AT, Around here there are Universities that offer a 'professional' course on 3DS Max, It is a intensive 'night-time' course that runs 20 weeks with two classes a week. Each class is about 3 hours. The course costs $12,000. I have a few friends that took the course and in the end they said that the teacher only knew the basics but encouraged the students to explore the 'other' aspects of the program. omg, my friend felt so ripped off, not only that, there wire 17 students in the same class.. and only one teacher. And to make things worse, the teacher was virtually unreachable out of class hours and during the class every student was trying to squeeze as much 1-on-1 time with the teacher as they could. ( I did a quick count, $204,000 taken in student fees for the course and the total number of hours the teacher worked with the students was/is 120. That works out to $1700/Hour that the teacher\course organizers made/make.) I'll say it again.. o..m..g.. what a ripoff. Oh and you want to know the killer fact? Only 3 of the 17 students actually went on to get jobs that use 3DS Max.
Anyway, there are many less expensive tools out there, and most if not all are easier to learn.
BTW the idea of sharing/posting a few of your models (with the higher poly counts) is a good one. It would give people that are interested some examples to play with and try to reduce the poly count.
Note, the people at
http://www.thegamecreators.com/
have some 3D Modelers and a poly crunching program that looks pretty good. It might be worth thrying their demo's
That's all I have to say for now, Cheers!
