Thats a cool concept and a nice direction with the texturing. Whats the story behind it? Is it a modified manufactured tree or has the tech and the tree grown together or something? Im having trouble understanding the story of it, at the moment I am siding on modified.
Create a Helix, create a Line that matches your profile, and use a Bevel Profile modifier on your Helix. The cool thing about Max is the modifier stack. Once you get how that works, it opens up a ton of possibilities.
Do the names carry across when instancing modifier stacks across objects yet? That's why I stopped bothering. Also You could use xform modifiers to achieve the rotation you're getting from the edit poly no?
comparing maya's history to modifiers though, is making history look useful it's horrible in comparison! Maybe I just don't know how to use it properly but most of the time maya's history is junk compared to the flexibility of the modifier stack
in addition to loading envelopes you can also use the 'skin wrap' modifier which can skin a mesh based on a different mesh's skin weights. this can then be converted to a normal skin modifier if desired. comes in quite handy.
Shell Pro is a modifier for 3ds Max that creates a shell around models without causing self-intersections unlike the standard Shell modifier which produces a lot of self-intersections. Get it from https://mariussilaghi.com/products/shell-pro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUs0UqBYrH0
Do you require FFD? Skin modifier with bones can give very good animation control. Also you can add the Morpher modifier for more precise shape editing.
try putting a push modifier on the lowpoly before the projection modifier with a value of 0.001 or 0.01 (dont remeber which one is, well, I guess it depends on the scene scale and unit size)
I find a very simple solution from this video #3DQuickTips 010 - Maya - Power of Snaps, at around 00:15:17. Which is essentially selecting 2 points from the object you want to make parallel to another object, also select two other point to the object you want to refer to, then go to:
- click on the "modify" main menu
-…
There should be a little button under your modifier stack to show the end result of your stack, so even if you're working on the edit poly modifier, anything above that, such as symmetry, will still display. It looks like a little pipe or something.