Studio max has many advantages over Maya for shader creation, especially when it comes to procedural texturing. The alternative for detailed procedural texturing in Maya is to use a plugin like Filter Forge for Photoshop that can generate large tileable textures. It's a some what poor work around but people like Alex Alvarez use this method to create detailed terrains in Maya/Mental Ray - see
HERE. Hopefully Maya will some have better procedurals that work with renders like Vray, Arnold and Redshift soon.
Another annoyance is that curves in Maya don't have bezier handles but, by using splines, the same result as in max, can be achieved.
Below I have replicated shaders from the "Learn Vray" course
. See 3ds Max versions HERE.
I've scripted them into a UI which has formed an ever growing library. They need a little tweaking but I will do that as I use them. This is what I love about Maya - MEL and Python scripting.
Here's how some of them look on the Learn Vray course shader ball, cloth and Gargoyle.
