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I first got interested in Strata when I noticed their claim about tight Photoshop and Illustrator integration. The interface does have a superficial similarity to (pre-CS3) Photoshop. And Strata will export layers in PSD format. And you can edit texturemaps live in Photoshop and import Illustrator vector files. But that's about it for the similarity.
I also noticed some astonishingly good work was possible using Strata (which is really what counts).
And Strata is available for a few hundred dollars less than Maya or the rest of the industry leaders (you get both PC and Mac versions, but it's still not a trivial purchase at $500).
But...
Strata 3D 5.0 (now there's a 5.1 update) is unpolished. It crashed more than a couple of times on me. And now that I've upgraded to Vista I can't use it at all without using various compatibility tricks.
Strata has just about every tool you'd need for static scenes (which is all I'm interested in), and a particularly good rendering engine. But some of the controls are very hard to find and counter-intuitive. Don't let the promise of Photoshop-friendlyness make you think the learning curve will be any shallower than any other 3D app (a mistake I made). In fact, in some areas it's steeper than it's more sophisticated (and expensive) brethren.
And I don't want to seem trivial, but their support website is infuriating to use. Each section demands to open in it's own window, there's a mishmash of domain names (some I don't think are even officially run by Strata), and there's a distinct whiff of used-to-be-Mac-only in the air (all their example files are SIT compressed, for example).
So unless price is your overriding concern I can't really recommend Strata CX 5.
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