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Mirai was during long time 6000$. It's there since long time.
Have been used in LOTR film, for Gollum, Treebeard and others. Is a kickass modelling package, wings adapted its modelling workflows. All apps are copying to day its edgeloops thing.
Has extremely good animation tools for characters. A high end tool.
bay raitts, is spelt so, is the author of the gollum thing. He uses thi spackages. Maya was used for the animations, as I read it in author's interview at AWN magazine.
Character Fx is superior in animation to Milkshape. Milkshape can't do vertex weights, actually. Something found in every high end package out tere (max having it both in skin modifier and character studio, XSI, Maya (wonderful paint weights feature), Lightwave, etc)
Character Fx allows handling directly in perspective, 3d view. Milkshape can't.
Those are two huge disadvantages.
BTW, Max, Mirai, Maya, XSI, Lightwave, are so much better than these tools. You can't compare.
Blender is a very good tool, and it's free. But the load of patience, brain skills, tricks (and some never fake the thing totally), needed...makes me only recommend it preventing people that a long read of teh doc is needed, and certain decission of dedicating to it months. I learnt it.
I have now XSI as I want mor epower. It's a royal dream. Even though this XSI Foundation 500$ version has some restrictions...(ie:funnily, I can do hair rendering for hi res movies with Blender, but is ripped from XSI cheapo version... XD )
Wings started as a clone of Nendo, nendo is a reduced evrsion of the modelling part of Mirai. but in the open source asnd totally generous BSD license. And it evolved to something imo better than Nendo. being now my favourite character modeller, counting high end apps in that , too.
mirai is such a kickass and serious tool.It even have 3d painting, a dreeamlike IK system, and many other amazing stuff.
It just was always to expensive and went like to asleep or out of business for years...but never died totally.IMO, when it was born, was actually years in advantage of technology with compared to other tools...Now other tools have evolved more, but if gollum's artist picked it, I hope it makes u think a bit...
Those guys must get serious with their tools, I tell you.
