[Kevin Sevcik]

LBK.... do you mean SW rendering of the viewports? cause I don't think that's tooo terribly important unless you want to have really really complex scenes that you're modelling with textures on, etc. HW rendering only helps for that.

Also, I believe you're allowed to install multiple copies of 3DS to other computers strictly for network rendering purposes. Which is certainly highly helpful for actually rendering the animation.

Finally, Autodesk really likes releasing new versions of everything on a yearly basis. I'm fairly confident that Inventor and AutoCAD have been updated with similar frequency. Personally, though, I got spoiled in college working with Solidworks. When I tried to go back to Inventor this summer to do some designing for the robot, it didn't work all that well for me.