million times and were burnt to cinders.
The number 1 question I got from the hundreds I spoke with was what kind of file import/export did Carrara support. I got the impression and I know for a fact that proggy's like Maya and Max and even LW with its poser plug in do not do well with Daz or Poser style figures, yet the demand to have fast acting characters like these is evident. Despite whatever anyone feels about them being canned or cheesy or whatever, people on a short timeline want quick, simple and nice... In a day in day out workshop where time is money, V4 can get a lot done. Carrara was a hit in this regard and even the Poser folks at E-Frontier came and got their free Daz Studio copies and checked out C6... 1.7 is quite a leap forward from the early release and the puppeteer thingy is kinda cool if you like that sort of thing. I get the impression more and more that 3D artists depend less and less on any one tool and are looking for compatibility between all of them. I hope one day some better common format is achieved and that the proggy's all speak a bit better to each other. V4 with all her morphs will crash Maya in less than a minute because it makes a full mesh for each morph. This is to its detriment as many of the users (whether they want to admit it or not) would make use of a fully posable and pretty simple to use figure like V4.
Even though they didn't have the biggest booth, ZBrush-3 was the hot item and for good reason. You can take that stuff in anything and sail with it pretty quick and the demo guys did a good job of making it look simple and I think that simplification was a big part of Z3. I have used Maya 6 before and to me anyway it seemed like you needed a PH.D just to get something simple done. I think in the end as prices come down and users learn more than just one or two or three softs that we'll see more and more users saying, oh I model in such and such, rig and animate in this or that and finish in Z3 or MB and then compose and shoot in whatever it is.. Not one single person I talked to said; Oh I just use Maya or I just use Max or Poser or Carrara or C4D or LW or whatever... They all rattled off at least 3 and sometimes 5 or 6 different apps and it really got me to thinking that its a healthy industry and the guys who will come out on top in the end will be the ones who's software is flexible and plays nice with as many other ones as possible.