Blender handles ase well, and it’s free. In the software world, price tag doesn’t actually correlate all that well with quality, as a rule (MSWindows and Linux give another example). The one thing it does still correlate with somewhat is interface usability, though – blender (and linux) are reputedly hard to use for n00bs. Unfortunately.
(As for why price and quality don’t correlate much – software has a marginal cost of reproduction of basically zero, so once a high quality piece of software exists it might very well become very widely distributed for nearly nothing. Software quality is fixed at the R&D stage, not in “manufacture”. Commercial software companies do of course have better funded R&D, but they tend to weight their budgeting in favor of things the marketers can talk up, which usually includes usability and feature set but not as much reliability or security, though the latter are showing up more and more on their radar, to the point that there are now television ads by Apple airing that are part of a campaign to compete with PCs (and therefore, effectively, Microsoft) in the area of security – logical, since it’s the area where MS has historically been weakest. In the meantime, open source is starting to pay serious heed to usability because they’ve noticed that beating the crap out of MS in the reliability and security and even feature set arena isn’t getting them much market share outside the server market, where the users are geeks used to arcane excuses for user interfaces anyway. At this rate, by 2015 there’ll be both commercial and open source software in many areas that are highly usable, reliable, and secure, at various price points, and the only thing keeping MS afloat will be its lock-in of OEMs, major game developers, and Office formats, having used “information rights management” to stop OpenOffice from completely interoperating in the latter field, and probably having used DRM-like methods to attract game developers to make Windows-only games by selling a “this will lock the game into a tamperproof box like an arcade machine – oh, did we mention it will not work on any other OS even with an emulator though? too bad” gimmick to developers that want to cheat-proof an online game, make a game arcade-like in other ways (such as having to pay money for each “continue”), or whatever.
That’s assuming that MS continues to be able to buy enough of the justice system and legislature in the U.S. to avoid getting more than the occasional antitrust slap on the wrist from the government in their home country, of course, but that’s a fairly safe bet. Meanwhile, open source may well kill commercial software in Europe and Japan, and is already doing so in China (ironic, given its undemocratic nature, but they just can’t pay MS’s prices and are increasingly being prevented from pirating by the ratcheting-tighter of MS activation schemes).
