itch.io

i will be honest , i was learning these in school so i wanted to know how many people even use it but the community at itch has helped me know alot about game development and so now i have started using other software.

It's an old outdated copy of Lightwave purchased years ago. I used it heavily back before Blender was really the super-flexible open-source 3d-animation powerhouse it is fast becoming now. I'm still comfortable with LW, but Blender has improved dramatically and is taking over more and more of my workflow the last few years. There gradually became more and more things Blender could do that LW couldn't do, or couldn't do quite as well, as time passed, and there was no reason not to do those things in Blender since there was no cost to pivot to the Blender software. The physics simulations in Blender, especially, things like fire/smoke and liquids, my old copy of LW simply can't do those things at all. There are still a few assorted things I'll still do in LW but only because I'm good at that workflow and I already have the license.

Keep in mind that LW at its peak circa early 2000s had 80,000 users and was considered a major VFX software package, used extensively for VFX sequences on TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: Voyager/Enterprise, Lost, Heroes, Firefly, etc. The software goes back further of course, one of the first versions of Lightwave was used for 'Babylon 5' back in the early '90s. Lightwave is still being actively developed but there's less and less of a userbase, the high-end professional users are shifting to Autodesk's 3ds max or Maya, the lower-end indie users to Blender. Lightwave is stuck in the middle and the center pricing range around $1000, is largely being vacated and all the programs in there are struggling to maintain a userbase. Also didn't help LW that several of the core LW programmers split off about a decade ago, to found the team which created Modo.

At least it's not entirely abandoned; it's still being improved on, just not fast enough - and at least it's still another alternative [like Blender/Modo/Cinema 4d] to Autodesk's recent near-stranglehold on the 3d industry. I still feel bad for all the Softimage users who saw their software of choice get bought by Autodesk, then torn apart and cannibalized for the best feature ideas, and then ultimately completely discontinued. There were 50,000 Softimage users! They had a big legacy too, in the early '90s Softimage was used for the digital dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park' and the photorealistic 3d world renderings in the PC game Riven, among other graphics-industry milestones. 

But anyway, that's all history now, I'm moving along with the times and I'm pretty happy with Blender lately.