I’ve gotten this question a lot lately at work. We recently migrated to Max 9 and the artists are still getting used to the new features. The old standby Polygon Counter utility has been removed from Max 9. In it’s place the often under-utilized viewport statistics display has been reworked to perform better and provide information. To enable the viewport statistics the default key is “7″. When the statistics are visible they, by default, display the scene totals for polygon count, vertex count, and frames-per-second.
Obviously the default readout isn’t completely useful to everyone. This was the problem with the pre-Max 9 viewport statistics. The information provided wasn’t entirely useful or configurable. Luckily that has changed in 9. In the Customize\Viewport Configuration dialog there is a new tab, “Statistics”. The controls on that tab allow you to change the information the statistics display provides. You can enable/disable polygon counts, triangle counts, vertex counts, edge counts, and the frames-per-second readout. You can also set the display to show the scene total of those counts, the selection totals, or both the scene and selection totals.
The new system is a huge improvement over the old statistics system and the old Polygon Counter utility. It’s a great update and I’m happy Autodesk chose to update the viewport statistics instead of sticking with the Polygon Counter floating dialog.
