Re:Maya 4.5 Is (not) amaazing! (Score 1)

I'd just like to comment on this as someone who works in the industry. Maya is a character animation system and a passable modeler but the one thing it is not is a good renderer. All the movies you just mentioned used renderman as the renderer of choice not mayas. If you are specifically looking for a good renderer then 3ds max or Lightwave are your best choices. Max is the fastest of teh two with excellent quality. Lightwave has more out of the box features but takes a long time per frame. Since you want it on Mac I'd look at lightwave. Very few high end production houses actually use the maya renderer they go out and pay thousand extra for renderman just to avoid it.