Ah, apologies, I may not have been clear. I encountered numerous obstacles with the biped`s rotation storage system when trying to write a universal xml file format for max. I asked numerous people at the company I am working for who had tried similar things, I also checked the internet and contacted autodesk. The results were not encouraging.

Why not make a new skeleton? Because the production I was on was using bipeds.

If given the choice, I would use something other then max, likewise if given the choice, I always go for custom rigs and not bipeds.

Sometimes though, you don`t have the option.

Any programmer should be able to pick up whatever scripting language a 3D program uses pretty quickly.

Having used both Max and Blender for a while now, I still find myself coming back to Blender again and again as my own preference of tools. All of our models at the lowpolycoop went through Blender at one point or another and is also the main modeling tool for about 80% of what we've done. The one thing I love about this thread compared to similar threads 3, 4, 5 years ago is that Blender is now being spoken of as a serious contender to Max instead of as a toy.

Going back to the OP and trying to read into your message, it looks like as your project grows it will be a spread out virtual team. Here are the reasons we chose Blender as our main tool for our own loose-knit team.

1. Blender is great at importing, exporting and translating files. There are also many well-supported exporters for existing game or rendering engines (torque and ogre being the two that people use our models for the most). This allowed us to easily have Blender serve as the main hub for all things technical and export-y, and then allow each modeler to work in his or her favorite app. We always used the philosophy that an artist should be able to do their artistic work in whichever tool makes them comfortable and having a solid tool like Blender as the technical hub allowed us to work with a larger community of artists.

2. Blender is free, updated regularly, and always has the most recent version available. This enabled everyone on the team to be up to date with the most recent version -- no fuss, no expensive upgrades, no subscription plan, no cracked versions of max to mess with. I've even done freelance projects for clients who use Max who had no problem with obj files I exported from Blender.

3. I use both Blender and Max a lot, but I can still do anything in Blender significantly faster. The part about Blender that I love he most is the "sticky" or "live" hotkeys (I'm not sure what else to call them). In most programs, max included, you hit a hotkey to select a tool, then you have another step to actually do something with that tool -- setting constraints is another button click or hotkey setting before doing any sort of translation, rotation or scale. In Blender, hit the hotkey, the selection starts doing it's thing, hit another and you set the constraint. It was really confusing at first, but now that I have had a year of direct comparison with Max I find it saving me a good 10-20% of time when doing vertex level modeling. Of course, someone with 6 years experience might say the opposite.

[edit] 4. Oh, and with Blender, I can model one handed, standing up, on a moving train.

Take this all with a grain of salt -- I am an unrepentant fan of Blender :)

Also, check out, as another poster suggested, the yo frankie link. They've done a lot of great work on making Blender more game-friendly.

Thanks,
Scott

The reason why max and others don't have the best built in animation / modeling solutions is because their basic products are now positioned as gateway type products.

Buying Max is the gateway to buying a better animation add-on product, a better texturing add-on product, a better modelling plugin, etc, etc...

Reminds me of Silo. If you want to type in the scale and position your objects exactly, it's worth another 50$.