I have a love-hate relationship with Maya. At the moment, it's leaning towards the latter.

• Maya "Unlimited" is actually the *limited* version of Maya
• "Unlimited" doesn't support Fluids, but it's in the help file, leading you on a wild goose chase (related to the next bullet)
  
• Explosions are not simple
  
• Come on - isn't this a high demand item? Shouldn't there be a brush or particle emitter for this?
• Why are there no tutorials for this that are simple? I don't want a friggin' photorealistic effect, I'm not doing Final Fantasy; is a simple fireball too much to ask for?
  
• How about an explanation of why each step is important, so the explosion can be modified as desired? I'm not some idiot script kiddie - I want to know what I'm doing!
  
• When I say I want 6000 particles a second, shouldn't that tell you that I want a dense sphere of particles, rather than a bunch of little individual grains?
• Maya is too stupid to warn you when you're software rendering a hardware-only object (related to the previous bullet)
  
• Maya doesn't scale particle emissions well, nor does it parent particle emitters to NURBS in an intuitive way (related to the previous bullet)
  
• All the *good* tutorials on Alias/Wavefront are for *Silver* members. I don't want to pay $20/month because you can't write a decent manual! (sorta related to the previous bullet)
  

On the plus side, everything else is going well. Mostly. Although I seem to be in one of my "why must everyone be so friggin' DENSE?!" moods at the moment ...

"Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay." - Salman Rushdie

What a great sig: "If your operating system doesn't end in an X, you've got a problem."

"Half of you are going to Ivy Leagues next year! How is it that you can't even center yourselves on the riser?"

My dentist told me today that I present, "an interesting challenge". I think "interesting challenge" is code for "major pain in the ass".