Rigging concepts are universal. The names in different packages might be different, but a rose by any other name is still a rose. When I created the what is now commonly known as the reverse foot rig, I created it in Power Animator. IK had just come out and no one was able to get good results with it. The foot would always wobble. And I realized that a physical foot has relationships. While the attempts at the time didn't. I say "attempts" because rigging wasn't the official term until much later. Shows how old I am. 🙂
Anyway, once I realized the need for relationships, my concept of nesting pivots in a hierarchical structure was born. And that is the basis of all rigging today. The reverse foot was just the first application of that concept. I still remember when Alias Research came to Sony to ask us to try their alpha cut of Maya. I applied my reverse foot concept in Maya and it worked like a charm. Same results as in Power Animator. Jason Schleiffer was an Applications Engineer at the time for Alias (he later became a bigwig at Dreamworks) and his jaw dropped to the ground when he saw my approach. He immediately asked if he could "script it and use it". That was my intro to MEL scripting. I said "sure" and within a year, my reverse foot was everywhere. The concept of nesting pivots really allowed the task of rigging to take off.
While at Sony, we were deciding which package to use as the foundation of our character CG department. The contenders were Maya, Softimage and Max. I was already quite comfortable with Maya by that time so I was assigned to Softimage. The reasoning being how long would it take for a newbie to get up to speed. I knew nothing of Softimage but I applied my reverse foot and pivot nesting hierarchies and everything worked as it should.
Sorry for the long winded reply but as you can see, the concepts are the same independent of the package you are using. It's just how well implemented they are in the package. Iks, constraints, deformers...they all should work the same. Best of luck on your rigging journey.
