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Here you go:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/287

http://content.luxology.com/gallery/565fc4f98dd0a8d41c8f7ab8bf52457d.jpg

maybe I should give a link... http://forums.luxology.com/

$500 is not expensive for 3D software, and it's more than fair for what you get:

• Additional 2D and 3D exporters and importers - Plugins for these tend to cost $50+ per format for other packages. (Examples: 1, 2.) And, that's without getting into CAD loaders which are often much more expensive.

• Dynamic component creation - If this were a plugin, I'd expect to pay $50-100 for it.

• LayOut - This addition to the package obsoleted a $300 Illustrator plugin I used to use to achieve the same end.

• Direct Support - This might justify the price for you all by itself. I have a support contract for one of SketchUp's competitors that runs me more than $500, and it's charged each year.

The past few upgrades have been cheap, too, at $95. 30-50% of the original cost per upgrade is more common.

As for your speculation on price reduction and increased package granularity, I don't see that happening. The only such change we've seen in the past 6 years was due to Google's purchase of @Last, which gave us the free version. Google subsidized that on the back of Google Earth subs and ad revenue from Maps. I'd be worried about the free version going away, if it weren't for reassurances in the press release saying they'll keep offering it. Instead, it makes me wonder where the subsidy will come from now. Maybe Trimble will also be purchasing Google Earth.

Or maybe we can associate another pop-culture reference:

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/post.aspx?id=416394&show=burns

Another great example is the 3d application Modo from Luxology http://www.luxology.com/

Both the application and multi-gigabyte content/training files are distributed via Bittorrent.
And on the last release, the forums had several folks reporting torrenting problems above and beyond the usual PEBKAC.

Now, if the Blender team could ever pull theierr head out of their ass and bring in a UI developer and stay out of the way... they might have something. But it's been ears coming and I doubt we'll ever see Blender become usable.

I've actually seen an interview with a Blender developer (a Linux magazine I flipped through, I can't remember which one) from when Elephant's Dream came out that discussed why they made the interface the way they did. Being the in-house application of NeoGeo, it was geared towards how they worked, and the developers gave the animators what they wanted - maximum productivity after learning the application when used the way that particular group of people liked to use it. The developers came to them and offered them an easier to learn interface - they were told "No, you idiot. We're going out of business and have to try to finish our last few projects. We're not going to hire anyone new. Now add this highly unintuitive key sequence to shortcut this arcane task that no novice has ever heard of." After it was released for widespread consumption, ease of learning became a common request, but there were still people learning the interface it had and wanting to be able to use it the way they had learned to. After almost ten years since its shareware release, and five since its release under GPL, this hypothetical easy-to-use, powerful, intuitive 3d modeling software that someone must have their head up their ass not to have delivered on a silver platter by now would probably have to take the form of a completely separate front-end, a fork, or a complete rewrite with some of the nuts and bolts used over.

And there are people out there who think that Blender "has something" just like it is. If a hobbyist or student wants gratis open-source 3d modeling with an easy to use interface, they should try Art of Illusion. It's nowhere near as powerful, but it's easy and intuitive enough for someone to learn on, and it can export into formats used by the big boys. According to TFA, Blender has the same "Learning path to be productive" as the others, even with the less familiar and intuitive interface. If someone is "getting serious", there isn't really a way around having to invest the time to learn something. And of six packages the article reviewed, only one could be learned in the single month they give you to try modo, and I'm sure those figures are for people who aren't squeezing it in on a part-time basis.

Oh, and there's a few gotchas with modo. They support both platforms - Mac and Windows! Should I download the trial and see if I can get it to work under Wine? Let me click on the "Try Modo" link - "Interested in trying modo? As a result of modo 301 now being available, all of our website bandwidth is being focused on supporting our registered modo customers. Sign up to create an account and you will be informed just as soon as the new evaluation version of modo 301 is available. If you already have an account you're already on the list to be notified." What? If I have an account, I'm on a list to be notified that there's a trial version available? Oh, they want $400 for an upgrade (which they're ready to sell you sight-unseen right now). Okay, let me see if I can figure out if I can use modo to turn blueprints into 3d models the way they do here. Hmm... not too big on the import/export capabilities are they? Looking over the so-called tech specs (looks like they hired some marketing people and got out of the way) I can only find "modo is able to harvest animation data from other 3D applications in order to render it. modo reads .MDD files for this purpose." Maybe it

I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.

I'm surprised noone has brought up the results over at the luxology. Brad Peebler got access to an iMac to confirm the results and here's a bit of what he said:

"Apple's numbers on modo were right and wrong. WIth the test data we sent their numbers were SPOT ON. I can confirm a 2.6x speed improvement with the intel iMac over the G5 iMac. Here's where it gets interesting. When I increased the number of antialiasing samples to get a longer render the delta got even larger! My final test showed the intel mac besting the G5 iMac by over 3.2x."

The quote is taken from here: http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4782

Also on the forum is results taken from one test on an intel iMac compared to Powermac G5's which also shows great performance increases:

"However, what you're all curious about is how modo performs - and I have to say that I am VERY impressed. I haven't had much time to do benchmarks, but on a simple test scene, my iMac is almost twice as fast as my main DUAL 2 GHz G5. Again, not compared to the old iMac, but to a 2 GHz Dual G5. That's awesome.

iMac (2 GHz Core Duo): 13.2
Dual 2 GHz G5: 20.5
Quad 2.5 GHz G5: 8.7"

This is quoted from this thread here: http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4880

So I'm not really fussed how iMove and iPhoto perform on the new iMacs, what matters to me most is how well pro apps like modo run because 3D is one area where you always need more processing power. And it turns out that these new processors perform exceptionally well. It even turns out Apple could have had the numbers higher if they'd wanted to.

Performance is most important to professional application users and in modo's case there really is that much of a performance increase, even greater in fact. So I don't really think it's just hype if pro app in real world uses runs just as fast as claimed.

I'm surprised noone has brought up the results over at the luxology. Brad Peebler got access to an iMac to confirm the results and here's a bit of what he said:

"Apple's numbers on modo were right and wrong. WIth the test data we sent their numbers were SPOT ON. I can confirm a 2.6x speed improvement with the intel iMac over the G5 iMac. Here's where it gets interesting. When I increased the number of antialiasing samples to get a longer render the delta got even larger! My final test showed the intel mac besting the G5 iMac by over 3.2x."

The quote is taken from here: http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4782

Also on the forum is results taken from one test on an intel iMac compared to Powermac G5's which also shows great performance increases:

"However, what you're all curious about is how modo performs - and I have to say that I am VERY impressed. I haven't had much time to do benchmarks, but on a simple test scene, my iMac is almost twice as fast as my main DUAL 2 GHz G5. Again, not compared to the old iMac, but to a 2 GHz Dual G5. That's awesome.

iMac (2 GHz Core Duo): 13.2
Dual 2 GHz G5: 20.5
Quad 2.5 GHz G5: 8.7"

This is quoted from this thread here: http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4880

So I'm not really fussed how iMove and iPhoto perform on the new iMacs, what matters to me most is how well pro apps like modo run because 3D is one area where you always need more processing power. And it turns out that these new processors perform exceptionally well. It even turns out Apple could have had the numbers higher if they'd wanted to.

Performance is most important to professional application users and in modo's case there really is that much of a performance increase, even greater in fact. So I don't really think it's just hype if pro app in real world uses runs just as fast as claimed.

So we (Luxology) went to Apple last Friday to verify their benchmarks using the Universal Binary of modo and found that a) their results agreed with ours, and b) we could, by changing scene settings, get even better scores (we got up to 3.2x speedup from old iMac G5 to new one).

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4782

And then yesterday we got our production iMac and I did some brief testing on it (since I don't have an old iMac, I compared it to my Dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac and my Quad G5):

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4880

So in our case, the new machines actually exceed expectations. I'm surprised about all the complaints about Apple using threaded benchmarks - why shouldn't they? The goal, after all, is to measure maximum computing power. As has been pointed out in this thread, all benchmarks are both subjective and specific, which is fine. But for our customers, the fact is that the new iMacs, for the same price, do in fact run modo 201 up to 3x faster. If an app isn't a Universal Binary or doesn't use all the CPUs/Cores available to it, then the limitations of the application performance are inherent to the app, not to the iMac.

So we (Luxology) went to Apple last Friday to verify their benchmarks using the Universal Binary of modo and found that a) their results agreed with ours, and b) we could, by changing scene settings, get even better scores (we got up to 3.2x speedup from old iMac G5 to new one).

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4782

And then yesterday we got our production iMac and I did some brief testing on it (since I don't have an old iMac, I compared it to my Dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac and my Quad G5):

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?i d=4880

So in our case, the new machines actually exceed expectations. I'm surprised about all the complaints about Apple using threaded benchmarks - why shouldn't they? The goal, after all, is to measure maximum computing power. As has been pointed out in this thread, all benchmarks are both subjective and specific, which is fine. But for our customers, the fact is that the new iMacs, for the same price, do in fact run modo 201 up to 3x faster. If an app isn't a Universal Binary or doesn't use all the CPUs/Cores available to it, then the limitations of the application performance are inherent to the app, not to the iMac.

Like here.

While Blender isn't imidiately accessible as a whole and has a very steep learning curve, it's workspacve management is considered groundbreaking. In fact it's being officially ripped off by newcomers in the 3D tool industry. And its the first 3D pakage that has a completely OpenGL accelerated GUI.

"How the heck are they going to do live-action robots transforming... lots of CGI?"
Well, I guess you haven't seen this ad made for the C4 of Citroen, have you?

If it looks like this Commercial and has the original characters then I'll watch it.