Brush, mud and modo

Starting to get the hang of things in zBrush 3 and loving Modo 301 I downloaded the trial of Mudbox to see what that is all about. I know some people who use it in their pipeline and what impresses me the most is that people at Blizzard Cinematic team are using Mudbox. I'm sure that they use a wide variety of software there, but I don't think that they would use anything if it didn't fit in their current pipeline or if the added value didn't compensate the cost of the tool.

Autodesk bought Skymatter, the original developer of Mudbox some months ago. But even before Autodesk brought Mudbox to my attenttion with their buyout, it was used by Weta Digital to make the movie King Kong. I didn't know Mudbox back then and always assumed that they used zBrush to create the fine details for Kong.

Now that many tools have become standard in my pipeline (Modo, zBrush, Photoshop, Illustrator) I am not so eager to change it. But I would like to learn animation, but haven't had much luck finding a modern and easy tool for that. Much of the appeal of zBrush and Modo is that they are really graphic designers tools, 3ds Max and others feel too complicated and feel more like engineer's tools often sacrificing creativity in the process.

People often tell me that XSI has superior animating tools compared to those inside 3ds Max and Maya. I have yet to try them out and since my very first and only experience with animation comes from 3ds Max I don't know what to expect. I have kept away of animation thus far because I feel that it is way too complicated and a lot of work before I can see the results. Very much the opposite to the tools that I have right now, I live on instant gratification.

At some point, I just have to take the leap and get my feet wet. The experience on animation will become handy when I need to make models that animate well, pure theory will only get you so far.

Software mentioned in this post:
Modo
zBrush
Mudbox
3ds Max
Maya
XSI