I personally spent some time studying Houdini decade or more ago but found a company would be reluctant to build their toolset on Houdini base. Same story in a way with Substance Designer actually which nobody uses really but me. Then I found all I ever wanted to do in Houdiny like complex arrays and scatter systems are…
I don't think that was included in the ancient version of max8. Back then it was a plug-in called "Texporter" http://www.cuneytozdas.com/software/3dsmax/