By the way in speaking of development, we have a situation that has come up recently, that will impact the future. I stubled across a statment about GMAX in a form by a fellow poster about the discontinuation of GMAX. Here is a link to the official press release from Autodesk:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5562445&siteID=123112

As since this was the best free 3d modeling program avaible, many games have used it for making players to make 3d content. This will inevitalby impact many games that use it/and are planing to use it.

As for another important news update, Autodesk has announced that they are in the proscess of aquiring Alias. Heres a link to the offfical press release for this:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5970886&siteID=123112

this will probaly mean the end of Maya, but will produce the most advanced 3d modeling program ever developed. Who knows maybe a replacement program is in the works, with more features(maybe normal mapping).

By the way GPG moderator stated that GMAX is now run by Turbo Squid and is still offered for free. Maybe it can still be an option for using to make models in the new format.

http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax

Download and use blender.

I actually don't know if you can make TA units with it.
You can export to a load of 3D formats anyway.

Well, you can use it for TA style units at least. Don't know about the new format. Blender has possibly the worst GUI known to man, though (I'd seriously rather try to model via friggin commandline by manually defining each vertex's coordinates than use that thing again). That wings3d one people around here like isn't horrible (though not powerful enough for my tastes), but again, I don't know if it could handle the new format.

Blender has a difrent GUI, but blender uses the screen real estate far better then other app's imo.
(I have done modeling in 3DsMAX)

Thats not hard if you dont show any useful gui elements :)

Speaking of software with terrible GUIs... *cough*

Did you test blender recently? The first versions had a bad gui, but after 2.2 or something, it's really not bad. The GUI layout is also very flexible and can be modified in any way you want.