In this short tutorial I am going to show you how Hold and Fetch commands work in 3ds max. These commands can save you a lot of time. You can make use of these commands before any heavy simulation or operations that may crash 3ds max. Let’s learn some more about Hold and Fetch commands.

Hold command saves the scene state in the system memory and creates a *.mx file (inside autoback folder) with name maxhold so we can restore the max file even after the crash by using Fetch command. Let’s take a look how it works.

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Step1

Here, I have a very low poly mesh which is pretty much looking like a face with no details. Let’s hold the scene by pressing Ctrl + H.

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Step2

I moulded the mesh in to a very basic face by poly modeling as shown in the image but let’s say I want that low poly face geometry back and unfortunately got my undo buffer cleared but remember, I performed a hold before starting so I can easily get there by fetching the scene using Fetch command.

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Step 3

Now, we can use Fetch (Alt + Ctrl + F) command in order to get back to the point where we held the scene. Pressing Alt + Ctrl + F will pop up a confirmation dialog saying “About to Fetch. OK?” Click Yes to fetch the scene and that’s it.

Please note that, after fetching the scene you can’t undo it back as Fetch command clears redo and undo buffer. If you want to keep the undo and redo record then you can use Save as option instead of using Hold and Fetch.
I hope you enjoyed this short tip. See you until next time. Good luck