First of all I am new to using 3DS Max, Mudbox etc....but. When we shut down the family engineering buisness I ended up with the complete Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate 2012 in my lap.

My problem is this the damn thing comes with 3DS Max Design 2012 and not 3DS Max 2012, the nif import / export plugins will acually let me get a nif into 3DS Max Design (bit of screaming at me but it does) but no textures.

I actually want to take the imperial city from oblivion use the meshes as a reference and create a trashed version of the city and then re-texture it.

So questions:-

Do I stick with Max Design see if I can edit the meshes export and re-texture them in Blender or download 3DS Max 2012 student?

Or do I just go with Blender?

What would you choose?

3ds Design is 3ds max with a few more features, as it is part of a whole suite. You definately stick with 3ds, although Blender can cover your needs as far as game assets go, but there's a reason Autodesk charges $5000

I guess the biggest problem is simply that the Nif plugins for 3DS Max are not really compatible with Max Design, you get a whole heap of textures errors in Max Design and I'm not enirely sure that the mesh comes in properly anyway. A nice feature of 3DS Max and Mudbox is that you can pass scenes back and forth to each other which is really powerfull but Mudbox spat up warnings about the mesh when I tried to pass it across.

Hopefully Autodesk will bother to get back to me, but in the meantime you do get a good import into Gmax but it's like driving a VW Beetle when you have a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your garage.