Any site recommendations ...

[xkey]

for tracking sales prices/advertisements of the major paint, sculpting, 2d, 3d, and animation programs?

i do programming part-time and full-time daddy schtick - an artist i am not so i dont cherish the thoughts of plunking down a lot of money on programs like maya, autocad, anime studio, illustrator, 3dsmax etc
when a lot of times i'm not in need of most of their features and may never really utilize them

heck, i think i might just go settle on ambient designs artrage 2.2 instead of corel painter to dabble as far as paint progs go

i just joined dazs' plat a bit ago to take advantage of the bryce deal ... and i'm leaning towards hexagon ... but my kid comes first ... and from reading the daz PC forum it seems like years past they've had Christmas sales that were *great*

so where can i find heads up to any other deals [umm well caligari spams the hell out of me but i'm still not biting on their deals ..too rich for my blood]

thx,
merry christmas,
c++ya,
xkey

[Dann-O]

Well I use PMG messiah it has some of the best animation rigging tools around and a powerful render engine. It runs $299 for the workstation version. It has no modeler but that is one of the things I like get messaih and a modeler of choice and go at it. A lot of messiah guys use wings which is free. So for modelers I like wings it is free so that is a no brainer. I think if you need more silo is great. If you could get Hex 1.2 than I woudl reccomend hexagon.

There are a few other messiah users here too. Look at what you want to do then ask about it. Sometimes you can get a lot out of a landscape modeler and a modeler but if you want more then well you would need different apps. Do you want to rig and animate? Do you want high quality renders etc.