BrianKitts

and the typical response.... its not the rendering engine its the skills and creativity of ther person using it. Use demos to get a go round on em to see what works better for you.

Try searching these forums you'll find tons of threads asking the same question, should lead you to the answers you are looking for.

As for the max/viz question, I'm a little dated in that I've used max for so long I really haven't checked out that capabilities of viz in a few years. But my normal answer to that question has always been that Viz is a watered down version of max. Max has more controls capabilites and functions.