My Comprehensive 3dsmax features for Blender Suggestions

My name is Stanley Janoski I have been using 3dsmax since 2009. These are my thoughts on what 3dsmax tools and features would be a great addition to incorporate into Blender.

Navigation tools:

Adding these could perhaps result in 3dsmax users having a desire to transition to Blender completely.

In the navigations ribbon menu, Snapping Toggle is extremely useful. In the Snapping Toggle menu, you can snap to: Grid points, pivot, perpendicular, vertex, edge/segment, and face. You can also snap to grid lines in the viewport, bounding boxes, tangents, endpoints, midpoints, and center faces.

The next extremely useful tool is utilizing X,Y,Z constraints. In 3dsmax these are called Axis Constraints. You can select the X,Y, Z or XY, or XYplane constraint or XY Toggle snapping. Using this will constaint you snapping to the grid or to the object so that you can tile objects in your scene like in a game engine.

The next tool is angle snapping where you can snap the object to a angle such as 25 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees... ect. This makes items easy to get precise angles when rotating an object.

Command panel tools:

Modeling tools useful in 3dsamax that could be used in blender can be the following modifiers: Bend, all the FFDs (like a freeform object mesh tool you control with points in 3d space), melt, projection, push, relax, shell (extremely useful), spherify, squeeze, stretch, taper, twist, unwrap, UVW map, and xform.

In 3dsmax, one of the most important tool is modifying your pivot. In 3dsmax you can move/rotate/ or scale your pivot. With one button you can snap you pivot to the center of an object, align it to an object, or align it to the world (like the 0,0,0 axis).

One of the biggest tools in 3dsmax is the reset xform tool. This resets all the transformation and commonly solves issues found on your model. Although this is also in your modifier tab in 3dsmax, you can also find it in the Utilities and More menu.

In the Utilities menu, another useful tool to use is the UVW remove. This removes and resets UVW info and material info.

Now we get into the real modeling tools using the Convert to Editable Poly modifier.

In Vertices selection, here are a couple useful tools I don't think I have seen in Blender.

I think the most useful items in 3dsmax that's not in Blender is the Edit Geometry's constraints where you can contrian vertices on an edge, face, or normal. This help you get extremely accurate control over where you modify your vertices.

The vertices menu allow you to also cut into an object's surface using the Cut tool, it's an easy way to model by making segments/ edges and vertices on the fly. This is an extremely useful tool for fixing and creating topology.

Another useful tool is the ability to hide geometry. This is extremely useful for modeling complex and tight spaces.

Another useful tool found in the Edit Geometry tab is X, Y, and Z constraints (next to the make planer button) where if one of these are selected it will flatten vertices based on an axis (i think it is a calculated average axis between selected vertices). This makes it easy to get perfectly aligned and flattened vertices on an object.

Another useful tool is Paint Deformation where you can push and pull geometry based on values, brush size, and strength. You can also relax the geometry smoothing it out based on your selection.

Soft Selection is another useful tool to get control of areas where you want to pull without influencing a large area or by making a sharp pull of an area.

In the Border tab, we have a tool called Cap. This Caps any amount of N-gons and is an extremely useful tool.

In the Polygon tab, we have many tools. From extruding using the shift button and my favorite universal tool called Bevel.

In the polygon tab we have the ability to flip geometry using the Flip tool. This is very useful.

Another useful tool is using the Turn button where you can see the tris a polygon is composed of and change the direction of the subdivision fold for a more accurate shader look.

Constraints are also extremely useful for Polygons.

The ability to Attach and Detach polys are extremely useful, especially to create separate models like clothing from the base model.

You can slice polygons with the Slice tool, Slice Plane, and Quickslice tool which makes it easy to modify the model. Just like the vertice menu, you can also slice a poly to easily add vertices and segments/ edges.

Once again you can Hide and show geometry for complex and tight areas on a model.

One of my favorite features is adding a material ID. You can do this using the Polygon: Material ID tool. It allows you to Set and ID or Select and ID.

The most popular shader feature in 3dsmax is Polygon: Smooth Groups. It's fast way to get accurate shading and shadows on your model. I like using the Auto Smooth feature, clearing all for a polygonal look,or selecting a number to get a good lighting and shadow look.

An amazing feature for modeling is the ability to select a group of vertices, segments, and polys, hold CTRL and press on another tab and it will retain the selection but translate it to vertices, segments/ edges, or polys. An example of this is Selecting a group of vertices, holding CTRL and pressing the Polygons tab and having the selected vertices translate into a polygon selection. this is extremely powerful.

That's it for the modeling feature.

If you select and left click on an object in the viewport, a few Object Property tools that are extremely useful is the ability to freeze and hide objects. You can also make an object invisible or turn it into an object that has Backface Cull which will show an object based on camera angle allowing you to see though the object from one angle and see it for another. An example of this is working in environments where you need to see through the walls to work within the scene.

Revisiting one of the modifiers called the Unwrap UVW modifier in the modeling tab in 3dsmax, there is a variety of amazing UV tools.

In our Unwrap modifier Selection tab, we can select vertices, segments/ edges, and polygons. Allowing the user to select these makes unwrapping a breeze. We can also grow the selection and shrink the selection. If you use shift, you can ring or loop a selection. One of the most powerful features in 3dsmax is the ability to go to your Edit Poly properties, make a selection, hold CTRL and have the ability to select the polygons inside the Unwrap modifier.

In Edit UVs you see the "Open UV Editor". This is an amazingly powerful unwraping tool. My favorite thing to do is to select segments and simply go back to the UV modifier menu and select "Convert Edge Selection to Seam". This allows me to make a complete unwraped object in a few seconds to or a few minutes.

Afew UV Editor tools is the ability to use the Editors viewport tools. The most useful tool is Mapping and selecting Flatten Mapping. With a Polygon Angle at 45 degrees and Spacing of 0.02, you can easily unwrap any object into useful UV islands. This turns a box into UV islands in seconds. Then you can left click and use the Stitch or Break tools. You can also go to Tools and Relax in the Editor's tool menu. This smooths out your UV islands.

In the UVW editor you have Quick Transform tools. This allows you tool snap selected vertices to an alignment so you can have perfectly horizontal and vertical UV islands. This tool is called Align Horizontally to Pivot and Align Vertically to Pivot.

Another way to get more control using the Reset Peel and Quick Peel tools.

When a person is done with adding and fixing all their UV islands, they can use the Arrange Elements tool to uniform the sizes and resize their UV according to texel density requirements (choosing what items requires more details then others). You can also add as much padding as you want to ensure there is no texture bleeding.

Another useful feature of the UVW editor is the ability to select and modify the UV islands using the vertices, edge, polygons and even the Elements selection. The Elements selection is extremely useful so you can move a large part of your UV islands all at once. You can also right, loop selections or hold shift on the keyboard and ring or loop that way as well.

Another useful tool is the ability to utilize the grid. You can select UV Islands and mirror islands (setting the W coordinate to -1) on a negative side of the grid for light baking in a game engine or material ID purposes.

Another powerful feature is the ability to make texture atlases for optimization purposes utilizing the grid system.

When you're all done with making the perfect UV islands and UV mapping you can go to the Editor's Tools menu and select Render UVs to save a UV wireframe PNG or JPEG of the UV file so you can texture is in Photoshop if you want. To do this you select the Render UV Template button.

Going back to the Unrwap modifier, you can use your traditional plane, cylinder, sphere, or cube unwrap feature. I rarely use these but it's good to have. You also have the Peel modifier which makes a taxidermy-like peel of your model. this can be powerful for character unwrapping. That wraps up for 3dsmax's Unwrap modifier. Probably one of the most powerful Unwrap and UV tools I have experienced in any 3D package. Now for 3dsmax's Material Editor. The only thing I would add to blender from 3dsmaxes material system is the ability to set material IDs using the Multi/Sub-Object node where I can select and add my material IDs and plug them in with a texture. This makes adding textures to materials on an object a breeze.

I also enjoy how 3dsmax does their material ID node selections and organization. It's easy to use and very easy to find materials and make selections.

When it comes to baking normal maps from Render To Texture, or weight painting, 3dsmax is not as powerful as other 3d packages so I'll leave these out of it.

In the viewport you can go to Views and xViews. This tool is extremely powerful because it tells you information and what is wrong with your objects. In the xView menu you can: Show Statistics (verts, poly count..ect), face orientation (make sure your polygons are facing the right way), overlapping faces, open edges, multiple edges, isolated vertices, overlapping vertices, T-vertices, missing UVW coordinates, flipped UVW faces, and overlapping UVW faces. This tool is extremely powerful and highlights areas on an object that needs to be fixed to have a successful model.

Lastly 3dsmax has a very powerful animation system but I prefer Maya do to it's more easy-to-use systems.

More on 3dsmax's navigation interface, I enjoy that 3dsmax has a walking tool called the walk through tool. This tool simulates you walking through your scene. If you make a scene and want to explore the scene freely, this tool is amazing.

These are all the amazing tools in 3dsmax that I think Blender could use. It would be great for Blender to integrate these tools into their systems. I think the result will be 3dsmax users leaving 3dsmax and moving to Blender because they will realize all the tools they use and are familiar with are incorporated in Blander's system which will allow them to transition into Blender and maintain their fast workflow.

I put this entire list together in 3 hours so I hope that the devs will take it seriously. I strongly believe if Blender adds these features, it will absolutely dominate the 3D software market.