I agree… I only jumped into this conversation because I’ve been around all the platforms as well and the one thing I’ve learned is they are all problematic. A lot of people ask me what package they should start with and I have to tell them it's not the package, it's the method that is important. The problem is the user of package X doesn’t want to admit to user of package Y they have any dirty laundry. It is some sort of innate human necessity to be on the “right side”, to the exclusion of everyone who might think differently.

I myself first started working in 3D with v1.0 of 3D Studio DOS. At the time I was astounded at the ability to create 3D artwork on commodity hardware. Now I look back on those days and cringe… It got me a job in the industry however. I’ve since worked on shipped titles in versions 2 through 4.blah and now Max versions 2 through 5.1. In the middle there I used Nichimen, a fantastic modeling package for the time. I’m pleased to report that both Max and Maya have successfully “borrowed” a lot of what made that package great. I’m also equally glad they avoided all the texturing and animating horrors it brought to the table.

I only used Nichimen for a very short time, sandwiched between using Power Animator (I’ve blocked the version #s out of my mind). From all the Hollywood FX hype I was expecting God in a Box. Man, was I disappointed. It had the best animation tools I had used at the time, but the polygon modeling tools were freakishly lame. There wasn’t even a simple “Skew” function!? Texturing simple polygons was mind-numbing work until we complained enough to one of our programmers. He wrote a very simple utility that made it a heck of a lot easier… even if the interface was a little unintuitive, I was very glad to overlook that minor problem.

These days I work solely in Max for the main reason we chose it for the cost and the available hardware (Maya had yet to be released and when it had, it was twice as expensive as Max +CS). In it’s infancy, it too suffered from many of the same problems the other packages had, but we were able to find plug-ins to ease the pain. Scripts came along later and it now seems someone with scripting skills addresses any little personal annoyance.

I know what you mean about Biped being awkward… It is a very different way of working that works well for what it does. The big problem most people had with it was Max lacked a robust bone system like Maya/SI and so tried using Biped to make up for it… Surprise! Biped does not do a good job with say… oh, quadrupeds! Sigh… it took Kinetics/Discreet awhile to pull their head out and start fixing that hole in their tools.

To answer your question about Max Script, I’m really not sure how “low level” it goes. I’m just a dumb artist . There is a thing called the listening window, that when activated it will display the max script for the actions you take in the program. If you want to make a button that duplicates those actions you just drag the commands to a tool bar. I only use this rarely, as making it more robust, requires a greater understanding of syntax than I’ve been willing to learn. I do know that someone wrote a script called “Back from Five” that would translate a scene, with all the attributes intact to a max script file. It was made to transfer Max scenes from version 5 and have them open in version 4. It was pretty cool to watch it in action, but I never found it very useful. I’m guessing that’s the sort of functionality you are describing? Is it an out of the box export option? If so very cool…