Marvelous Designer and Zbrush could already have been in your personal pipeline prior to fbx support.
They're both more so middleware software in this particular context (creating IMVU assets) in the sense neither truly replaces your traditional modeling package, though zbrush is certainly inching into that territory. Both of these programs help you create very complex details, albeit in very different ways, but for use on IMVU you'd really never want to go directly from either straight to importing to IMVU because A) ideally you want to end up with a fairly lowpoly diffuse-only asset, which is not something either of these programs is really meant to leave you with (not to say it can't be done) and B) there's still some prep work to do before going from FBX -> IMVU that, at least as far as I'm aware, you can't do in either software.
I'm personally mostly looking forward to this change just to get away from some of 3DS max's worse-for-wear toolsets that didn't receive a whole lot of love after Autodesk acquired Maya.