You can get all Autodesk's products free under their educational plan.

Just register at Autodesk as a student, give your details and you are good to go.

Note though that these programs are for non-commercial, single user only. If you get caught using these for commercial use, then AD will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Their lawyers take action even it if it is not really worth their while.

The draw back is that they don't have anything as good as MoI. Alias is very good for Nurbs surfacing but the learning curve is extremely steep.

However, you could import MoI models in to Max and render with Mental Ray.

I use Softimage on a daily basis with MoI. Works very well and is better suited to single users and small shops than Max and Maya IMO. Not as hard to learn either!

There's a handy plugin for SI that lets you drag and drop .obj files so transfer from MoI is fairly quick. If you're going to try AD products I'd suggest trying SI.

Here's an image I just completed with it and some MoI help in modeling:

http://www.actionart.ca/images/ClashOfTheTitans.jpg

Cool image!

Thanks, glad you like it ;)

I find between Softimage and MoI, I can model anything quite quickly. They work very well together.

In a dreamworld, MoI would be completely and seamlessly integrated into Softimage but that's just a dream.

Softimage uses Mental Ray as the standard rendering engine. A lot of people are frustrated with it but I like it. It's very powerful and flexible. You just have to spend a bit of time to really learn it. Softimage integrates it better than Max and Maya.

Other rendering solutions are available if you don't like MR.