Excalibur, Hello !

[samuel_bubat]

While people are allready discussing the new ipad on 2 pages.. Autodesk introduces "Excalibur"
unnoticed!? Wake up guys

[rmejia]

I was surprised no one had mentioned Excalibur (XBR) before here. Joined the webcast the other night. What most interested me is the talk about improving stability & performance. The idea of a new file format seems interesting, depending on it's interoperability with other apps. The ideas of changing the UI .... concern me if they are thinking of further spreading or rearranging commands in the Microsoft ribbon UI

Links to Excalibur info:
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/excalibur_xbr_notes
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/e...r_xbr_revealed

[Codi]

Definitively interesting, be sure to watch the webimar:
http://adinc.na4.acrobat.com/p23782361/
(It's on the second link rmejia posted)

Anyone has an idea of when will it be fully implemented? My guess is 3 years, but I think there is no official statement.

I'm also afraid of the UI changes, hope they polish it a lot more before releasing something like MAX 2010. The rest of points they highlight on the roadmap look very promising.

[beestee]

The ribbon UI is actually starting to grow on me. With AutoCAD in particular I find myself stumbling onto useful tools that I have never used before.

What I found interesting in the XBR initiative is that the phases are not aligned with new releases. In recent years they have shown a lot of favor to thier subscription licensing, and once again it seems that they are making another big push in that direction.

[rmejia]

I've become used to the ribbon in Revit too. The thing that bugs me about the ribbon most is the location. I saw a video from MS where they detail how they developed the ribbon. From their tests it was shown that most people tend to look to the top area of the screen first when looking for commands. So they stuck it up there. I use a 27" screen, and it is wider than taller. I much rather have the ribbon on the sides. I think in some Autodesk programs like inventor there is that option. In Max I have the right menu area double in size, and still have space to work. I like the Adobe layout (although some people detest their UI). I like this option, which keeps it small at the top:
http://area.autodesk.com/th.gen/?:76...tel/Slide9.JPG

[Codi]

I guess that it's a matter of taste. I hardly do any serious modeling task lately, so I have the Ribbon hidden anyways. The new selection floater is too slow, as is MAX 2010 starting up, it is really afecting my productivity:
-Start Max
-10 sec
-20 sec
-30 sec
-...
-[Mmmh, lets check if there is something new in the forum]
-...
-10 min
-[Oups! What was I doing?]

Anyways, there is much more interesting stuff in XBR.

In the webimar they talked about the improvements on the viewports. That there could be floating viewports and you could have one of them doing a VRay render while working on another view. Sort of the RT we have now but with a lot more possibilities. I'm sure someone here knows a few things that are going backstage

It seems that we could finally have a much needed improvement on the material editor, along with a powerful node editor to control everything on a scene.

The possibility of a new file system is interesting too. There could be incremental file saves, so you only save the things that changed from the last save, improving a file size and opening the possibility of having an inbuilt versioning system.

[jujubee]

Well, it seems they are well aware of the performance issues and feel that they can tackle most of these changes without completely rewriting the code from the ground up. That's something...

[Neilg]

The only issue I have with the ribbon in max and autocad is how absurdly slow it is. You change from poly to element selection, move the mouse over to the ribbon for your tools and when you get there it's still blank and hasnt updated yet.
Autocad in general is far too slow these days too - I couldve sworn I was using autocad 97 to open more detailed drawings than ones i'm looking at now with less slowdown. And this computer is considerably better too.

I like the look of the planned changes, and I hope they all go through and work well.

[cadmonkey33]

I think the planned changes look good.
Hopefully we'll get drag out viewports on a second monitor.
And presumably, if they're opening up the .max format, we might even finally get decent backwards compatability.

[sandykoufax]

If they retain the modifier stack, I'm welcome.
I really like edit poly stack.

[mike_kennedy]

Would love to go all node based.....Zookeeper would be great if my company were on a newer version of Max

[rmejia]

Just got this email:

Thank you for attending Autodesk’s Project Excalibur webcast last month. We appreciate your participation and hope you found the content valuable.

In the spirit of continuing to share information with our valued 3ds Max/3ds Max Design user community, we wanted you to be the first to get a sneak peek at some interesting videos. When we briefed you on XBR, we should have told you that you won’t have to wait too long for some of it to come true. This is just a small sample of what we have in store for you. XBR is happening, it’s real, and you’re part of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo8zPOS_1ds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b65ndE24VCE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VktIBuySEfE

Please share these videos with your colleagues and friends, and be sure to stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!