Autodesk Developer Network members (see the topic Developer Support) have access to a debug version of the 3ds Max SDK and a special build of 3ds Max in that is compiled in debug mode.

This special version of 3ds Max has a purple animate button to distinguish it from the regular Release build of 3ds Max. There is also a Debug menu available on the toolbar. This menu provides options to review the 3ds Max command stack to see what is the current command mode and what modes have been previously pushed.

Also provided is a menu item 'Pipeline...' Each line in the dialog displayed by this command represents the state of the pipeline cache after a particular modifier or derived object. The following two letter codes identify the different channels.

• TM refers to the Transform Matrix channel: the number in parenthesis is a zero(0) or one(1) indicating the channel is invalid (0) or valid (1).
• MT refers to the Material channel, followed by its validity in parenthesis.
• OB refers to the Object, and is followed by a list in parenthesis of all the object channels. If the channel is listed, it is valid, otherwise only "--" will appear for that channel.
• TO is the topology channel.
• GE is the geometry channel.
• TX is the texture coordinate channel.
• MT is the sub-object material channel.
• SE is the sub-object selection channel.
• SU is the sub-object selection state.
• DI is the display attributes channel.

An asterisk (*) following any of these channels indicates that the channel is "locked", meaning that is a shallow copy of a channel that is owned by a cache "upstream" in the pipeline.

The numbers following "t=" and "g=" are the memory addresses of the topology and geometry channel data, respectively, which are useful for debugging problems related to the shallow copying.