Did you run mesh clean up a few times? Also make sure theres nothing else selected in a sub menu under the action centers. If I remember correctly (dont have modo open in front of me atm), selection needs to be enabled.
in 2010 at least there are stepring and steploop, I'm not sure if its called something else in Polyboost. Stepring doesn't work on poly-selection rings, though. I'm guessing because of the way it determines a poly-selection ring - stepringing would change the direction of the ring each time.
How do you get Maya to do select + move in one click? When I try it I can't even do that, I have to click once to select, then click again to move... is there a tool setting I'm missing to allow this one-click behaviour?
In maya I would have the entire obect selected and then extrude. Not sure how object/component selection works in max but basically you want to extrude all the faces at the same time. If you extrude in the negative direction you'll have to reverse your normals afterwards.
Delete the catmotion layer and in setup mode select both knee vectors and the pelvis bone and click unlink. the knee vectors will jump position. Select them and move them back out in front of the rig at knee height. Reapply your catmotion layer and it will be working correctly.
In toolbag2 you can select your mesh and then change the tangent space type to match whatever you baked with (you mentioned max and xNormal, we support both of these). Select the appropriate one, and if the issue persists, then check the "flip y" button in the materials normalmap drawer.
Uhm... create the lace details all on a straight line (ie, not curved like the dress). Then go to the dress itself, select all the edges on the outside where you want the laces to go, then make the selected edges a 'shape' and then go back to the lace and use path constraint.
(I know how it's done, I'm wondering what particular steps he is taking as his result is different than my own). In my case I don't append anything. Just select a solo zsphere, then Rigging: Select Mesh followed by Topology: Edit
Thanks for the response perna, great idea of simplifying it with a falloff material, I was overthinking it with lights and all. I got the result i was looking for by selecting a falloff map in the diffuse slot, and selecting my light source as the falloff direction, now i can create rainbows!