[Andrew Blair]

As far as industry standards go, from a teacher of both at a local tech school: it depends on what the employees know.

What he said was that even though you see a "Made in Max" or "Maya", the actual end product was often a fusion of work from both programs, or even others. People in industry are often doing just modeling, or just texturing, and as a result, you can have quite a bit of freedom in choosing your own software to use. I for one think that Maya is far easier to box model in, though I like Max for pretty much everything else. (Granted, I haven't done much in Maya other than modeling and texturing...). I have also heard Max is better for animation. Again, though something is "done in Max", doesn't mean that only Max was used.

(The guy I talked to said Halo was mostly done in Maya, and I've also heard it was mostly done in Max. Doesn't matter really, Autodesk owns 'em both now!)