Modo!

Try it and see for yourself? Do you know tor frick? He's one of the best env artists I know in terms of speed, and he does it all in modo.

I'm way too busy to change modeling packages right now, and I don't really see the point. But I do also think Modo is going to become industry standard eventually, it's just amazing in terms of modeling, it just needs to get all the other shit to the level of max or maya (like animation)

I messed around with it for a couple weeks this year. I found it quite hard to get used to it coming from max. Out of the box the controls and shortcuts are really shit imo. Of course you can customize pretty much everything and that's what everybody does who uses it effectively but it's a real pain in the ass to set up. The workflow takes some getting used to aswell. As max user i'm used to a nondestructive workflow using the stack. Forget about that with modo. If you need to get back you better saved enough backups. Also feels weird that every step you do you have to confirm unless you painstakingly customized a different behaviour for every tool.

Obviously in the right hands Modo can do wonders and i feel tempted to get more into it especialy when i see how quick Tor Frick can spit out whole environments but for the time being i will stick with max. It just messes too much with my head to go back and forth between the two. Would make more sense if i knew i could use Modo for everything that i do professionaly and use it as my primary modeling tool but for that it still feels a little too rough around some of its edges. (For example crashes a lot more then max and can be difficult to synch with other 3d apps/engine since the scaling works a bit different).

I think softimage is still the best, but that's a sinking ship. I will never buy anything from Autodesk again cause they are lying bitches. I think modo is the most promising software out there. It missis a lot but each update adds so many features.

You can get a student version of modo on steam which comes quite cheap but I don't know about the disadvantages of that.

When i can't work with softimage anymore I probably switch to modo.

I had a work placement at an "Architectural Visualisation Studio" that used modo back in 2008. It was the first 3D modelling software I had ever used and I found it fairly easy to use.

I also had to use 3D$Max at uni, but IT spent more time making it work than me using the bloody thing. Their website is atrocious as well, could not get a non-corrupt download ever using various browsers.