With all of the three main ones (Max, Softimage, Maya) done by Autodesk, they start to be more and more alike. The decision to go with Maya was done before my time, but I'm glad it's not Max as I'm not too good with it. The workflow with Max is different in that it has all those modifiers. It's harder to translate stuff for animators that have worked with Maya. Soft and Maya are pretty similar in many ways. I personally prefer Softimage, but I'm very happy with Maya, too.

In the end it's just a tool like a pen. I've seen great animations come out of any of these tools. Glad you enjoy Max =)

Who does your modeling work at Riot?

am studying this, this is pretty helpful thanks riot !

Gosh. One of the assignments for the animation class I took was a walk cycle. I decided on a zombie. which was set to Jonathon Coulton's Re: Your Brains. a song about zombies. The requirement was to set the walk to the beat of the music. I set the lurch to the beat and decided to interrupt the cycle with a lunge to something he wanted to eat. I laughed when you said you ran out of frames and needed to get her (cassiopeia) back to her normal pose because it reminded me of the difficulty i had getting my zombie back into his timed-to-music-lurch in less frames than was necessary >.< and coincidently it looks forced. this was hand-drawn and i dont have experience with Maya so the question I guess I have is:
When you set your keys does the program assume the tweens? Sounds like After Effects the way you described it.

We outsource a lot of our modeling, but also do some polish inhouse.

Gj Looks hard and requires skill ^^

I got 3ds Max the other day, ****s fun, good work with cass.

3ds max plugin importer/exporter PLEASE ?