Inside of polyboost (graphite tools in 3dsmax 2010) there is a Swiftloop function lets you place a loop wherever you click. It was inside the polydraw tools in polyboost, not sure where it is now in 2010. If I remember correctly it lets you slide it into place before you release. I haven't used it in a while tho...
Cut lets you draw/click edges across the surface of the mesh. If you select two edges and click connect it creates an edge between them. Select two parallel loops and click connect and it inserts a loop between them. You can also click the box next to the connect button and insert more than one edge and pinch it to the…
slipsius: use "Remove" to get rid of unwanted vertices / edges / edge loops - pressing "delete" will actually physically delete the geometry, which is usually not what you want. connect is the best way to add edge loops - if you want to put them into a ring just select one edge from the edge ring, then select the edge…
Someone living in Canada? :D I don't know about Maya but you might find the ; key useful. It repeats your previous actions, so if you extruded a face, and clicked ; it would extrude the face again with the same settings.
oh yea that gets everyone. Good thing you figured it out so early. Max is loaded with lots of little gems like that. Just wait until you lock your object (spacebar/padlock icon lower middle) and can't figure out why it won't let you edit anything. Or Keyboard Shortcut Override, there's one that gets just about everyone...…
go into hotkeys and unlink X and Spacebar from their keys. both will annoy the piss outta you. To make the camera rotate around your current selection, hold down on the tiny button, 2nd over from the right hand bottom corner, and change it to Orbit Subobject. It will behave like when you F focus in maya, but automatically…
Glad you figured it out, but its weird it wouldn't do that on an open edge I'll have to see if I recreate that at some point, I don't think it should do that. =) There are two ways I know of to check the normals. 1) Apply a Edit Normals Modifier to your mesh. It draws lines from each vert showing which way. 2) If you're…
Well, there's plenty of stuff you can do to make Max a bit friendlier from Maya (eg. mapping hotkeys like "Focus Selected" from Z to F since you're used to that in Maya), but yes, the workflow especially when dealing with polygon modelling is quite different.