Autodesk offers Maya, a 3D animation, modeling, simulation and rendering tool available to artists, animators, and educators, used to create realistic characters, models, and scenes, as well as effects such as explosions, cloth movement, etc.
$234
per month
Cinema 4D
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Maxon, headquartered in Germany, offers Cinema 4D, an animaton suite for 3D artists, which the vendor states is suitable for beginners and seasoned professionals alike, who can take advantage of Cinema 4D’s wide range of tools and features to achieve stunning results for demanding, fast-paced 3D production.
N/A
Solid Edge
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Solid Edge is a software solutions for product development — 3D design, simulation, manufacturing, data management, and cloud collaboration. Solid Edge aims to combine the speed and simplicity of direct modeling with the flexibility and control of parametric design.
$110
per month
Pricing
Autodesk Maya
Cinema 4D
Solid Edge
Editions & Modules
Monthly
$235
per month per user
Yearly
$1875
per year per user
3-Year
$5625
3 years per user
No answers on this topic
Design and Drafting XaaS
$110.00
per month
Foundation XaaS
$267.00
per month
Classic XaaS
$335.00
per month
Premium XaaS
$481.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Autodesk Maya
Cinema 4D
Solid Edge
Free Trial
Yes
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Maya is also available through Autodesk's Flex plan and pricing. Tokens expire 1 year from date of purchase. Not all products and features are available with Flex. Students and teachers at qualified academic institutions worldwide are eligible for free access to Autodesk software for one-year through the Autodesk Education Community.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Autodesk Maya
Cinema 4D
Solid Edge
Considered Multiple Products
Autodesk Maya
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Autodesk Maya
The UI of 3ds Max is not that good and very old, not the best. Blender is the best for everything, especially its modeling and animation tools are not the best as compared to Autodesk Maya. Cinema 4D is good for motion graphics and create vibrant renders but it has limited …
Autodesk Maya is better than these other softwares because Autodesk Maya is a software that does not have updates every time, and this means that you do not have to waste time seeing what has been updated and what has not.
Autodesk Maya is a great software, it has so many tools that you can create a full movie without even jumping to any other software. Although it's pretty hard to learn but there is nothing more fun, once you get a hang of it. In general, its tools are best for modeling and animation.
Photorealistic Rendering (it takes a LONG time to render for print, but it's insanely realistic). Commercial Production Graphical Integration into print materials (and digital) We did a lot with brochures and billboards. Hi Res rendering takes hours, but the output set us FAR apart from the run-of-the-mill competition we had.
It has very good user interface in classic or ordered environment.
In 2D or drafting, you can give any Geometric tolerancing and symbols to any dimension. There is a wide range of options available.
You can convert any files in step file (.stp) and can open it in other designing applications easily.
After converting 3D drawings in 2D you can make changes in 2D drawing by converting it in the draft. You can also add details like cross-sections and detailed view.
You can directly make threads without creating holes.
Right now Maya has no good viewport like Blender 2.8 has. It is good that Maya 2019 devs focused on performance and stability but it's strange to see that mainstream soft aren't on trend in developing really cool and helpful tools.
Maya LT is very good for artist who don't need complex FX tools. So the devs must add python API to Maya LT.
Add more helpful tools to modeling section especially for retopology.
Being used to 2-key and 3-key commands from the keyboard, it would be nice if this was more robust in Solid Edge. The capability of programming keystroke commands exists in Solid Edge, but it would be more user friendly in that regard.
Editing hatches can be a challenge.
I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, but that seems to be a feature across software platforms in Windows.
As Autodesk Maya was one of the first softwares I learned, so I feel very fun to work with it. The overall usabilty feels very natural to me and I felt it's easy to learn but tough to master kind of software. Some people find it very difficult to learn, so I deduced some rating points.
For reasons mentioned before: an intuitive interface and speed of the viewport, speed of loading, and ease of plugin integration. The MoGraph module encourages experimentation and the creation of highly modifiable scenes. Crashes are extremely rare and the support team and community are hyper-responsive to requests for help. For real... Maxon's staff hangs out in Slack and Discord communities, regularly assisting users with issues. No support ticket required.
As mentioned previously, Siemens Solid Edge is not the most user-friendly of products at all. It requires intense training to make sure that the basics are understood, and after that, there are numerous other training interventions needed to be able to perform expert-level CAD functions. The GUI is not intuitive, as many other packages are, and the features built-in are not well defined. The process to use many of these features is counter-intuitive and requires a mind-shift.
Maxon's staff regularly hangs out in Slack and Discord communities, ready to assist. This goes beyond the support ticket system, which is also extremely robust. Hundreds of optimizations and bugs are fixed in every patch, even when the user experience is already 99.9% smooth. This is a proactive, not reactive, support and engineering team at Maxon.
I have been involved with support and training of Solid Edge for 24 years. Given that I based my business model on support, and have been successful for all these years, I know excellent support. Siemens support for Solid Edge, "GTAC", is the definition of support for a product in every aspect.
We were evaluating the products within the Adobe portfolio like Adobe Animate, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe After Effects majorly among few others before finalising on the Autodesk Maya. One of the major reasons for that was earlier experience with the Autodesk Maya tool for the engineer and also it has more to offer than Adobe with multiple products.
Well, I go for cinema 4D if I want to create dynamic animation instead of Autodesk 3ds Max as I can easily create that animation compared to Autodesk 3ds Max.
FreeCAD is often better than Solid Edge 2021 when converting files, but I hope this changes with 2023 NX is overall more powerful, but that is to be expected (and you cant add it above because it is too short for whatever reason).
It took about 20 hours of use to get the basics of Synchronous Technology, and with just a basic competency I was able to make useful changes to the design. One of those changes was impossible to do our other CAD program.
My use lately has mostly been on personal time and self-driven, so learning other aspects and features of Solid Edge has been slower. Creating a drawing for a part required a few hours to learn and do the first time, but luckily there were YouTube videos for examples. With practice, I would expect the time to reflect what it takes in SolidWorks (about 30 minutes).
