Is 3Ds Max Better Than Maya For Game Development?

A quick read will give you a pretty good idea of what MEL is all about:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/supp...3CC75458-42A5-4703-B001-6A7B53F6CAD7-htm.html

 

and you can get a lot done with it, but mel is pretty terrible to work with as a langauge

 

Yeah I don't get the fanboy vibe here at all. I'm actually seeing a lot of great back and forth on the pros and cons of several 3D packages.

 

I have no idea why you would say that is better workflow.. having to go into G, and then having to switch between Shift +x,y,z ...all the while the viewport camera is locked in position, as you can't rotate camera or move it while in this mode. So you have to go out of that to adjust camera for better perspective, and then going back through G, and shift+ x,y,z .. just to get back to moving a selection along a plane... its kinda S***ty workflow to me not intuitive at all, its different I'll give you that. For me though it doesn't make any damn sense but then I guess without plane handle manipulators what choice do you have

Another thing is in maya hotkeys like those G, and the modifer keys such as shift+x are prized keys used for other commands while speed modelling, to me its a waste of hotkey to have it only be used for plane axis constraining.

This is something Autodesk should go implement right now.. and update its own aging [space] hotbox menus by including something more modern such as a command search filter.. currently the closet maya users can get to a quick search filter of all commands is this very handy script https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/maya-search-commands ..just thought I'd point that out for maya users.

 

Blender started as an inhouse tool and grew from there. Probably at all times there were too many people opposed to changing anything because it would ruin their short term productivity due to shortcut habits. And whenever a new function was added they probably looked for still available shortcuts instead of optimal shortcuts. That said, afaik the 2.8 release cycle is supposed to introduce some changes in those areas.

 

I don't "go" to G. My left hand is almost always on keyboard also I touch type at decent speed (somewhere between 300 and 400 characters per minute) and know where each key is without looking at keyboard. The whole "having to switch between" things happens at lighting fast thing, and takes less time than hunting for some buttons on screen. To press G I need to push my left index finger down, slightly. The keyboard hotkeys are being used naturally, you don't really even think about them.

I like this approach. A lot of other apps seem to have the idea that a user only has two fingers on their right hand and that's it.

Screw "intuitiveness". I prefer power.

There are plenty of modeling hotkeys too. Basically, you rarely ever press a button with mouse in blender. (alright, you do it occasionally, because someone forgot to assign a hotkey to sculpt mode).

You just need to get used to the workflow, and that's it.

 

that still reeks of bad UX to me, 3d packages are huge sometimes you can go months using it while only using 10% of its functionality. So having to know the keys for every dam mode in the application sucks. Compare that to Maya where their are keys to do most actions, but that there is always a well organized UI and marking menus that are context sensitive to what part of the app they were used in, and the type of selection.

Also vertex normal editing is rubbish, and wtf is going on with the color selector for Vertex Paint and Texture Paint modes. You cant directly assign rgb values but are forced to choose out of a color wheel. Wtf consider often you need exact values in your Vertex Color.

Like once you got in in muscle memory i do kinda get your point, but the learning curve on it is pretty equivalent of dropping someone who has ever only used modern IDE's in front of VIM or EMACS.

 

It's downright clever if you ask me, it forces you into a speedier workflow! I love it, the first thing I do when I open unity is sigh at how cumbersome or should I say slow to navigate the viewport is.

It really is horses for courses when people say intuitive. Take the qwerty keyboard compared to the dorovak keyboard, or whatever it is called. Long time qwerty users will complain the dorovak keyboard is non intuitive but if you were bought up using dorovak you will realise the key positioning is made for the fastest typewriting speed for the english language - well barring the shorthand ones people in a court of law uses...

Food for thought, anyway to summarise...

TDLR.

Blender matches any other 3D package, has more feature sets (not all applicable to game dev), people complain about usability but they are people that probably haven't given it much of a go or are too used to 3dmax or maya - I get it, throw me into maya or max I'd probably kick up the same fuss. Learning maya or max is only great because those that have gone before have set this in stone as the standard. So if you're not an indie and expect to be working in a team or studio you pretty much have no other option - it has good tools too.

nuff said case closed, thank me later.
And normal editing are you talking about 2.74
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74/Modeling or the blend4web plugin?
What's this about the color picker?

 

does that normal editing actually carry over into exported files without edge splitting is the question, and can you reliably get rigged weighted and animated content to other apps as well?

Also blender isn't the only one with key commands and stuff, Maya and Modo are extremely efficient once you know the keys and marking menus. But they also let you learn all of that at your own lesieur and let you still use the app by exploring it.

 

Have you ever tried a Max or Maya trial?
I'm not looking to compare softwares because I seriously think it's not fair- each person/artist has there own preferences and that's cool. However I've personally mentored approximately 10 artists in Max, who had previous experience using blender. After about 10-15 minutes nearly all of them have commented along the lines of - that is a lot more intuitive and simple to do than what they were used to in blender. Although this has been several years ago, before I believe blender updated there UI and added more functionality.
Might consider checking out a trial to see just how different better/worse each package is.

 

I tend to agree. Supporting heavy use of hotkeys is great, but forcing it dramatically bumps up the initial difficulty compared to having on-screen controls.

 

Is that a bad thing, though? I'm not sure if learning curve is even a factor worth considering, as long as the final workflow is efficient. You won't be learning the software forever, and will have to start USING it at some point.... and learning a dozen of hotkeys you need to navigate and use for basic operations shouldn't take too long.

The price combined with lack of permanent license is a deal-breaker for me. I know for certain that maya animation functionality is superior to blender's, though, but I don't quite agree with UI bashing. It is 3d modeling version of vim, pretty much. As for "inferior" features, properly aligning secondary target bones for IK chains is a royal pain, for example.

 

With Blender 2.49b and earlier the interface was pretty crazy, I bet almost every other 3D program was more intuitive than that ^^. The current UI is fine for me.

I'm not even sure which fileformats support custom vertex normals without edge splitting. Iirc .obj does only support smoothing groups, but I could be really wrong. Isn't edge splitting going to be introduced later down the pipeline at some point anyway, because game engines will split even for disconnected UV islands? I've read on Polycount about split/hard edges being "free" performance wise on edges of UV islands.

I think the "search field" way like pressing space in blender, or the search thing in sublime text, is the easiest and most intuitive way to learn about what a tool can do, if you know the basic terminology or the functions are tagged with good search info. In the past I've often looked at Blender-alternatives for various reasons, and with all tools that have icon-button-heavy UIs, I end up hovering over each icon till the mouse-over pops up, because I never can figure out what their icons are supposed to mean. I remember (15+ years ago) Lightwave 6 having mostly text-only buttons, for me that's easier to use than icons. And search field plus hotkeys is what I'd prefer to have in all tools. To me that lowers the barrier to entry.
Not a graphics tool but Reaper has the coolest feature: a search field for the options menu ^^. And a complete list of all actions the tool can perform, searchable by hotkeys or action, and that's also the place where you assign hotkeys. They don't have a great many of them in use already, so it feels like you are customizing the tool to your workflow right from the start. I ended up setting some things up like in blender, like x for delete. It's a pure habbit thing, in many tools I catch myself pressing x to delete something -_-.

Yeah, plus I don't like Autodesk.

 

Fbx and dae do, in the game engine doing thr edge split is fine, since the importer will spilt and trianglate based on normals and uvs. But the problem is since blender can't save spilt normals to fbx you got no way to move a model between blender and any other app without breaking it into pieces which is less then ideal for the person on the other end.

they 2 of these aren't mutually exclusive look at the workflows used my people really experienced with Modo or maya, it is extremely fast, but both apps also provide a easier time to learn these controls and learn the features of a program.

 

I mentioned earlier that if you want to exchange data between apps this is not the program to use.

However, if you're creating your own models and use blender to produce assets, it is mostly fine.

Workflows are subjective, imo. It would make sense to discuss them if there were more modeling programs available at blender's pricepoint, though....

 

I get where you guys are at/coming from, I was just relating anecdotally to prior experiences I've had, and some comments seem to be coming from uninformed users who have used one product exclusively and really don't know about why other packages are just better than the one they only have experience in. So using a trial and checking it out could inform some better - so they aren't just saying - this one is better because it's free and its what I use. That is all.

This isn't directed at the 'experienced' and informed blender users here, who have over a year or more of experience and have used other packages and choose blender because other reasons besides price.
This does bring up a great question though - if blender is so great - AND free - why is Autodesk not attempting to alleviate users leaving in droves to use a perfectly comparable FREE alternative?
They aren't - because the mass exodus isn't happening. Because blenders top redeeming quality is the price point.
You get what you pay for - and you don't know how much better another software package is - if you haven't tried it out.

Not trying to convince anyone - Just to inform others - Max is totally configurable to use hotkeys and remove almost all buttons/UI from the screen. But what is really great about this optional layout/setup is -- it's optional. Totally configurable to allow the user to set it up entirely how they like to work. Not locked in - "this is the way you will work" because this is the way the software is designed and you must conform! You must learn hot keys.
As far as I know Maya works the same way as Max.


When modeling - I usually work this way, using all the commands I need in a right click quad menu, and/or a hot keys. Want to exit Expert mode and bring the UI back. Ctl X, or click the button in the bottom right corner. Optional layout. Really nice.
And all hotkeys, toolbars, quad menus and colors can also be customized to the users desires. All optional.


Anyway - as stated before I think it's totally user preference and one package might fit an artists workflow better than another. Personally its all about efficiency. If a software fights with me or has buried features that aren't intuitive and easy to use - that seems counter-productive to me, and is why years ago - I choose to focus on Max over Maya.

 

@theANMATOR2b i really wish max would just steal the Maya marking menu. The quad is better then nothing but its really nice in maya, where after you learn the layouts of the marking menu, you can use it like a mouse gesture and simply activate and flick in a direction before it is even visually visible to use a command in it.

 

This sorta reminds me of vim vs emacs debate. Emacs is INSANELY configurable. The problem is as a result of that a user who loses their config can't work, and they can't work on someone else's emacs installation.

I think that by default software should provide well thought out and highly efficient scheme that uses hotkeys. If all the hotkeys are blank by default (like it is displayed in your amx screenshot) it is bad, because user is required to waste time researching the most optimal configuration. Also, in a commercial product a layout I'd like to use should be available out of the box by default. Autodesk is big, so they could spend a bit off their resources and provide blender keybindings for their products too.

 

That exodus will never happen unless people can no longer afford to pay for their Max subscriptions or Autodesk kills off Max in favor of Maya. Even if Blender was objectively better in every way, people wouldn't switch. The biggest part of productivity in a tool, is the user's experience with the tool. I've seen people that don't use a single keyboard shortcut in Photoshop, and still work relatively quickly. They click through menus a lot quicker than I could, because I use shortcuts for most things. They were still a bit slower than my shortcut-heavy workflow, but you get the point.

I can work really fast in Blender without tinking about it, but if I switch to any other 3D package now, my productivity drops to zero, and I have to work my way up again from there. And that's an excruciating process, that would take months, where I would be thinking most of the time "In Blender I would have been done with this already". And if any super experienced Max-user were to switch from Max to Blender, it would be exactly the same terrible experience for them. This isn't application specific, it is a universal problem of having built workflow-habbits with a tool for way over 10 years.
The other big factor is 3rd party support and pipeline integration. There still are pipelines out there where you need Max exporter plugins to get the data in the right format, and that's the only way to get the data in the right proprietary engine format (I don't know how common it is, but it exists). And exchanging files or collaborating also gets a lot harder when not everyone is using Autodesk products. Also I might have bought VRay already, if the Blender integration was easier. I assume that wouldn't have been an issue with Max.

Personally I'm still hoping for a miracle to happen, that creates relevance for Blender in the professional AAA market. For my personal indie needs, Blender suits me very well.

 

but the hotkeys are not blank by default, and most of the interaction is more logical then blenders, infact their are some really weird everyday things that blender requires multiple presses and a menu for that max and maya can just do in 1 press.

 

"Intuitive" means "I'm used to it" or "it resembles something I used in the past".

I think the discussion is walking in circles at this point.

 

Easy to pick up would be my answer, that's the one thing blender isn't.. Then again neither is something like LightWave, the main bonus with Maya is it is really simple to use, it's UI is easy to get around and WHEN you get to the point of being a hot key king then you can customise it to be exactly what you need / speed up workflow.

Also let's face it, obviously dependant on location. If you're half interested in games dev then $30.00 a month isn't really anything for a fully featured well designed powerhouse. The main reason I use it is because I don't have issues between exports.

Like in Modo I had constant issues with UE4 .FBX, if it wasn't normals then it was animations.. Some .FBX's in the earlier days from Modo crashed UE4.

 

Regarding axis orientation:
You can change the axis orientation in Maya to be either Z-up or Y-up. It defaults to Y-up.

Blender user here, I agree, Blender's FBX support of late has been pretty spotty, as they are in the midst of changing ownership of that module. So, there is a legacy and normal mode, neither of which works 100%, and each has their own problems. For my latest game, I have to use Legacy mode for exporting models with child objects, otherwise, child positioning gets lost. Blender has some sort of forward and reverse parent-child transforms, which I don't care to investigate at this time. Unfortunately, one mode or another has a broken global scale, so importing into Unity requires me to adjust it.

As for my choice for using Blender, I originally picked it up after having used Maya for so long because I was done shelling out money for it. Especially now that I have a regular job again, I don't have as much time to author content, so shelling out money for that is just ridiculous if you can't even work on it full time. You might as well hire a contractor to do some art work for you for the amount you spend monthly for Max/Maya.

Of course, I'm still on the fence about that decision. I'm glad to learn that Maya LT still has MEL support, as all my scripts are in MEL, so going back wouldn't be that bad of a loss.

However, I'd like to also chime in on the programming APIs. A large part of improving the authoring workflow is having the custom tools to efficiently pump out content, and this usually means also writing custom automation processes. That said, max, Maya, and Blender all support Python. However, the APIs themselves, I feel Maya is the cleanest. When every 3d artist first learns Maya, they learn about the DAG as the core of Maya, and being able to easily navigate that DAG in script sets it apart. I've only had experience with MEL in Maya though, so I don't know how the Python interface is, but I could imagine it's much cleaner. On the other hand, Blender's API feels like it's all over the place. You will eventually solve your problems, but doing google searches, you really have to make sure which version of the API you are looking at. Blender has improved on the API docs lately though, such that you don't have as much fragmentation as before.

One major drawback of Blender's API, is that it doesn't expose the top-level Editors, so any of your controls have to be added to one of the existing Editors. This means that you can't create your own non-modal floating windows either. In Maya, you can pretty much overhaul anything. I've seen "total conversions" that make Maya look like max. On the flip side, Blender is open source, so you *can* modify it to look like other packages, but good luck doing that. And for max, I've only used MAXScript way back when, but I had a similar experience as Blender's API.

EDIT:
I guess at some point in time, Autodesk's marketing team finally changed 3ds max to 3ds Max, so I apologize for using the lcase 'M'.

 

Yeh it has most of the stuff you would need, its why I see a plugin putting all that into a better workflow, that or a fork of Blender designed for it. I read there 2.8 roadmap is meant to improve on workflow aswel.. but I doubt they achieve much on it. Maybe 3.0, they have said they are gathering up ideas for bigger changes, someone should point them to this thread, huehuehue.

Would be interesting to see a modeling competition where each respective products professional user competes in a countdown trail to see who gets the most work done on creating an asset in category of organic, hard surface etc. I think for the pro's who have established there own shortcuts in hotkeys or ui scripts, the differences between app choices maybe small though the effort put it might vary, blender user hammering away at hotkeys

And for the average user proficient enough with there program tool of choice, I don't see a blender user having the best toolset features to achieve ease of use in workflow and being able to iterate fast on something they are making. But thats just my impression of it right now.

Competition in anything is good for everyone really, you can't argue with facts when the results show which things give better results for most people on average. Something to learn from I'm sure.

Wht? are you talking about ...expand on how its slow

Seeing as you brought up I will say its annoying how Unity can't be bothered to put in more preference options for things.. bare bones as S***..things like the viewport camera fly speed, I hate how I can't adjust the default speeds or the ramp over time so I can put a cap on the max speed it can goto, and there is no way to adjust the near camera clipping plane directly.. you have to mousewheel in, and in and in.. until near clipping plane is adjusted (its the only way to do it), enough so that you can go upto closer objects without the geometry clipping in camera. But other than that the viewport camera is fine its like Maya, almost perfect

So something Blender clearly opposes adhering to adopting then basically. Because intuitive means its pretty damn obvious how to do something I want to do... something as an example Blender lacks in the sense of transform axis plane manipulators (that have been adopted by multiple programs in the industry now, including wait for it UNITY!) seriously it screams out as un-intuitive. As your guide on how to achieve clearly spells out the required steps of going into g, then using shift+xyz.

Blender is not upto the professional industry standards as a whole, otherwise well everyone would have bailed out from under Autodesk by now, same goes for Gimp (that's an even worst state.. honestly I swear Adobe hands some of those devs a paycheck to keep it staying S***). And I can't see it ever getting better with such resistance to better improvements not being made due to defensive users so enamored with subpar workflow that's tied to hotkeys, and poor gui layouts, hardly efficient when most users use mouse and keyboard. I'm more of mouse gesturing type of person aswel, so the of hotkey central workflow sucks to me, but its a lot easier for developers implementing it that way instead of putting brain to work on designing intuitive interfaces that make sense. (And that for a large part is not as hard as it sounds, it usually just means seeing what the leading competitors did, they got success for a reason, its because most users adopted a liking to its design and workflow)

 

I....t ......... i s sl o w e r ............t h a n................. b l e n d e r.

^^Expanded

It is slower than blender
^^Condensed

 

Nope. Its hotkeys work the same way for years, and they're, because of it, intuitive.

Also, I hate those "industry standard" manipulators, because they're slow. You have to hunt for manipulator arrow with mouse, and most generous packages make those arrows few pixels thin AND make cursor collision detection withm them pixel perfect, because "screw logic". Those manipulators are especially bad in programs like daz and poser which were apparently made with assumption that user has only one hand with two fingers. In case of unity I routinely miss proper rotation manipulator and click "yellow" circle by accident.

Meanwhile in blender to move something I need to click anywhere on the object once, and then just quickly press couple of keys, and I know which axis it is locked on, and whether this is a local, global or viewport axis.

I wish this kind of hotkey movement was used more often and was more common. The "manipulator" paradigm is alright for a complete beginner but past that point int simply gets into users way.

 

I also agree that the 'G' 'R' 'S' hotkeys for Blender make modeling wicked fast. But unfortunately, I don't use them, as I guess I'm hardwired the Maya way. As for axis plane manipulation, if I think it is what is being referred to here, I typically use Ctrl+Off-Plane manipulator, in both Maya and Blender.

 

I think Andrew Price proposed a pretty solid blender UI overhaul

https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/new-blender-ui-proposal/

You can't really disagree with him, this is applicable for new users, long time ones just use the hotkeys of course.

 

you come across as dense not being able to translate what you say is slower into an actual descriptive explanation of why that is.

oh jeez you have to hunt for them lol

 

Step 1. Re-read the above about using hotkeys instead of manipulators
Step 2. Re-read the above about using hotkeys instead of manipulators
Step 3. There are no other steps.

I'm done here wasting too much time.

 

Are you trying to get the topic locked or something?

In general, anything I do with keyboard I do MUCH faster than anything I do with the mouse.

Therefore, an UI that insists that I should for some incomprehensible reason press on-screen buttons with mouse or drag on-screen objects will be much slower for me and wastes my time. If said UI keeps control I'm not using at the moment visible, then the UI wastes my screen space.

Basically the job of a pointing device in 3d modeling software should be moving points and objects, not pressing buttons.

For extra fun, try pressing a small menu button using pen tablet. Or dragging manipulators.

The only decent 3d manipulator I saw was in unreal's editor, by the way. The worst one was in DAZ studio. Can't believe people tolerate this kind of garbage in their applications.

 

I also thought a bit on how we could solve the discussion with a "trial by combat". But it's hard to really condense it down to a test that tests the program and not mainly the user. I think your example compares the artists above all else. I was thinking more along the lines of define a starting object (e.g. cube) and define a target mesh that needs to be lowpoly enough to take longer than 5 minutes but not be so complex that it can't be reasonably copied with 100% equal topology. Then with clearly defined parameters the combatants could model this object again and again until they hit the hard limit of how quick they can do it in their application of choice (of course making a script that just builds the mesh automatically disqualifies). So basically a "speedrun" competition. I'd hope that that way we get reasonably close to testing the application instead of the artists or subjective criteria (like which 20 minute hard-surface asset looks the coolest). Some onscreen clock from a website or something like that could be nice too.

You just gave a ton of examples yourself ^^. Unity as an editor for distributing 3D assets, compared to how it feels for me to do such tasks in Blender, is like comparing notepad to notepad++ for writing code, imho. "Bare bones as S***" seems like a good description. At least Unity Editor scripting can help with a lot of things and is probably easier than Blender scripting.

 

Let me actually use the word intuitive correctly: Bashing your head against the keyboard is the most intuitive way to learn Blender's interface. Blender might actually have a "make MMO" command that no one has figured out because it's hidden behind a chain of key commands that have no feedback.

 

Please keep the conversation civil. It's fine to voice your opinion but if it starts becoming abusive or rude I'll lock the thread.

As for my two cents, learning modeling concepts and getting a good personal workflow down is much more important than the tools. A lot of modeling tools have overlap so it's more about learning how to approach it and then you can apply the specific software's way of execution. That being said my personal workflow is Maya -> Zbrush then either photoshop/painter for texturing. The ability to do custom marking menus in Maya keeps my workflow fast.

^ This

 

Funny - the guys that initially created that for Maya - were hired on at Autodesk for probably double what they were making - and created the quad menu. When Maya first released that - I was really hoping Max would create something also. Only 3 releases later (2 years) we got it, and although it's not as good as Mayas it is really a great workflow tool.

Max has hot keys bindings by default - just not for those tiny few that I caped. The majority of common tools/edits to-do have default hotkeys.
Agree - There are .fig files that completely update Max and Maya's hotkeys to work like the other - if someone so chooses. Honestly providing hotkeys that match blender keybindings would be nice for those who'd like to use both softwares - I wonder if anyone has done that already?

I wish we had a thumbs up smiley face! thats what I'd put here.

 

Neg, that is hilarious. Been there, suffered that. In fact, just got re-hired by a company I left awhile back, and have discovered their anal-retentive admin types have locked down virtually ALL configurable options in Windows, IE, Chrome, Visual Studio, etc... uh, WTF? This is gonna be "interesting"...

On the up side, this discussion has led to us pulling the trigger on Maya. Back in our SGI days my wife was an Alias ninja. When I pointed out Unity had mostly-matching hot keys, it was a no-brainer. (She's constantly complaining about having to reset herself switching between Unity and Blender.)

Oh and somebody mentioned Maya has retopo built in? Another no-brainer for us.

Maybe it got a bit messy but I think this has been a pretty fact- and info-rich discussion so far.

 

I just learned that 3Ds Max hidden buttons like... because some of the 3Ds Max have not really a normal button unlike Maya have a more normal button understanding. Although some of those hidden buttons are more useful to do more diffcult task, when you figure out those hidden buttons.
- Extrude face normally= select faces> Extrude setting options> set to 0, Local Normal option> check mark icon> use at least one of the transformation tools
- Extrude edges only= hit W for the move tool> select edges> shift + drag left mouse
- Sometime need to select Use Selection Center icon, instead of selecting Use Pivot Point Center icon to scale multiple vertex at once.
- Most strangely I think 3Ds Max have no option to cut straight from only one direction in X or Y or Z axis. Only this video have this way of cutting straight. Please correct me if possible if my facts is false and there is a easier way of cutting a straight direction. It will be helpful if you tell me how to cut striaght in 3Ds Max. Because, my teacher forces me to use 3Ds Max, when I mostly use Maya.

 

I never needed to do that. There were tutorials.

Also a lot of blender commands are available in menus and menus list hotkeys next to them.

 

There is an option under edit poly and edit mesh called slice plane. This is one of many ways to accomplish a straight cut. Look up slice plane - but be aware when you use slice plane it will cut the entire mesh front & back (even with back face cull set to on in the properties) and add vertices to every edge it intersects with.

A different optional method is to just select edges (ring or row) and use the connect command, again under edit poly or edit mesh.
If you want the vertices/edges to be aligned straight select either vertices or edges and change the pivot point to selected group (I think), select the scale tool and scale towards the selection. This really doesn't scale the selection - it really aligns the selection on the equalized axis they all share.

Another option is to use the cut command - with shift or control held down it will snap (I think) to any angle which is controlled by the angle snap setting. Usually can snap to vertical/horizontal or any 5% increment in between. And when cutting you can click on one edge and then click on another edge all the way across the mesh and it will show a visual edge where the cut will be applied after clicking on the second edge.

There are probably 3-4 other ways to accomplish this. It's a basic modeling technique and Max allows the artist to perform the technique in a number of simple ways.

If you need a little more help you can PM me.

 

I use this tool many times every single day, it's awesome for cutting straight through on an orthographic axis. I will note that you may want to "Reset xForms" on the mesh you wish to cut. I've found if you don't and a lot of edits have gone on with the mesh the slice plane will behave oddly.

 

I almost done modelling.