Activate and set up the render elements you’ll need for compositing. Next, activate the “VRay FRAME BUFFER”. Inside the VFB rollout, check the “SAVE SEPARATE RENDER CHANNELS” check box and click “BROWSE” to save your frames. When you click render, Max will prompt you with an alert about “saving a sequence with no output”, click “OK” to ignore. Now VRay will save out all your render elements in the specified folder. Each frame will have the element name suffixed to the original file name. 

If you’ve ever been working inside an Edit-Poly modifier and needed to move vertices along a non-ortho edge, you’ve realized it can be difficult. If you scroll down in the Command Panel and find the “Edit Geometry” rollout, inside you’ll see a set of parameters named “Constrain” with the options “None”, “Edge”, “Face” and “Normal”. Click “Edge” and now your vertex selection will ONLY move along the shared edges of the vertex selection! Also works with Face and Normal mode as well as with other Sub-object levels selected (edge, border, polygon, element).

If you want more precision while drawing lines, go into PREFERENCES / VIEWPORTS and toggle the Zoom About Mouse Point options on.  Now your middle mouse wheel will use your mouse as its zoom target. 

If you think in an inverted Y-axis, for flying, video games, etc. 

Edit > Preferences > Input Devices > Check “Reverse Orbit”

Press the ‘Q’ key to enable/disable HyperNURBS (sub-d smoothing). Much faster than clicking the green ‘check mark’ on and off. Also, it doesn’t contribute to the undo/history chain.

Finally happy with your camera angle? Set a keyframe on frame 0 of the camera so you dont accidentally lose it.  Life Saver!

If you are working on a certain object(s) and find yourself accidentally deselecting the object(s) or selecting other objects in the viewport, you can use the Lock Selection button to prevent that from happening. Hit the Spacebar to lock/unlock the currently selected object and you will not be able to deselect that object or select any other objects until you unlock the selection. This is good to be aware of anyway, as many beginners hit the spacebar accidentally and then don’t know why they are stuck in a selected object.

If you are trying to make selections based on a certain type of object (i.e. bones, shapes, lights, etc) you can set the selection filter to that type and the viewport will disable selection on all other types of objects, making for easier selection. Comes in handy when setting up/testing rigs, when you don’t want to have to freeze your model geometry, but you can avoid accidentally selecting geometry by setting the filter to not include geometry. You can also choose Combos and select multiple choices, such as bones & shapes (rig controls).

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.

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!

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