electric image, the masters of amorphium and eias, hve just released eias 7.0:

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/

fbx support is the most interesting feature for 3dgs users. they advertise with the slogen "hollywood effects for the fraction of the price and your time", the star wars movie created by only 2 men is funny yet pretty cool. i don't have time to check it right now, maybe someone else is interested in trying it out. there's a free demo version abvailable.

Electric Image Animation System v7.0

EIAS 7 full version
$795.00

i know, but it's much cheaper than 3ds max, maya, lightwave or even c4d which seem to be widely used around the users.

but more expansive di xsi fondation.

but xsi hasn't been used for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Daddy Day Care, K-19: The Widowmaker, Gangs of New York, Austin Powers: Goldmember, Men In Black II, The Bourne Identity, Behind Enemy Lines, Time Machine, Ticker, JAG - Pilot Episode, Spawn, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Galaxy Quest, Mission to Mars, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Titan A.E., U-571, Dinosaur, Terminator 2: JudgementDay – DVD Intro, Jungle Book 2, and Lost In Space

so it's a rather movie and television proved tool.

personally, i am not understanding the xsi concepts and wouldn't use it even if you would give it away for free.

No. It is not "much cheaper" than Lightwave. Lightwave is about the same price but if you buy a side-grade (I did it with my ancient C4D version), then you can also get LW for something around 500-600 $

broozar,

If you were to find out all of the 3D software that was used on each of those movies, you might be surprised at all the various forms of software used. A lot of the work is done off site in shops that are hired to do specific jobs (modeling, lighting, compositing, etc). Each graphics shop has their own set of tools that they prefer to use and many of the individuals working there have their own "pet" tools that they use. XSI is certainly one of the "big players" and is used to create models and graphics for movies, TV, still graphics, etc and is used about as much as 3D Studio MAX, Maya and others.

In today's graphic's world, it is not so much the "tool" that is "proved", but the artist. Therefore, get the tool you can afford that gives you what you need, create what you can and push your own abilities.

XSI was used the create the Jurassic Park dinosaurs that should be "prove" enough. Dan is absolutly right in the industry (movie, game aso.) they use all kinds of tools.

Maya is very often used for animation because of blendshapes and the script editor, besides there is Softimage XSI which great with the giga poly core and my favorite the proportional modelling tool.

Dont forget Renderman which is the ultimate pipeline the render your images and of course 3d Studio Max which is great at modelling.

I was once a 3d Studio Max user but now I would never give away XSI, Zbrush and Photoshop.

The time you talk about the tools you should take to learn how to create great artwork, because software is like clay "you need it to realize your vision, but it will not realize the vision for you".

hey, i'm not hired by electic image, i just found an old magazine about 3d creation yesterday which reviewed amorphium3. i was interested in it and visited the homepage and found eias. strange, i thought, noone talked about it yet here in the forums, everyone seemed to have maya, max, cinema, lw, but eias just seemed to be not present. so, i thought, it might be interesting for other users to know that there's an alternative even beyond these 4.

i do not know what eias can do, i did not even test it, i don't know how it "feels" working with it. i was just surprised to find a package that offers a whole bunch of features that i never heard of.

Well thanks for pointing this out. Though I have to agree - in my eyes EIAS doesn't sound like a big deal and it's not much cheaper than Lightwave for example (795$ vs 895$) and well when it comes to where tools are used (especially in TV Series etc.) I think there's nothing that beats Lightwave here...
You also should consider the huge amount of tutorials / content you'll find for those "big" programs...

But this Amorphium has somehow catched me. With 79$ it's pretty cheap and the export to Flash swf files is very interesting. The downside is that the poor website doesn't really say a word about what it really does and is capable of. They start with this "OMG look how many awards it has won!" and then just give you some vague feature list which could make it a ZBrush, Silo or even Truespace 5 derivate. I'm also no friend of registering when trying something like this so maybe someone here knows a bit more about it. As it has modelling, animation and texturing capabilites it might be pretty interesting...

Enjoy your meal
Toast