I have been slowly checking out Modo 501 and am thus far highly impressed with it as an alternative to 3dMax but without character animation and the addition of mudbox-like painting and sculpting facilities. Superbly intuitive interface that seems to have a number of similarities with Sketchup in the way modifiers such as scale, rotate and move affect vertices, edges and faces. I gather the rendering is also easy to use (haven’t got that far yet) and is supposed to be quick and high quality.
