I don't know how you texture in maya but in 3dmax you open the material editor, you assign one of the spheres a texture. and then drag it to the item. From the main windows, you can adjust the placing of the texture. This is just the %1 of texturing abilities of 3d max. But what you need to get going :p And do watch out for polygon count when modelling.
Oh and also, 3d max recently bough Alias (Hurray for 3dmax!).