Work smarter with intuitive tools in 3ds Max

Smart Extrude’s partial overlap cut through and merging operations have been further enhanced to help you produce better and cleaner geometric results. You can now cut across multiple edged bodies on the same mesh with Smart Extrude, while additional support allows for clean cut-through of non-planar quad and n-gon polygons. This enables you to perform complex modeling actions more easily than ever before. 

As scenes become more complex, a great deal of data gets displayed in the Viewport, making it difficult to discern the different types of objects in those scenes. A new Per Viewport Filtering option in 3ds Max makes it easier to control what is displayed in the Viewport by enabling you to filter by category and object type. Objects that are filtered only affect visibility in the Viewport and not the render.  

• Left-clicking the Viewport Filtering icon in the Viewport controls will turn Per Viewport Filtering ON and OFF.
• Right-clicking the Viewport Filtering icon found in the Viewport controls will bring up the Per Viewport Filtering dialog, which enables customization of what is displayed in the Viewport. 
• The Viewport Filter menu can also be found under the Display menu of the Viewport.

When working with the Editable Poly or Edit Poly modifier, the Occlude selection filter will now process region selections like rectangle, circle, and fence when used on the Edge and Face component levels. This update to the Occlude selection filter will allow you to easily add or remove visible component data to your active selection.

3ds Max's Pipeline Integration capabilities have been updated to make it easier for you to configure the software. You can now seamlessly switch between tasks that require uniquely configured environments, including project settings, user preferences, scripts, and plug-ins. 

A newly implemented Advanced Wood in OSL has been developed to meet the demands of studios that require rich and vibrant wood textures that are easy to configure; closely mimic wood types such as maple, walnut, and oak; display beautifully in the Viewport; and can be used in any OSL compatible renderer. Advanced Wood OSL can also be baked to a custom bitmap texture using the Bake to Texture feature.

Continuing upon the work done in previous 3ds Max updates, scene file save has been further optimized enabling you to experience an additional 25% boost in file save performance. 

This update ships with Arnold 7 and adds support for the following features:

• Tonemap Imager support for LUTS: The Tonemap Imager now supports "LUT Mode" which enables you to apply LUT files in any format supported by OCIOv2.
• Ignore Imagers Flag Exposed: The option to ignore Imagers has been added to the Diagnostics tab.
• Arnold Lights: Arnold Lights now has new defaults that give better first-render results. Sticky settings allows you to create lights with the same settings as the light previously created.

A new Slice Cleanup Threshold spinner has been added to the Slice Along Mirror option of the Symmetry Modifier. This new threshold option will allow you to have control over the cleanup of vertices that are close to one another along the cutting plane before the mirror and merge actions of Symmetry take place.

When performing a Peel action on a poly-type object, 3ds Max will perform additional clean-up actions in the Unwrap UVW modifier to ensure that the data is manifold before attempting to peel with the Unfold3D algorithm. This will help reduce the chance of distortions occurring. To help with automation and tool development, a method has also been exposed to MAXScript enabling packing commands to operate with the Unfold3d algorithm.

The Limit Affects functionality in the Chamfer Modifier has been updated to generate better results on non-planar faces and non-collinear chamfered edges.

• Show Selection Range UI: "Show Selection Range" in the Time Slider Config is now ON by default making it easier for animators to quickly scale the range of a selected set of keys in the time slider UI. 
• LookAt Contraints Viewline Length:  To assist those of you working with complex rigs, the "Viewline Length Absolute" option of the LookAt Constraint is now set to OFF by default, and the "Viewline Length" is also set to 0. This will help reduce Viewport clutter and provide a better animation experience. 

• Auto-Expand Selection in Explorers:  Auto-Expand Selection in Explorers is now OFF by default to help improve productivity. This enables you to set up separate views of your data through hierarchical representation in Explorers and spatial organization in the Viewport.
• Recovery of Orphaned Layers: When loading or merging a scene into 3ds Max, orphaned layers and objects with no parent layers are now automatically recovered and added to the current scene's Layer Manager.
• Software Security: To further reduce the risk of exploits through 3rd party malicious script embedded in scene files, enabling Safe Scene Script Execution will prevent scripts from writing to folders that represent the 3ds Max and plugin package installations as well as user-defined script and plugin paths.