Unbroken-fighter, I'm trying to rotate the scene view with middle mouse button (which rotates the scene in perspective view) after activating the box-select.  There's no hotkey combination which I've found that does that without disengaging the box select mode first, and forcing you to re-engage the tool.  Each time you re-engage the tool, you are locked into the view you chose beforehand, and have to rotate your view and then engage it again to make more selections.  In Max, there's no need to enter a select mode. You simply pick a marquee selection type (rectangular, circular, free selection, or lasso selection), and then start selecting vertices, edges, or faces, without a hotkey, as you rotate around the scene.  I was hoping for that kind of freedom with the box-select tool in Blender.  I've worked with Maya, and it's about the same as 3dsmax.  I'm sure XSI was that way too.  Even Carrara used a similar selection system.

The rotation gizmo behavior in the R hotkey in Blender is a bit frustrating.  It seems to depend on the perspective view angle as to the direction the gizmo "rubber band" pulls the rotation of the object?  Holding down the CTRL hotkey, I believe, restricts it to an axis, but it seems hard to control on my system.  So I use the rotate transform manipulator instead.

Just out of curiosity, which Pixar software did you work with?  Marionette used to be their modelling software, and Presto is their proprietary animation app.  I didn't think these were commercially available?

Thanks for the tips!

---

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

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