Although I am a fan of the Viewport Canvas in Max, it has some flaws. One that has been around forever is that it displays textures differently than the normal viewport does. My assumption is that it is using a different gamma for display. When in Viewport Canvas, the textures are always displayed more “richly” (apparently a little darker and/or more saturated). Once you finish using VC, your textures immediately get a little washed out. I’ve noticed this for a few years now… and I’m really hoping for this to get addressed in a 2014 service pack.

There are sample images and simple steps to demonstrate this here:

http://area.autodesk.com/forum/t79183

This applies to material editor, render frame, render settings, and layers menu, at least.
I often have materials, render settings, and layers always open. They aren't in front, and so you either have to move the larger one out of the way, or close and reopen it since the button toggles.
Instead of the button toggling, wouldn't it make more sense to just bring the window to focus? If I want it closed I can hit the little X like I do in Every Other Windows Application. I wanted to bring some stress to that, but I'm not yelling.
This is just a small annoyance, and has been there for years. It Should be an incredibly easy fix. Just don't call it a new feature. Don't even call it out. Just include it silently in an update under the category: UI fixes/improvements.

I know since max 2013 you made autobackups timer to reset each time a scene is saved and while this is great when working with large files that take long time to save, it totally killed the single thing autoback was useful for me.

I am a modeler and don't have any problem with saving times, I use autobackups in order to be able to go back to a previous version of my scene in case something goes wrong or I changed my mind about anything, set my backups to about 40 files and then I have a full day of work available to go back if necessary.

Current functionality resetting the backups just totally screws this up, as every time I save my scene, it goes back to write in backup file #1 and if I am used to save a lot, so much that I wont let Max create backup files(cause of the timer resetting), then I get 0 backup files in all day, and that is just plain wrong.

So a checkbox to turn this feature Off would be great

Thanks

The normal align (Ctrl-N) is ripe for an overhaul and missing some basic functionality.

1) It doesn't work with snaps, so trying to align the center of a face, vert, edge to the something else is nearly impossible. You can click and drag the align gizmo around when you are selecting your faces but they don't snap to anything.

2) It uses the smoothing normals instead of the actual face normal. Even when you apply edit normals and Break everything it still goes based on the smoothing normals. To see an example of this create a cylinder, assign every poly to smoothing group 1 and then try to align a box to the cap poly, it will align to the averaged normal not the face normal. The only way to get it to align to the actual face normal is to break the smoothing on a per face level, which will mess up many workflows.

This problem can be solved with a simple caddy floater (much like the bevel tool) with options to align to face normal, averaged normal over a selection of faces, or the smoothing normal.

Having a caddy would also allow people to select each face, preview and make adjustments before applying. It would also be helpful when both faces aren't in the view at the same time, you could actually navigate or rotate the view while aligning. Right now you get one shot and both faces need to be facing the camera, which leads to more lost time wrangling everything into the view of the camera.

This is a very minor thing but after you've gotten used to how windows snap to the screen if you drag it to a screen corner, it would be nice to see this functionality in all windowed dialogs in Max. It already works in some Max windows (like Max itself, Slate) where you can drag the window to the top of the screen and it will snap to the whole display or to the left/right and it snaps to half that display.

I like to snap Slate off to fill a second monitor. I'd like this same functionality in other windows. The one that annoys me the most for not doing this is the Curve Editor. You have to drag the corners manually to fit it to a display.

[TOTALLY UNRELATED] but I logged in via the Max help and it used my "single" Autodesk account but I had used a separate email on this forum previously... can an admin merge my accounts?