Lately I've been getting interested in Computer Animation. The whole thing is just... so amazing! I'm curious if anyone else has gotten into this. I've used Maya and one other program. So far, Maya has proved to be the most user friendly program. Is Maya a widely used program? For instance, is it used by big time programmers? I've figured it wouldn't be, my cousin uses it in his Sophomore Computer Animation class. But then again! I could be wrong...

May I doubt the legality of your (or your cousin's) copy?
Pricetag: $2'999.-

Not for everyday use by Joe Soap!

There's the free Maya 7 Personal Learning Edition too...

Yeah, how they get Maya for free kind of baffles me aswell. I asked my cousin about it and he said that either their local College or the Maya Company supplies them with it. I'm not quite sure, but I believe it's the College. His school is using the same program as the College, so they recieve College Credits for taking the High School class. It's a deal the High School has with the local College. But then again, one of the lead programmers of Maya talked to his class about the program. My cousin claimed that his teacher didn't even know half the stuff the programmer said. So there could be a chance that Maya donated it too the school. It's not uncommon, Dodge donated a Dodge Viper to his Auto Shop class, which is amazing. If only I had opportunities in Highschool like that.

I actually manage our Maya/StudioTools licenses here and it's a pretty pricey program. We use Maya Unlimited and StudioTools 12 and I also manage the licenses for Solidworks, AutoCAD, VIZ, Rhino, and a few other CAD/CAM apps I can't think of right now. The personal version of the software is completely free and can be downloaded from alias directly. As far as I know (never installed it) it's a pretty functional version with some of the more powerful functions disabled. Lots of really high end production is done on Maya including many movies, Doom 3 and Serious Sam II IIRC. Many other current games are done in Maya as well.

Very functional in my opinion, but it adds the Personal Learning Edition watermark to rendered images. It hasn't been a problem to me though.