Maya had a popular (on SGI) predecessor called Wavefront (at least the company was called that, but IIRC it was also the name of their 3d modelling/animation product), the company Wavefront was then aquired and merged together with Alias Research (PowerAnimator) by Silicon Graphics into a company called Alias|Wavefront, which then created Maya from scratch, but Maya took a lot of inspiration from Wavefront (and PowerAnimator I guess).

As far as I remember, 3DSMax was still an outlier throughout the 90's, but it quickly gained popularity in the PC game development scene because it also ran on PC and didn't require a separate investment in SGI workstations or beefed up Amigas (and I guess the rampant software pirating on PC in the 90's also played a role to make 3DSMax popular).

What about Lightwave? Wasn’t Babylon 5 done with that?

Yeah, as far as I know the Amiga was popular for US TV productions, probably because of the Video Toaster heritage, and the low resolution of TV allowed to render out lower resolution video which didn't require powerful SGI render farms. I don't think Lightwave was ever popular in the PC game development scene (I remember one small Berlin game studio though which sticked with Lightwave for a fairly long time because they had built a pretty extensive workflow around it).

My understanding is that Maya wasn't a total rewrite, it bolted together parts of Power Animator and Wavefront together with a new architecture.

Wavefront's big product AFAIK was called Kinemation. I used it circa 1994 to pre-render sprites using motion captured animations that were captured at a very early studio called BioVision. The game was for the Mega Drive / Genesis. We may have been the first game to do motion capture in this manner (not rotoscoped). IDK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinemation

BVH format is still floating around. The Biovision motion capture format. I am quite surprised!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biovision_Hierarchy

Yes by "Max and Maya" I misspoke, and should have said their predecessors 3D Studio (ported into Max) and Alias PowerAnimator (ported into Maya, among others)

Yeah, I recall 3DS being more PC-prosumer based. And SGI | Alias was super high end. $150k Irix machines with VR gloves & glasses. You'd only find them in the engineering & architecture departments. The others were distributed at siggraph on free cd-roms, with permissive student licenses you could use for months of self-training and hobbyist modeling ;)

No one could top Maya back then in terms of flame, water & particle effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFLapfliN8