I haven’t thought about Combustion in a long time. Maya Composite is really nothing more than Toxik and when it could not survive on it’s own, it was bundled as a “new-feature” in Maya. From what I’ve seen it has some decent features but I really don’t see it gaining much ground. AE is still the king. I’m not saying it’s perfect (far from it) but it is widely used. Historically, Autodesk has had a very hard time breaking into the desktop compositing market.

Psoft is very similar to Maya’s toon, albeit a much easier interface and WAY faster. It’s a favored tool in the Anime world in Japan and soon I’ll be using it on a project and will report back with a full review.

Glad to hear your using Nuke. I learned it myself over the summer and found that I actually prefer it over Fusion. You are correct that it is not a motion graphics tool. We use AE for those types of jobs, but for our more 3D or VFX heavy jobs, we do go the node route. On a recent job we finished for MGD we couldn’t have finished without Fusion’s projection tools.

We are big exr fans too. In the latest version of Max, it is very easy to embed your render elements into a multi-channel exr. The only issue we have is that After Effects really sucks at handling them. Very slow. So it’s a trade-off. I personally prefer them, they are space savers!

Ahhh Softimage. Not much being said about it’s development. Will it be around in 2011? Who knows. How can you have three products with competing features fighting for the same market share? Something has to give.

I think you’ll find that Max is getting a lot of great attention at Autodesk. Especially with Shane Griffith at the helm. I’ve seen pieces of it’s road-map, and I’m very excited.

Keep the comments coming! Thanks!

-chad

My thoughts on some posts this fall:
Maya 2010 has less new features than Max partly because it does a lot already. New things such as OBJ import, which Maya has always had, are not new. Reminds me when “ghosting” came to Maya, which was already in Wavefront. But Max does seem to be favored. I’m curious as to Psoft over toon shader functions in Maya. As far as EXR, I’m using Nuke, which is great for large format work and handles EXR well. Nuke is node based and very flexible but I can’t recommend it for graphics work over AE. It’s a different tool like Maya used to be versus Max. Truth is Max and Maya just keep getting closer and yet get promotion over Softimage (they are “featured” but Softimage is not).

Finally, I’m glad you search for what is meaningfully cool rather than debate over which is the “winner” - which is decided by Autodesk anyway. Keep up the good work!