Make 3DS Max not hate point clouds

[onitreb]

3DS Max supports point clouds and has added support for new file formats. Point clouds render nicely in Arnold. These things are good.

But Max still hates Point Clouds and feels like it hates me too:

1) Max does not recognize point cloud points while user attempts to orbit view around a 'point of interest'. This makes poly modeling using point clouds as a reference perhaps one of the most maddening experiences a person can have and is borderline cruel.

2) Display Volumes only supports 3 primitive types. It would be very useful to use meshes of arbitrary topology to hide/display point cloud points.

3) Linking/parenting is confusingly broken. The user can use a display volume as a parent-link to a point cloud only if the link is made first. If a link is attempted after the display volume is added, Max throws a 'circular dependency' error (or whatever they call it).

The following issues have been around since version 2018 and I've experience them on multiple computer systems, as have colleagues:

4) Max viewport regularly becomes unresponsive while orbiting/viewing point clouds in the viewport. (Since there is often no hard crash a crashdump cannot be submitted to Autodesk.) Max must be restarted.

5) Max regularly crashes while orbiting/viewing point clouds.

My point clouds primarily come from FARO terrestrial scanners and Recap files are produced with Recap (or FARO Scene when FARO and Recap sdk's get out of sync, which is often).

[onitreb]

6) When hitting render the user has to wait 30+ seconds for behind the scenes processing before the scene will render. Even if the scene actually renders in 1 second, you'll never get a rendered frame in less than 20-30 seconds, in my experience. 

7) If you have a large(r) point cloud on in the viewport and mistakenly start an Arnold Active Shade render there is no way to cancel the render. You may be stuck for many minutes waiting for something to happen.