Hey, thanks for the cordial welcome, Lobo!  Glad to be here.  I've been in and out of the 3dsmax forum here for almost a decade now, and hope to make some new connections here with Blender.  The reason I decided to post my questions here, honestly, is because I've not been too happy with the Blender community elsewhere.  Once some folks found out I was a 3dsmax user, and asking questions, and making sometimes critical comparisons between the software (in an effort to LEARN), I was greeted by very hostile Blender fanboys (and girls) who were not helpful, and quite angry, that I wasn't in the highest praise of excellence over their beloved Blender.  Hey, no software is perfect.  I've often criticized 3dsmax for certain things over the years, as well as Poser and other applications.  I believe in honest critique, and not just fawning praises.

Anyway, this has been the most helpful Blender forum I've been to yet.  Believe it or not.  I think more people interested in learning Blender should ask questions here, if they want kind and concise responses.  Anyway, thanks again.

I'll be back with more questions.  So far, I definitely have found Blender absolutely capable of doing all the modelling needs I have.  My ONLY complaint, coming from 3dsmax, is that you can almost tell that features have been added on by people not connected with each other.  I don't know how to explain it, but there seems to be a difference with software created by a tightly knit team working together over the years, compared to individuals contributing randomly to open source code.  Not complaining, mind you, but I feel this could be why it's harder to learn for me.

I will say this on the positive side:  Blender's extrusion modelling techniques are very fast, and easy.  You can almost feel like you're sketching extrusions from a model at the speed of drawing by hand!  That, I find very good.  It falls a little flat though when it comes to doing insets or bevels.  I really do not like the way Blender does bevelling, or rotations, in edit mode.  The rotation tool, in particular, is very frustrating when you use from the R hotkey.  I don't like the rotation from view perspective thing it has going on.  Very hard to control that sometimes.

Anyway, I'm sure i'll have more questions!  Thanks to all!

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.