Like huffer said, I think the main difference between the two programs is that Maya uses nodes and Max uses modifiers. But to be honest, I find them to be pretty much the same thing - the biggest difference would be that Max' modifiers actually let you go back and forth in history, while in Maya you're mostly limited to…
So I made a UV map of my pen and textured it....buuuuut, when I render it it looks like this; so my questions are; how do I get that lovely grey background in my render? how come my render is showing the wireframe? why is my texture all washed out like someone's pushed down the opacity? Usually google would help but, I'm…