Many people don't start their designs in 3ds Max so coming with premade concept art, reference images or blueprints is very common. This is such basic stuff; it should always be at hand and easy to set up. Maya does it directly from the viewport menu: View>Image Plane>Import (link to video). Blender with its Import Images as Planes official addon (link to documentation; link to video).
Additionally, unlike the other geometry, they should be prevented from switching to wireframe mode by default without the need to deal with layers to control their display mode (link to video).
Automatic Blueprint Box Function
"So many projects start the same way: creating planes for top, left and front views of a model, creating materials for each view, applying those materials to each plane, aligning the planes, turning off their backside views, freezing them, showing them even though they're frozen, etc, etc. This is such a common first step that it would be nice to have a feature where we just tell 3ds where to find the blueprint images, tell 3ds the expect height (or other single dimension) and it will build the blueprint box for us." Credit for this idea goes to scottcorrigall (link to topic).
