Section Eight - New in Max 7

3ds Max 7 has added a number of improvements to the uvw mapping tools and workflow. We'll quickly cover some of them here.
First, a handy addition. Seams in your UVW mapping groups are now highlighted in bright green directly on your 3d mesh. It's a minor thing, but it makes it much easier to visualize how your coordinates are laid out and where any problem areas may lie. This setting is on by default.
Another great time saver is a new addition to the Editable Poly tools. A "Preserve UVs" checkbox allows you to modify your mesh without affecting the mapping coordinates. In practice, this option isn't perfect, but it'll save you a lot of time and effort if you ever have to make changes to your mesh after mapping coordinates have already been applied. See the images to the right for a comparison. A single vertex was moved to the left, first with this option turned off, then with it turned on.
The Stitch tool has another minor improvement too. Previously, it would scale only the edges that were being stitched. Now it has an option to scale the entire UV cluster that it's attaching. This is a big improvement when you're stitching two clusters that have dissimilar scales, but which are internally consistent.
Other improvements include an optimized Pack UVs routine (which yields much more useful results when you run Pack UVs or one of the automatic mapping tools.) Edge Loop selection mode is also useful, as is the Planar Angle option for viewport selection.