Hey guys.  Connecting edges and borders in polygonal modeling is really one of the foundations to creating great geometry.  It's one of those features that you simply can't work without, regardless if you are hard-surface modeling, organic modeling, or in between.  The easier it is to add additional edge loops, the faster you will be able to work, and the better your topology will end up.

There are cases, when modeling objects, especially in hard-surface modeling, where you may wish to round out curves and edges in certain areas after the fact, without adding tons of additional, and possibly unnecessary polygons to the entire mesh.  When you need something like an arch, or curved surfaces, for example, it's really easy to just slap a turbosmooth or meshsmooth modifier on the object, and voila, your previously low-poly, hard-edged model is now much smoother, and rounded where you wanted it.  Sure, this works, and is fine in a pinch.  You can subD the mesh only when rendering, etc., and that's all good.

The downside here, however, is that adding the Turbosmooth has subdivided the entire object, and now you have tons of additional edges on completely flat areas, where they aren't needed, and some edge cleanup would be necessary, especially if you have a polygon budget, or plan to redistribute the object in the end.  Cleaning up a subD mesh can be a total waste of time, especially if you only really needed more resolution only on certain areas on your mesh.  The other option is to just select the area you want to smooth, and add the subD smoothing to the selected area only; but now you are left with possibly dozens of ngon polygons, and you really want to keep everything quads.  So what's the logical way to do this, without subdividing the entire object, or starting the process all over again from scratch?  Well, just add additional edge loops of course, using Connect.

The problem here, as is the case with 99% of polygon modeling packages, is that simply connecting or splitting a ring of edges with a new edge loop still requires you to manually adjust the vertices in order to "fillet" the area you need rounded out.  3dsmax, however, has a very cool and convenient solution to this, called Flow Connect.  Flow Connect, as described in the Max documentation, connects selected edges across one or more edge rings, and automatically adjusts the new loop position to fit the shape of the surrounding mesh.  It interpolates the position of the surrounding edges, and automatically fits the newly created edge loops to "fill in" the empty spaces.  Quite handy, and very useful, as I will illustrate below:

Here, I have an object that I've extruded along a curve.  It looked good from a distance, so I went ahead and chamfered the edges, and thought I was done with it.  However, it came to my attention that the segments weren't sufficient to maintain the smooth profile integrity I wanted from the object.  However, adding a turbosmooth to this would have given me WAY too many additional edges.  I really only needed to increase the segments in the curved area to make it better in close-up shots.  So I'll use Flow Connect here, to give me the results I want, and here's how it works.

Select just ONE edge on the ring you intend to connect with a new edge (you can select more than one edge on several rings at once if you wish, or select an entire edge loop for that matter).

Navigate up to your* Graphite modeling ribbon*, and under* Loops*, in the dropdown, you will see Flow Connect, with a little arrow box next to it.  This arrow drops down another flyout panel, where you can tick "Auto Ring" if you wish.  Auto Ring allows you to select just one edge in the ring you want to connect, and it automatically adds the connection to that entire ring of edges.

Now press Flow Connect, and as you can see in the example, the new edge loop splits the ring, and interpolates the curvature for you automatically!  Just to show you what the standard connect would have done, compare this image:

As you can see, the standard connect would have done what it is supposed to, which is slice the edge ring with a new loop, but it did** not** adjust the curvature, and I would have been left to do that manually.  So in this case, Flow Connect gave me the perfect result I was looking for.  I could also have selected a number of other edges along that curve, and Flow Connect would have worked on ALL of them at once.  As in the example below:

So bottom line is, USE Flow Connect when you have a situation like this, and you will save yourself tons of time, and also create better geometry, with lower polycount, and maintain quad topology.

Yep, this is one hell of a great feature, especially when you need to edit an existing mesh.  Can't tell you how often I've completed a model and turbosmoothed it just to get rid of the ugly edge stepping around the profile.  This isn't a big deal when you're subD modelling for organic shapes, but for things like hard surfaces that might have just a few curved parts to them, turbosmoothing the wole thing is just a waste of resources.  It's easy to get through a whole model, and then realize you need more segments in parts of it. It's not always so easy to fix that problem, unless you use a feature like this.

Thanks, Maxxx.  Yes, the Flow Connect is one of my most used tools in the Graphite ribbon.  Second only to the Swift Loop tool, which I think is priceless, especially when used with the hotkey combinations to pinch/slide the loop dynamically after you place it.

There's still some things AutoDesk can do to improve on the tools, to make 3dsmax the PERFECT modeling package.  For example, we really need Distance Connect fixed, for one.  It simply doesn't work on anything but planar surfaces, which makes it far less useful than it could be.  Also, I'd like to see a lot of the edge selection capabilities we have, made available as well in polygon subobject level.  I realize it's much more important to have a high level of control over edges anyway, but it's very convenient sometimes to work at the face level.

If AD would impliment just a few of the tools in the RappaTools addon into the Graphite ribbon, like a proper distance connect, and some of the face selection tools Rappa offers, then it would easily be the ultimate polygonal modeling package; untouchable, in my opinion.  If you can add RappaTools to your workflow, combined with the Graphite ribbon, then you've got the most complete polygonal modeling workflow available anywhere, at any price.  I feel 3dsmax already contains the most robust set of edge loop and selection tools out there right now, with it's current state, but there's still some room for improvement.

Excellent tip. There are litterally hundreds of these seldom used features in Max. I run across them every now and then.

Example: whenever you extrude, bevel or chamfer an object the smoothing becomes a hard edge. Then you have to painstakingly adjust all of the smoothing groups manually.

Or click on the Autosmooth button. Works like a charm most of the time. Funny thing is, that button has always been there but I've never noticed it until I was so sick and tired of adjusting the smoothing groups manually and gave it a try.

About your comment on Max as a modelling package I have to disagree slightly. I was following a thread at CGTalk on modelling packages and most of the people over there agree that Modo was the best on the market. I can't attest to that as I have never used Modo. However I have and do use Maya (on occaison). There are a number of modelling tools Maya has that Max certainly can use especially for hard surface modellers like me.

Not to mention Maya's history library. Like photoshop you can scroll through the changes and select the one's you want to undo, unlike clicking the undo button repeatedly in Max and restarting.

Well, I'll bet when it comes to polygonal modeling, Max has more features than you think it does, but simply haven't discovered yet.  What features in Modo were they referring to, that Max doesn't have?  I'll bet whatever the issue is, there's a free Maxscript for Max to compensate the shortcoming; if it's not a case of just not knowing it was possible all along.  Max is so incredibly deep, even highly experienced users don't know all it's possible features.

As for modeling history, if you model procedurally in Max, through adding edit poly modifiers to make changes, rather than collapsing the stack, and working at editable poly, you will have a more versitile modeling history than Modo could possibly provide.  If you look at the Design Reform vids, they do a lot of procedural modeling using the modifier stack, but I'll post a quick tip example of how to use edit poly modifier to make holes in the mesh, for example, that you can later adjust the width of, even after you've added other changes to it, simply by making the holes on an edit poly modifier, in animation mode, then doing the inset command, and deleting the polygons on that edit poly modifier.  Basically, Bandolin, the modifier stack can be used exactly like layers in Photoshop, but for modeling changes.  In a much deeper capacity than Modo's modeling history.

There's also a thread on Polycount forums, which compares Maya to Max for polygonal modeling, and the consensus there was Max was just a better solution, but it could depend also on what you're used to using.

However, there's no appliction out there that can model less destructively than Max, if you model in LAYERS using edit poly and other modifiers in your stack.  Procedurally.  Only collapse the stack at the very end, or when you're completely sure you're not going to need to modify any of your changes up to that point.

I always use procedural modelling. In fact I'm guilty of not collapsing my modifiers, but I'm a hobbyist and I'm not concerned with production quality models.

However, it still does not permit you to 

1. move a vertex

2. inset polygon

3. add edge loop

and then say oh I don't need the inset polygon. In max you would have to undo the add edge loop and then undo the inset polygon and redo the add edge loop. In maya can skip step 3 and only undo step 2.

Sometimes I move 1 vertex at one end of my model then do 30 or 40 incremental moves of several vertices at the other end, and really like the result except for that 1st move I did. I can skip over and keep the 30-40 adjustments and undo the 1st one.

But the rest of what you said is true.

Well, if you insert the loop, say, on one edit poly modifier, rename that in the stack to "Loop Cut" or something familiar, then add another edit poly on top of that, where you make further topology changes  As long as the subsequent changes you made to the mesh after that layer in the stack weren't dependant on that new edge loop, you can turn it off and on, to see what effect it has, or make adjustments to it.

Insetting can be made animatable, on an edit poly modifier, by pressing the animate ticker instead of model ticker in the parameters.  Doing this, you will be able to add further modifiers above it in the stack, then go back down the stack at any time, and adjust that inset width or parameters on that edit poly level dynamically.  You simply don't have that level of control in any other package, including Maya.

Regardless, I'm referring more to the tools for polygonal modeling.  Max has the deepest tools for editing edges and polygons of any application I can think of, since the introduction of the Graphite ribbon.  Maya certainly has a distinct advantage when working with Nurbs, but that's another story.

Having used Maya before myself, I can say without a doubt it's a great modelling application for Nurbs especially.  However, modelling complex polygonal objects in Maya can get tiresome, as many tasks, that would be simple in Max, require a few more steps in Maya.  I understand what you're getting at with the history though.