Here's my first stab at plugins for max without any mess so you can try it yourself. This is called Hemify but really its just the same spherify you see in max with one little twist. These was written with the 3.1 SDK. It's a modified spherify plugin. Namely, it spherifies a mesh but on a hempisphere rather than a center. The only thing i can say that is special about this plugin was that i finally got it to compile correctly in VC++.