[Ecohen694]

My team, 694, will be mainly competing in the animation portion for this award. We will use 3ds Max primarily for modeling, animation and rendering.
3ds Max 2010 has alot of new, useful modeling tools that were not available last year. We will probably use inventor for the design portion. Maya is very similar to Max, but it's interface and workflow is different and confusing for our new members who have only been introduced to Max. Also, while it isn't really in the spirit of the competition as we are encouraged to use only autodesk products, Google Sketchup is free and good for teaching modeling, and Photoshop CS4(Free Trial) or GIMP(Open Source) is really necessary if you want to make good textures.

In my opinion, changing the award really doesn't change the competition much at all, however it might change the nature of the animation to be somewhat closer to the design aspect rather than "Visualization" or communication like it has been in previous years.