Max currently doesn't have any sort of curvature map. A curvature map calculates a black and white map based on how convex or concave a surface is. This creates a mask that allows you to place a different materials in non-exposed areas of your model.

It's used a lot in zbrush, you may have seen this effect, the bronze shader made by stumpf that turns green/dark in the small detail areas (excellent model sculpted by andreja). This is using a re altime curvature shader.

This is similar to the Ambient Occlusion map in mentalray, except for a few details.

1) Ambient occlusion deals with object interpenetration, this technique doesn't.
2) This technique will give you results on convex faces, which ambient occlusion will not.
3) This technique is generally faster to calculate, since it doesn't need any rays to be traced.

I would like to see a curvature map that works in the scanline and mentalray renderer. Areas of convexity and concavity would turn the map one color, and white for flat areas.

Go here for a UI mockup and extra info:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/cg_wishlist/3dsmax/wishlist_curvature_map.htm

The material library needs a massive overhaul. It is unbelievably slow even when handling medium-sized libraries. Forget about dealing with a large library.

It needs to have sophisticated search tools. It should be more database-like where Date Created and Date Modified are stored along with the material.

Materials should have a field for tags so that they can be categorized.

The library should allow for grouping and nesting. Max should allow users to just have one mega-library with a user-defined hierarchical structure, instead of forcing users to create separate libraries for dozens of different categories.

Materials should be able to have custom sizing options saved with them, as it relates to the preview Sphere. For instance, you should be able to tell Max that you want this material's sphere to be 10' tall and another one to be 1' tall so the material can show up properly. The sphere size can be shown as a small number in the corner of the preview window so you know what the different scales are when comparing materials. Previews should be more sophisticated than just a ball, box, or cylinder. I know there's a custom object option, but that should be built-in.

I don't understand why such an essential feature has been so neglected. It's like Max is designed only to create new projects, but little consideration is given on how people might re-use assets .

I use the Vertex Color Map along with the Vertex Color modifier a lot to perform various tasks. One task that I use it a lot for is creating Masks. The problem is that although you can Paint onto the Vertex Alpha with the modifier... the Vertex Color does not let you use that channel (even though it lets you choose any arbitrary map channel greater than or equal to 0). The problem is that Vertex Illumination and Vertex Alpha use channel -1 and -2.

I have found several alternative methods to do the things I want... but all are less than optimal. It would be great if the Vertex Color map included vertex alpha/illumination support. I would also like to see Nitrous updated such that things like the Blend Material can use the Vertex Color as a mask and display in realtime in the viewport. (Because you cannot do this, I have had to resort to the DirectX Shader... which is not what I really want to have to do for multiple reasons. The main reason is that the viewport is using the DirectX but then I have to manually copy the vertex channel to another channel to be used in the blend material that is used for renders.)

Before it gets asked... I know that you can use bitmaps as masks... but it saves disk space and is less messy for my own needs... not to mention it is cleaner for my own target usage which is game engine tools that often are mapping vertex alpha data to begin with.

3ds Max is a very popular software in the game industry, moving to DirectX 11 could probably keep that up. Check out the game engine Unity 4.0 (not released yet) to get a feeling for what DX11 can do as a real-time renderer/viewport engine.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2012/07/13/unity-4-directx-11/

So to be able to preview your game models and environment directly in Max would be cool and helpful. But to be able to actually create your own HLSL shaders within Max would be even more cool and helpfull!
Take a look at Shader FX from Kees Rijnen and Ben Cloward (I think)
http://www.lumonix.net/shaderfx.html
It's a node-based editor for "writing" HLSL shaders, very cool!

Integrate this plug-in and upgrade it to support DX11 features and wrap it in the Slate GUI for making it familiar too all Max users. Now game artist can create and preview their own HLSL shaders directly in Max and then simply export them to their game engine.

I think Kees is currently working for Autodesk so he might be very interested in a project like this :)

DX11 can probably be an awesome feature for architects as well to be able to let their clients walk around in the buildings with stunning graphics and changing colours, lights, and rearrange furnitures and walls as they go a long - such a workflow would impress a lot of clients and make them feel very involved!

DirectX is also supported by fairly cheep "game" graphics cards, which would make a good workstation cheaper then one with Quadro FX cards which is very interesting for small studios and freelancers that have a really tight budget to keep. Imaging being able to just bring a "gamer" laptop to your client and show of your work in progress directly in the viewport without having to spend hours on doing preview renders.

Support for Post-effects/camera shaders would be really cool as well. Like bloom, lens flares, DOF, motion blur, tonemapping, SSAO and so on...

In Max 2010, a new map was added called Multi/Sub-Map. This map is great for adding variety to your materials without the need for separate materials for each variation. However, it has some major limitations...

1) This map is mentalray only. A large portion of 3dsmax users use other renderers, like vray, brazil, the scanline renderer etc. Could we please have this map ported to work in the scanline renderer, so that all of the other available commercial renderers can use this as well?

2) You are limited to 20 slots. Can we please get a dynamic interface so that we can choose how many slots we need? This would be really useful for complex scenes that require a lot of variety. Say for example, I have a robot character, and it's made of metal. But I have painted 50 different diffuse maps for different pieces of the character. If I had the ability to change it to 50 slots, I could use this map to place each of my diffuse textures onto my objects, and still only need a single material. This is how studios like ILM work, they hand paint each object in a complex model, then use a single material and a map like this one that switches between different maps for each piece of the model.

3) In "Switch Color/Map based on", could you add an option for "User Defined Prop", and then a text box to add a name? Here's where this would be useful...

Say you have 200 rocks. And say as well as 5 different rock diffuse maps, you also have 5 different rock bump maps. Right now, if you use 2 Multi/Sub-Maps, one in the bump and one in the diffuse of your material, and set it to something like Mat ID, when you apply the first rock bump map, it will match up to the first rock diffuse map, for a total of 5 separate rocks. But if you could use "User Defined Props" instead of Mat IDs or Object IDs, it would be really easy to mix and match, and get potentially 25 different rocks from your 5 diffuse and 5 bump maps.

So say you applied one of these maps to your bump slot, and set it to use the User Defined Prop Name "RockBump".

Then go to your rocks and apply the RockBump property with a random value between 1 and 5.

Now this particular object would pick the second rock bump texture defined in the Multi/Sub-Map. You can apply multiple user defined properties to an object (whereas material IDs can only be a single one per face), so say you give this object a RockBump value of 2, and a RockDiffuseMap value of 3. Then when you use your two multi/sub-maps, one that uses the RockBump property in the bump slot, and one that uses the RockDiffuseMap property in the color slot, you'll get the 2nd bump map using the 3rd color map.

Simple scripts could be written to distribute random values to these properties to your objects, allowing you to quickly assign up to 25 material variations to your 200 rocks, with only a single easy to use material.

Go here for a more complete discussion of the topic:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/cg_wishlist/3dsmax/wishlist_submap_improv.htm

When doing color corrections, the HSV controls are rather limited. They basically have a...

* Hue Offset Control
* Saturation Multilpier
* Tint, which is an RGB Multiplier

Just like the Lightness area has an Advanced mode, I'd like to see an Advanced mode for Color as well.

In this mode, I'd like to see the following controls...

* HSV Change, this lets you take any of the three compoents, H S or V, and change their value to a new value, independently of each other. Like Change the Hue to a value of 0.8, which would make the result Pinkish / Purple, while leaving the Saturation and Value the same as the input map.
* HSV Multipliers, this lets you take any of the three compoents, H S or V, and multiply them by a constant. A constant of 1.0 would produce no result.
* HSV Offset, this lets you take any of the three compoents, H S or V, and add or subtract a number from them. Example, an Offset of -1.0 for the Hue would put the hue of the resulting pixels 180 degrees on the other side of the color wheel.

Each control has an on/off switch, to let the user decide if the control is activated.