In 3ds Max there is no built in method to transfer weighting. But I have a script that does this. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2904948/MaxScript/Skin_ReplaceWeights.ms
Nice 1 - great discription of the gui and hotkeys. There are a bunch of cool scripts from the community - take a look into Materialbaker and PixolNormalMapper (for worldtextures).
That's funny, all the parameters for the "mentalrayGlobals" attribut disappeared in maya 2008.... ................... really funny ................... my old script doesn't work anymore >_<