It has a nice interface, and an a-grade subdivision modelling system. Very Mac-friendly. It's no Maya, but that might be a good thing. There's a full demo available. I've played with it a bit. What sort of modelling do you want to do?

mostly high-poly-count multi-layered urban environments.. big files.. a lot of to-and-fro'ing with acad/dwg... some imported solid geometries from DP. I'm a veteran 3ds max user, with some Maya, vis, DP and rhino experience. But I'm really not happy with autodesk now (ended up getting licenses renewed for boot camp based on their advice, only to find that their darn license-management software is unstable on it.. and then to get yelled at by their customer service for having the temerity of trying to use their product in an unlicensed way.. apparently using it under boot camp is a violation of the autodesk license agreement or something stupid like that). Anyway, I'm tempted to try to crack their software, not because I plan to pirate it, but just for personal use, as a perfectly legal paid license holder, just because they're so bloody annoying (not to acad: chewing out your paying customers is not a good idea).. unbelievably, their insanely bad programming and less-than-zero customer service actually incentivizes loyal, paid users like myself to defeat their licensing protocols. Anyway, enough griping.. I'm looking for a mac native alternative that can handle high polygon counts in a sub-d environment.

How can running AutoCAD in Boot Camp possibly be a problem for autodesk?! It's just a normal copy of Windows, running on commodity laptop hardware! They're crazy.

Haven't really tested the back-and-forth very much, but for high-poly work, modo should be fine. Just try importing a few files into the demo and doing ordinary stuff to them and see what you think.

sub-d is just cheap imitation NURBS. have you looked at T-Splines yet?

i hear your pain about autodesk but i have long since aborted so i don't feel it ;)

PS the cracked version of acad works fine on mac, but why, when intellicad does what they do for free

i have modo sitting around I am just more keen on Rhinoceros so i haven't had the time or need

If you're doing predominantly facet-based models (like buildings or urban environments, say) or low-poly modelling (for realtime interactive models) there is a lot of overhead in working with nurbs.

depends on your setting for tessellation

NURBS are ideal to control any mesh no matter how simple or complex because you will never have the jaggeys when you don't want them

if you need low poly for slow PC's or real time its avail np

Yep. For me, nurbs equals crash. Rhino can't support the database sizes I regularly use for urban models... it's useful for specific curves and objects.. but not for scene management. Moreover, as agfa8x pointed out, animating these big models in Rhino means boom. To clarify, high-poly count = lots and lots of low-poly objects managed in a scene (like a district of a city), without xrefing...

Thanks for the input. I think I'm going to try to dowload the trial version and try to import in some models for test renders.

Jonas77.. not sure I understand what you mean. Rhino has faily low pre-programmed maximum dbase size limits built into it.. based on vertices I think. I can't even import my models into it, to begin with, much less work with them for animation purposes.. just get error messages. It's not a question of PC speed or capacity, as far as I'm aware. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong (I'm emphatically not a Rhino expert), but I can't even get even open my large dwg-format exported files (from max) into it. A typical model is 2-4 gigs (in .max format), often comprising many thousands of low-poly buildings, landscape/terrain features and so forth... a lot of this material was originally generated from arcMap (ESRI GIS) databases, and there's a lot of it.

use worksession manager in v4?

i would not be importing Mesh in the 1st place as i start in Rhino

animating in Bongo?

ya put everything to the test for sure. i think if you are having crashes or booms you need more ram mabye as the limit is your hardware that or find a way to do less complex models on such scales.

sounds like you are working with HUGE data sets. 64bit max?

yep 64bit... note that the rhino vertex constraint seems to be part of the software, not a hardware issue. Whenever you work at the landscape scale, using GIS terrain datasets, you get into massive data sets very quickly.. makes for beautiful renders of landscapes and such, but very processor intensive.

i cheat and make the step topo cardboard look with radiocity
I always thought i would be 64 bit by now but am not.
next chip maybe