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Layers can help organize the contents of a scene.
Layers are like transparent overlays on which you organize and group different kinds of scene information. The objects you create have common properties including color, visibility, renderability, and display. An object can assume these properties from the layer on which you create it. Using layers makes it easier to manage the information in your scenes.
For example, you might want to set up a layer for importing only detailed, custom furniture. To do this, you create a layer and set Viewport Display to Bounding Box. This will keep the viewport display quick. Then, whenever you want to import new furniture, switch to this layer. You don't need to set up your viewport display every time you import new furniture. Also, if you don't want to render the furniture, you can turn off that layer's Renderable property.
The Layer Properties dialog displays layers, as well as their associated objects. This makes it very easy to organize, and make changes to objects in a scene. With the Layer Properties dialog, you can adjust property settings at either the layer level, or individually for each object. Each property can be toggled between various states, including the ByLayer state. When an object’s property is set to ByLayer, the object inherits that setting from the layer it is associated with.
When you begin a new scene, 3ds max creates a special layer named 0. By default, objects on layer 0 are assigned random colors, visibility settings are on, renderability is unlocked, and viewport display is set. You can’t delete or rename layer 0, the current layer, or layers containing objects.
If you haven’t created any layers, 3ds max places objects you create on layer 0 by default. After you create objects, you can reassign them to different layers, including those residing on layer 0.
You can specify layer visibility individually for each viewport. If you don’t want to display a certain layer, you can hide that layer. 3ds max hides the layer in the viewport, but not in any output rendered image of the scene.
You can specify layers to display objects shaded, in wireframe mode, as a bounding box, or as whatever is set on the Viewport Properties menu. Using this method, you can have different objects displayed differently in the same scene.
You can display layers in See-Through mode. See-Through mode temporarily displays selected objects in translucent form so you can see through them without applying special materials. You can toggle See-Through mode for all objects per layer.
Note: You can control whether newly created objects adopt the default layer settings on a per-object basis by using Default To By Layer For New Nodes in the Preferences dialog.
You can create and name a layer for each conceptual grouping (such as walls or terrain) and assign common properties to those layers. By grouping objects into layers, you can control their display and make changes quickly and efficiently. When you name layers, you can use names of variable length up to 255 characters. These names can contain letters, digits, blank spaces, and the special characters dollar sign ($), hyphen (-), and underscore (_).
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