Maya is ideal for low-poly modeling, props, and animation, which is what I was trained on. Trying to use Blender after being spoiled with that is a pain. I got Blender to work and made some things in it, but it wasn’t perfect, even for basic shapes. Maybe I need to get used to it some more? Maya has good lightmap UV workflows, mainly due to its ability to automatically lay out UV shells with appropriate spacing for any pixel size texture you wish to use and being able to snap UVs in many ways. The few UV shortcomings in it that I had to deal with were eradicated in the new version. I have no experience with 3DS , so I won’t comment on that.