Even after having worked in 3dsMax for so long, I find myself thinking of small workflow improvements that aid in daily workflow. Today while I was lighting a character, with multiple lights with different colors to them, I thought it would be nice to see the target line represent the color value of the light. So it would change something that looked like this:
To something that looked like this:
Now I realize that there are other ways to easily view or find lights from their color, like using the light lister, or the new max layer manager in 2015 to see these things, however in this situation it seemed pretty quick and elegant to go this route. In order to quickly set the wirecolor of all of the lights in my scene, I wrote the simplest of one off scripts that would handle it for me.
for i in lights do ( try (i.wirecolor = i.rgb ) catch () )
It simply grabs the color value, and sets the wirecolor to it. If you update the color of the light, and want to update the wirecolors, simply re-execute the script. And if you find yourself annoyed by the garish colors that you have created, you can always go back to the old wirecolors by simply executing this one line, to put them back.
for i in lights do ( try (i.wirecolor = (color 255 229 0) ) catch () )
I just thought I would share this idea for helping keep your scene and workflow fast and clean.