when you pick yourself off the floor after seeing the pricetag on Autodesk's suite of progams, maybe look at a few simpler suggestions.
Wings3D free, very basic modeling app
Blender free highly complex modeling app
Hexagon cheap has Daz studio bridge
Sculptris free lite version of Zbrush like virtual plasticene playdough or clay modeling
Carrara my choice, good all round animation, rendering and modeling app not cheap but compared to Max or Maya a bargain
Zbrush which I just bought today and have yet to learn, bit dear cost me $880AUD but still a bargain compared to Max.
for uv mapping UV unwrap is free
as is lithunwrap

@TBS - you may also want to look at 3D Coat for making hair. - this is more the type of hair that is friendlier with iclone, and you compensate the stringy textures - with bump maps, realistic textures, opacity and specular maps. For the flowing part, you can add bones to the hair in blender, so you can add spring bones in 3DX5. Further it was announced that we will have cloth physics in IC6 so this 'in theory' can be used for hair as well.

Plenty of options other than spending 3.6k on bloated software to make a hair that's not practical for iclone.

also, you are not likely ( never say never ) to ever get real looking hair in iclone - the iclone focus is real time rendering, to get a good rendering with the particle type hair, the software has to calculate light reflections and physics interactions on each of those strands - at our current technology level, it's just not practical real time rendering, at least not in a home computer environment. maybe with quantum computing. hehe


Cheers

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would you like some fries with that ? rofl

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Lol!! I think sw00000p's way of thinking is more of a foundation of art and theory so things are harder to learn but once you have the skills you can accomplish much more. My imagination wants to do so much at the same time that I find it hard to stick to one thing so tend to go down the easy routes and therefore have no knowledge of much at all to be honest. Autodesk softwares can be downloaded free if you state you are a student and I am learning all this so... That counts lol. I've spent enough on iclone to buy a completely new playground. I'll checkout maya also.

Thanks all for your input on this, I think I need to learn more before I make hair. I hope reallusion make a hair plugin. Garibaldi looks sweet tho, just how I would like to make hair.



- Mike

it really depends on what path you want to take ...do you want to be able to express ideas quickly, or do you want to sell your shiny assets to someone else with ideas of what to do with them ?

in the end, it's the same mountain, except in one workflow you learn first, in the other you express yourself and learn along the way. What do you plan to sell ...an idea or a model ?

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so there you go, listen to swoop if you goal is to sell models. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it has it's standard workflow.

for people that want to sell ideas, all that precision is detrimental to our goal - we look for funding to hire people like you and swoop.....unless we figured it out ourselves and pocket your salary.

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Wow that looks good to begin with! Thanks for sharing!

- Mike

My goal is not really set at this point, I want to see where it takes me. All I know is I want to improve constantly. I want to start off by making some 5-10 min short stories. I want as much as possible to be my own creations and then have a next generation once I learn more. I think after a while of using my creations I will sell some of them to help others look good. I would like to collaborate with people and perhaps make original movies. The hardest part is finding the balance of creating and putting things to use, when I spend enough time on both sides I'm sure things will become more clear. At least either side is creative which is definitely what I need.

- Mike

well, both creativity and technical are years of mastery - even swoop admits that trying to come up with new ideas to pitch is difficult. The idea is what you want to focus on first -
on one side you spend most of your time studying tutorials, and manuals on the other side you spend most of your time looking up trends, marketing, and psychology, creating tons of clips that go nowhere in search of that one idea that works and understanding how to publish it. Each is it's own journey and it's not practical to master both at the same time. Not to say you can't do well at both, but each is none the less an independent discipline.

swoop abandoned himself creatively years ago, so it's easy for him to follow the technical path and become an engineer. He copies, he doesn't steal.

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swoop, stop whining, he likes 3D coat.

he might want to be creative and not be part of your borg mentality.

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