Small Annoying Things

PURPOSE
This forum is about all the little annoying quirks and problems in 3ds Max that you might have gotten used to over the years but that might benefit from a second look.

Remember, keep these ideas to tweaks of the workflow rather than large, sweeping changes to the tools. Try to imagine how much effort a programmer has to go into in order to implement your suggestion. Anything requiring major UI changes or new UI dialogs will need to go in another forum.

Feature ideas considered too big will simply be moved to the General Feature Requests forum; suggestions for new defaults should go into the Default Settings forum.

Add your vote to any idea if you also think this is an annoying behavior that needs to be fixed.

HOW TO USE THE FORUM
- Each user has 20 votes for each forum
- Each idea can have no more than 3 votes by a single user
- If you enter an idea, it will cost you 1 vote – therefore try to make sure the idea doesn’t already exist
- The more precise and detailed a description you give, the more likely your idea will rise higher in the list
- When an idea is implemented, votes are returned to all the users that voted
- User can change their votes at any time
- Admins can move, edit and delete ideas as they see fit to better meet the goals of the forum
- We will flag ideas that are getting our attention as “under review”. Because of limits on what we can say publicly, that is as far as we can go with commenting on a particular idea. If it is “under review” it simply means we’re studying it for possible implementation or gathering data, but there is no commitment to do it.

Remember, we do not release versions on “internet time”. Unlike the web sites this was designed for, our process of releasing functionality is much longer term. So there won’t be a constant churn of ideas being “closed out” by us and votes returned to you. For this tool to map to our process, we will be looking at the data during a short period of the year (3-6 months) and deciding what actions to take after that. Don’t expect to post an idea and a month later for us to respond in some fashion to it. The most likely scenario is that you’ll post an idea and if a lot of other people vote on it, we’ll eventually flag it as “under review” – but that could be 9 months later or longer.

Please treat this as an experiment in working with the community. Even if Uservoice is not the final home for this, we’ll do our best to export all the ideas to whatever future system might take its place. Your voice will persist.

Note: It’s important to realize that these lists are simply raising the quality of the feedback we get from the community. They are not a replacement for how we define the features for any given release. They are valuable input, but beta input, product strategy, focus, innovation and other factors are also important aspects we consider.

BUGS
Please report them here:
http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax-DefectSubmission

AVAILABLE PUBLIC FORUMS
Default Settings
Please tell us which user defaults settings you change the most! Enter a description of the default or ini setting and then see how the community votes on it. Remember these are only the user preferences you can either set in the interface or ini files.

General Feature Requests
Please help us collect ideas for new features and general product enhancements. What’s on your top ten list? Add a vote to any idea you also think is important!

Small Annoying Things
This forum is about all the little annoying quirks and problems in 3ds Max that you might have gotten used to over the years but that really should be fixed.
Remember, keep these ideas to tweaks of the workflow rather than large, sweeping changes to the tools. Try to imagine how much effort a programmer has to go into in order to implement your suggestion. Anything requiring major UI changes or new UI dialogs will need to go in another forum.

SDK/Scripting Enhancements
This forum is about improvements to the SDK or Script-related.

Describe a small problem in 3ds Max that annoys you in your daily work. Please give the steps that show it and describe clearly how you'd prefer it to work. Please include a description!

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  • Hot ideas
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  1. max files remembering project folders

    When I open a maxfile, max should ask me if it should automatically point to the project folder from the file I opened

    114 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  2. Load and Save status bar

    Like at most other Programms I would like to have a status bar where I can see the progress of the load or save operation. Even its a good way to check if Max is still alive during saving!

    45 votes
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    3 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  3. autobackup per open max session

    If multiple instances of max are open the autobackup overwrites itself. would be smart to have the autobackup named by filename [filename]_autobackup[numbering] so multiple max instances dont overwrite each others autobackups

    23 votes
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    4 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  4. Autobackup improvements

    A few simple improvements to autobackup feature:
    - fix autobackup when multiple instances of Max are open - now they overwrite eachother,
    - let me choose where the files get created - the default folder or the current scene max file subfolder,
    - checkbox for activating autobackup before every render

    10 votes
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    3 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  5. autosave should not be compressed

    Regardless of the File > Compress preference option, autosave should not use compression in order to be as fast as possible

    10 votes
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    3 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  6. Quicker saves

    This is probably a "Big" annoying thing but I think that I loose hours on saving. For instance now I have a very tight deadline and I'm posting here while the file is saving.

    9 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  7. Remember exporter

    Remember the last exporter used between Max starts. Max always uses the top-most exporter (defaults to Autodesk .FBX) between sessions. Would be nice to have my last selection maintained. Would be nice to have this separate for 'Export' and 'Export Selected'

    5 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  8. Checkbox for turning off autoback resetting

    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…

    4 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  9. Autosave should include option to open the most recent (usable) file after a crash

    After max has crashed I usually do a little (not a lot, but more than I'd like) detective work to make sure I open the most recent file - which is either "awesome_hollywood_explosion_v37" or "AutoBackup13.max" depending on their date stamp and file size. If the autobackup file is older and several MBs smaller than my own scene file - it's probably corrupt. I think max could do this work for me - and give me a popup telling me any relevant information in the process. Such as "Sorry for crashing - the autosave/most recently saved file being opening now is…

    4 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  10. Long file extensions indicative of Max version.

    Long file extensions indicative of Max version. The days of DOS are long gone, but for some reason we still use three digit file extensions. Why not make the extensions of Max files end at least in the version. This would make different file format versions easier to identify quickly. Instead of a folder containing teapot.max it would be teapot.max2013 or teapot.max9 or something similar. It could even be teapot.3dsmax2013 if brevity isn't your thing. At the least it could be some kind of optional toggle for files, and entire volumes of files could be analyzed and renamed to reflect…

    2 votes
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  11. 1 vote
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    0 comments  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
  12. "Incremental backup"

    It would be useful to have an option to save and automaticly creates a backup file (.max) that include a number that corresponds to the last backup made. It would alow the user to make changes in a xref scene and keep the backups easliy organized.

    1 vote
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    1 comment  ·  Load/Save  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
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