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Switching to Soft Selection in 3Ds Max: the Mesh Displays as a Wireframe

It looks like I accidentally pressed a shortcut where when I switch to Soft Selection tool in Edit Poly, the model looks like a wireframe. How can I fix it? I can’t find the settings for this on General Preferences or Display Preferences.

Neither resetting the max, resting my computer nor replacing the national government could fix it.


The problem was that I had mistakenly pressed the button “Shaded Face Toggle” that is located on the Soft Selection rollout of Editable Poly modify panel.

This mode seems to shade the faces with a color ramp; not limited to vertices and edges like it does by default. However, this only works when the object has no material assigned.

If the Shaded Face Toggle is active and the object has a material, then it appears as a wireframe when you enable Soft Selection.

If you still want to keep the Shaded Face Toggle active (a feature that I never find any practical use for), you need to “unassign” the material of the object:

  • Press F11 to show the MaxScript listener window
  • Then, with the object currently selected, write this code and press Enter:

$.material = undefined