Bootsy: Awesome... thanks for the info. I think the reson those "myths" might still be around is that Max was lagging in those features behind Maya. All of them have been there since Maya 1 and gonig back to Power Animator. When i was a Sophomore in college, I used all of the packages (as mentioned before) and while Max was way easier to use for simple modeling purposes, the other packages were just way ahead, especially in what i was interested in: animation. Biped couldn't cut the mustard... it was awkward and not flexible. When we needed IK for the arms and elsewhere, we were screwed, as it didn't even have basic constraints at the time. So... i guess what i'm saying is that those who've been around all the packages for years have seen Max sort of trailing the pack... it could again just be my perception over time, but initially this was based on hands on experience.

When i say it has it's place, i in no way mean it in a degrading way... it's like the whole stupid mac/pc wars thing... whatever works for you, use it! It's "better" if it works better for the user, all the other discussions are worthless. I have quite a few friends in the industry who still work in Max, and as i said before, my opinions were just supported by those that i know who've switched to Maya and thought it worked better for them. But, i'll definitely shut my trap about my misconceptions. Max's "place" was always game companies in the past, since it was WAY cheaper and ran on PC hardware, when Alias and Soft only ran on unix boxes, which also added to it's rep as a lower end program i imagine.

Question about Max script (i'm genuinely interested in this knowledge, not trying to start a pissing contest by any means). How low level is it? I know one of the killer things about Maya is the Maya ASCII format of saving files, so an entire scene can be saved out to text format and hand edited if need be, which means that every command in the file could typed into the command line to completely recreate a scene. When they say everything can be scripted they meand everything. If Max has gained this feature that's a big plus.

Softimage: i loved that program for some reason. It had such a different approach to everthing. The interface was just insane. XSI has now gone more standardized on the interface, but i haven't even looked at it since 2.obeta, which was at least 2 years ago. I have no clue what's going on with it these days.

At any rate, thanks for the info, i'll definitely change my tune one that stuff!