Essential university software

[reddy]

Hi everyone,

I'm sitting on our schools student computer committee at the moment(trying to improve the integration of computers into the school). One advance we've made is that apple have agreed to provide us with a media lab including video editing, sound editing and lots of nice mac hardware! they also want us to come up with a list of applications we might need. I dont use macs so i'm really not sure.

Being an architecture school I'd reccomend BIM software first (probably archicad - already used in the school) and artlantis to provide better rendering. What other packages could you reccomend bearing in mind the lack of time to deal with the steep learning curves of max etc?

Thanks,

Brendan

[bjornkn]

SketchUp!

[reddy]

Ofcourse! I use it myself and it didnt even occur to me!!

Thanks a lot.

Any more ideas?

[Bhanu]

I think Cinema 4D,(offers excellent educational discounts) gives comprehensive exposure and experience for 3D modeling, rendering, animation techniques.

Visit www.maxon.net for more details.

[AJLynn]

For Mac, you don't have Autodesk but this isn't necessarily bad. Take a look at VectorWorks, Adobe Creative Suite, Cinema4D and Maya. If you've already got an Archicad user base, what the heck. Sketchup is so cheap and easy for students to learn in 10 minutes, it's a no-brainer. Artlantis is easy to use but it isn't very good. (They have Maxwell educational pricing, and it looks very promising from the new material that's out... but wait for the next prerelease and see what the people have to say about it.)

[reddy]

Thanks everyone. Thats really helpful. I'll reccomend all those options.

the whole maxon road is really interesting. I've no experience with it but its always good to try out new things.

Thanks.

Brendan