The Tips in detail

 "How to get an adaptive helix?"

This one was suggested by Mathieu Rivest on Engram's Mailinglist.

How to make an helix perfectly smooth at any resolution? According to 3ds max reference this seems to be impossible.

Well, just in case no one has offer any viable alternative to using the spring dynamic object (which I would personnaly hate), I believe I may have a nice solution.

Make your helix, collapse it into an editable spline, then transform all your vertices into smooth vertice. Now collapse it into a nurbs curve (or simply NURBS in max 3.x). Go in the curve approximation rollout, remove adaptive and simply change the number of steps you want to keep the curve smooth.Higher the steps, the smoother (duh :)).

From here you might want to go into sub-object/curve and REBUILT the curve and put a lower amount of CVs since helix are so heavy in vertice amount and converting into nurbs doesn't quite help in that matter (remember to only keep the general shape of the curve, since nurbs are parametric you'll always be able to keep them smooth with other controls).

Now, if you have a modified helix that has cornered vertices or bezier corner vertices, converting into nurbs won't quite solve your problem since you'll end up with having a few places in your curve where tangency will be broken. So in this case, since I believe you also said in your post that the curves will be use for lofting purpose, you can (if your loft doesn't have any special modifiers that will break the stack downwards) convert the loft into a nurbs surface and from there play with the rendering surface aproximation settings to keep your surface smooth. (you may also have to close the surface in either rows or columns to keep the tangency on the surface's end smooth). This solution might now really be all that good and also will end up being time-consuming and polygon-heavy. But it's still an alternative! :)

Last thing you want to do if really *NOTHING* else works is to recreate the helix using snaps/vertex snaps with a new curve from which you'll be able to play with the steps settings. Wish you good luck on that one though and suicide might be as viable an idea :). Hope all of this helps!

Regards,
Mathieu Rivest
Vircom, Inc.