There are a couple routes to transferring or copying P.S.R of one object to another:

1. Copy & Paste: This works, but there must be keyframes in order to do this.

2. Parenting & RESET PSR: Make the receiving object the child of the main and use the “RESET PSR” command found in the Command Manager (or zeroing out each field in the attributes manager.)

3. Transfer: Located under Functions is the Transfer command. It works by allowing a user to visually select another object, matching the selected object’s PSR values to the other object’s.

Go to the Lighting menu, then uncheck “Two Sided Lighting”. Every face with reversed normals will appear black.

Instead of dragging out a new camera and trying to match the perspective view that you like.  Simply press “ctrl” + C on the keyboard.  A new camera will be created from the active perspective view. 

To move frame by frame on your timeline, Pressing the ‘f’ key will move 1 frame back, pressing the ‘g’ key will move 1 frame forward.  Hold down the CTRL(CMD) key while pressing ‘f’ and ‘g’ to jump between keyframes (back or forward).  Its a big time saver!

If you’re having trouble controlling depth of field on a moving camera or focusing on a moving object, adding a target tag to the camera may help solve this problem.  Adding this tag makes the “Use Target Object” option available under Depth in your Attribute Manager.  When enabled, anywhere your target is, your Target Depth will be set to.

To remove the material assignment and revert back to your object color open up the Maxscript Listener and type ” Geometry.material = undefined “.  The object will then switch back to its object color.

Hit return to switch between point, edge and poly modes while modeling. 

Sometimes things can get very crowded with modeling inside an edit poly. While “Ignore Backfacing” helps most of the time sometimes you just don’t want to see the geometry you’re not editing.  

Within the edit poly you have the option to hide and unhide geometry.  This works in vertex, polygon and element mode.  

NOTE:  All parts of the model will still render even if they are hidden. Also, functions are mirrored in any instance.

Change the project folder in Max without booting the program by navigating to

“C:\Users\ {your user name here}\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2011 - 64bit\enu\3dsmax.ini”  

Open the file and locate

[Directories]ProjectFolder=C:\ {add location here}

Remember to always save a copy of the original in case you mess anything up!

To make your life a lot easier when working with splines, try turning off the Display for your Axis.  An unobstructed view makes a world of difference, especially when laying out a new spline.   Go to Filter -> Axis, then set to unchecked. 

Say you want to render a character from several angles for presentation purposes, and for this you render one perspective at the time, and you have to wait for it to finish before you start the next. Instead, try to use only one camera, but store the different camera positions for each render in a keyframe. This makes the scene easier to manage with only one camera, and you can set software to render from frame 1-4, instead of rendering each perspective separately. This is both time saving and more practical, since you don’t have to monitor the rendering process.

Want to make some crazy effects? Try making the brightness of a light negative and suck the light back out of your scene. Works well if you add falloff to the negative light.

Try and use spot lights whenever possible. A spot light only calculates a single shadow map, but an omni light has to calculate 6!

Curved Spline primitives default to a 5˚ subdivision but this is often an unnecessarily high poly count. Set your default “angle” to higher number to help keep your scenes from getting too heavy. 25˚works well.

Getting funky Spline Wrap results? Animating something inside a Spline Wrap and it’s giving you trouble? Make a cube that encompasses everything affected and include it in the hierarchy. Then you can check the cube off!