Tips!

I saw on Sam's Blog, she wrote about 3ds Max crashing and losing work, so I thought I'd share with you all some tips and the cool features Max offers.

• 3Ds Max by default, makes backups every 5 minutes. You can configure this in the 'Preferences' window, 'Files' tab. They are normally saved to:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3dsMax8\Autoback

• *EDIT*
• 3Ds Max 9.0 seems to save in your Documents folder, instead of the program folder. On mine (Vista) its found in:

C:\Users\James\Documents\3dsmax\autoback

• In the 'Preferences' window, change the default "Scene Undo" levels. Its set on 20 or something ridiculous by default. Push it up to 500, so even when you make a huge amount of changes you undo them all.
• You can right-click the Undo buttons to see what changes were made, and jump back to them. Kinda like the Photoshop history tab. Not that useful, but handy when undo steps take ages because its a big file/low memory.
  
• When working on intense bits or you can tell the computer is struggling, just hit CTRL+S often, and you shouldn't lose a thing.
• Use versioning when saving, like face01.max face02.max and so on. I do this for major phases, like between modeling/mapping or just a new one for each hour/day. Then you have older versions to go back to. Keep in mind, some of the things you do in Max can't be undone. (for instance, converting object type and making animations from the physics engine which we will probably use.)

Oh and a few problems I found since I started using this program. These are annoying, because they happen so often, everyone gets annoyed by them yet they are so simple to solve!

• Everything turning into cubes when you move? It switches on when you use up too much memory, or just catch the key by accident. Use 'O' to toggle that on and off.
• The "Gizmo" (3 axis thing for controlling move/rotate/scale) disappeared? Just press 'X' to get it back.
• Wondering why when your working with vertex, you press a normal key to change the view and it screws up the whole object? Sorry, I haven't figured that one out yet! ;)

Hope that's some help, if you get any other weird shit happening you can't figure out, comment this post and I'll try to update it with a solution.