Remember, though, that there's a good reason that more of the bigger studios are not using 3D Studio Max or Lightwave. These applications just don't have quite the depth of features or extensibility of Maya or Softimage. It used to be that the price difference was much wider because of this, but that's no longer the case.

That's not to say that great things haven't been done in those packages, even large, professional productions. It's just that Maya makes customization and development much simpler -- unlike 3DS Max, for example, plug-in development is infrequently something you have to do because MEL is better integrated into the package than MAXscript.