I'll offer my opinion, what it is at the moment, and it comes after trying quite a few of the software packages out there. I have actually been testing Terragen for a colleague who has been working in Maya and Vue for quite a while. As for Maya, I think it's an amazing program, comparable to and maybe better than many other similar 3D applications. That's not to say it's better all around, or any of them is better all around, since I'm of the opinion that they all take time to learn and then a good artist can get great results with them. I've spent time with many of them, from Pov-Ray years ago, to Softimage, Lightwave, and some others. Each can produce amazing results, but professionally you have to consider what the industry uses in their shops, especially what will matter on your CV. That said, I'm willing to take the time as long as the program can produce great results, doesn't crash too much or suck RAM until it dies, and I can get help when needed. Maya works for me and has produced some terrific animations and models.
Yes, Maya crashes sometimes. But virtually every program will crash given the right circumstances. I wish it was otherwise, but I never have the best and fastest computer with the most RAM, so that likely contributes to some crashes since I tend to throw everything at it. Even Terragen has crashed at times when clicking some button while rendering, or clicking repopulate too many times. Who knows why, but it usually runs fine for days and produces great results. I wish none crashed, but when you've worked on Windows as long as I have you know that a strange combination of software, hardware, drivers. or flaky updates can make programs crash. Still, Maya, like Terragen, is a terrific program in my opinion (though I do agree that the money Autodesk charges is prohibitive for us working class people.)
My 2-cents about the one program I think is a disappointment, and that's Vue (v10/10.5). From watching a colleague use it and seeing his experiences, and some myself, never in my life have I seen a program that will crash as much as that one or that appears so poorly programmed from it's memory management standpoint. I compare that to Terragen 3, which renders like the blazes compared to any render that managed to finish in Vue. Matt should get an award for what he has put into Terragen. It has run a render in less than 45 minutes that I feel is every bit as nice as a similar render in Vue that took almost 24 hours. When I finally rendered a scene in Terragen that would have looked good in an animation, and it only took a little over 30 minutes--you could actually see doing an animation in Terragen, even if longer render time became necessary (at least you'd be alive when it finished and not biting your nails that it was going to crash). Not that Vue can't do nice images, but the crashes made it unreliable and unusable..and it was slow. With an 8-core Intel and 12gb ram I can use Terragen and actually produce amazing and useful results. Comp that into something with Maya and things get moving.
Sorry this got long..but crashes (in Vue) led me to Terragen, so talk of crashing programs and Maya caught my attention. If we could roll Maya into Terragen, that would be sweet. For now, with the Forum and help readily available from all you wonderful people (Jo, Dune, J Weber, Oshyan, and everyone), let's hear it for Matt.
Thanks..