Listen, I don't mean to say the forums look bad or boring (still debatable), but it's definitely outdated to say the least. It uses the default color scheme that comes with the Invision package, same default layout, everything. Not to mention the fact Invision has been putting out numerous new features and not one of them is being used.
Of course, none of this stuff is really necessary, some of them would just be nice I think (file sharing and gallery are already out of the question though for storage reasons). I tried out a little demo and had a bunch of users test out each of these (except e-commerce for obvious reasons). All of them were tested but the one that really stood out I think was the Clubs feature. It basically lets your users create small groups together, which would be perfect for animation teams, collab organization, etc. Plus there are a lot of options you can give or take.
There are a whole bunch of different options that you can give in terms of clubs. You can change how exclusive individual clubs are, you can give them a mini forum category inside the club itself, you can even use it in tandem with the Calendars feature so they can schedule certain events as a group, such as the release of a certain animation or the deadline for a collab (that collab deadline thing would be a huge reason to include the Calendar feature). Plus you can make it so mods have to approve clubs after being made before they're usable (which might be appealing to this particular community).
That is why I think the Clubs feature would be a very useful thing to have considering the nature of the forums.
And then, there's the design of the website itself. It's pretty outdated. It looks okay, but it could definitely be spruced up a bit with a modern, Modelbench-like color-scheme. The current scheme may have worked for older versions of Mine-imator, but now we have a shiny new concept for Modelbench that looks so much more colorful, elegant, and still professional. Perhaps Voxy could help out a bit and you can update the colors a little? That would be very fantastic. Apparently I'm not the only one with this opinion I've found.
Thanks!