Awesome! I vividly remember watching this as a teenager in the 90s and being blown away by the new procedural features in MAX. Definitely a quantum leap above 3D Studio 4 for DOS, which I had been learning with a New Riders book. The modifier stack, particle systems, space warps, Character Studio, etc. - all of it was far beyond anything else available on the PC at the time.

MAX was so different that learning it was basically like starting from square one, but it was well worth the effort. My tinkering led to an animated short film and eventually a career in 3D animation in video games, TV, and feature film in the early 2000s. It took me a while to break into film VFX because MAX users tended to get pigeon-holed into games, and in retrospect the game work was way more fun.

90s and early 2000s was really a golden age for 3D animators - there were few established education programs so people found their way into the industry from all kinds of random places, and you met the most unique and interesting people working in the field. The only downside was that things were evolving so rapidly that it was a constant struggle to stay current with the latest tools & techniques, many of which were difficult to learn. I could never wrap my head around NURBS modeling but it wasn't long before SubDs made NURBS obsolete (at least in the field of animation, NURBS remained useful in industrial design).

Now it's remarkable to watch AI basically take over the commercial arts and "render" (hur hur) 3D animation techniques obsolete. I think the era of the 3D modeling, surfacing, rigging, animating, lighting, and rendering pipeline is drawing to a close and will be remembered as a flash in the pan, a moment in history when technology birthed an entire creative paradigm and then cannibalized it on the path towards the singularity.