Viewport Mouse Focus & Focal Point Sampling

There's been a feature out in max since 2013 called "AutoFocus Viewport" that allows you to maximize a viewport from a multi-view display, based on the current location of your mouse (with the hot key for maximizing a viewport (Alt+W)). In other words, you can maximize a viewport simply based on whether your mouse cursor is currently in that viewport. Previously you had to R-Click to activate a viewport before maximizing. This functionality can be enabled/disabled from the "Mouse" tab of the "Customize UI" options.The "Mouse" tab was implemented in release 2013 and also contains some other features including some old favorites that used to be in the "Viewport" tab of the "Preferences" options.

There have been some additional issues reported by users related to a new 2015 viewport navigation feature (not documented very well IMO) to resolve some older viewport navigation complaints. Any long time user is familiar with max's perspective view problem zooming and panning in large scenes. For example, after a lot of zooming in to an object, the increment of zoom and pan becomes very small and you are forced to zoom extents to re-establish an appropriate increment based on your current view/proximity. "Viewport Focal Point Sampling" was implemented to try and fix this, but apparently didn't work very well. You can follow some of the threads about this here: Focal point Sampling Issues. It is reportedly fixed in Serve Pack 3, though one of the user comments on the SP 3 release states that it is not fixed. SP3 is included in Extension 2 for subscription user and can also be downloaded here available from here:

3ds Max Design 2015 SP3

3ds Max 2015 SP3