@Mihai - sure. But first, don't get me wrong, I'm not agains C4D - in fact I'm sure it's a pretty solid piece of software for what is was designed for. In the matter of ArcViz - I believe C4D is not really an option simply because it's lack of
proper UV workflow. For instance. Or, Light management. Or, render layers management, or render passes management. Or colour management
Or even modelling tools.
I mean, again, don't get me wrong - I've seen pretty impressive images and animations done in C4D - mainly abstract, procedural, or object based.
I believe C4D is great for motion graphics. While if he want's to do ArcViz (where he would fix UVs, model extra stuff and etc) I would guess he would need a proper toolset for UVs and Modelling (at least). I'm not saying - STAY with MAYA, but essentially if you already know maya and it's pretty "alien" interface - I would stick with it. For couple reasons:
1st - yup, Maya offers much more than he needs at the moment. But hey, in that variety of tools you've got pretty descent selection of the ones you gonna use most.
2nd - Maya is node based and, keeps history (read non-destructive workflow)
3rd - Maya is the industry standard for all things 3D. And it's cross-platform (which is a big benefit these days)
4th - Right now you're doing ArcViz, but maybe tomorrow you'll be asked to do something else.
I think that 3D Max might be an option, however:
It is also Autodesk.
It is also almost as complex as Maya
It is also quite expensive (almost the same as Maya)
And, yup, it is still only on Windows machines (No Linux, no Mac OS)
beside those, I would say 3D Max fits best.
@choo-chee - Well think this, arcmos is right - Cinema4D without Mograph makes no sense .. but guess what - you'll unlikely to use mograph in your workflow, as it is mainly for procedural animation and motion design. You can get C4D with Mograph but the price tag would be same as Maya. Sketchup - is probably the easiest to learn (unless you want to consider Modo). But I know a few people who works in Arch industry, some of them use sketchup - and everything was fine until their boss asked for a better quality images. And for sure you can push the quality with textures, but ask anyone here, without a proper geometry and UV maps -even best textures are almost useless. In sketchup your modelling and uv mapping tools are super limited.