Hm. Nice idea. I like that they are repositionable. I think having them follow the selection is a great idea. I know me enough to think that having them jump around might piss me off. Be yellin' at 'em "Just stay where I put you!" I get the intent, but there might be a difference between a ready butler and a frickin' grasshopper ;-).

I could be wrong. A "don't follow" option could be good.

Props.

Is this interface will be available for choosing modeling tools as well? Or just for editing tools?

i don't use max but i really like what i see

This is very nice. I like the floating in "Command Panel." So far I used the panel on a second monitor to get the maximum space for the viewports. Of course I had longer ways with the mouse. This here is alot better. There when I need it away when I do not need it.
Integrating the altering options for modelling in the viewport is very handy. I am sure it will save some time for me.

Regards

Nice one!

OMG! But, Autodesk, what happen!!! What is becoming Max??? Like Sketch-Up! Go, go icoland... Cumbersome and inconvenient. Now I have to follow with three different areas on the screen for modelling: the Command Pannel, the Ribbon, and now those little buttons that floating around the screen depending what I select. But to create a static interface no??

The Command Panel (which I don't know, seems to sawn at the top) that is disappearing is uncomfortable. I want to decide when disappear or to remain there. In fact, right now I now associate a shortcut to enable or disable it when I want. Also shown in the video that the user is that it is not so "uninhibited" in using those float buttons. And every time I select a different edges... boom! The UI change position: Boring and it wastes time.

And then the BIG icons of the Ribbon, plus textual descriptions are just disastrous. Simply icoland ... here it seems a product for children.
Please, make a static UI. This animated ribbon pannel, floating button is uncool!!!
If this UI work for MS Office, you don't use it in all software in the World...





Impressioni? MA che cosa sta diventando Max??? Macchinoso e scomodo. Ora devo gestire tre diverse aree dello schermo: il Command pannel, il Ribbon e ora quei pulsantini fluttuanti che se ne vanno a spasso per lo schermo in base a cosa seleziono. Ma creare un'interfaccia che stia ferma no??? :crying: :crying: :crying:


Il Command Panle che sia a scomparsa è scomodissimo. O decido io quando deve scomparire o che rimanga li. Infatti attualmente ho associato uno shortcut che permette di ativarlo o disattivarlo QUANDO voglio io. Inoltre si vede anche nel video che l'utente non è che sia poi così "disinibito" nell'utilizzare quei pulsantini. E poi le icone mastodontiche della Ribbon, più le descrizioni testuali proprio sono disastrose. Altro che icoland... qui sembra un prodotto per bambini. Attimi a raggiungere Sketchup!

looks fun and very productive! i can´t understand why i should get back to a static interface when i can have something context sensitive right under my cursor? nice!

looks promising to me

"nice option - But am I missing the additional options for the extrude or bevel (noraml, group, by poly) ???"

Look closer - there is a drop-down list right below the black Bevel label of the Caddy.

dont we already have those things in floating menu boxes ?! is this just a polishment ?

Quote:"So XBR means you can choose the modify panel the graphite modeling tools or the caddies all for the same workflow?"

No, XBR is the *process* of turning Max from what it is today into what it will be in a couple of years. "Process" is the keyword here. I would compare this to puberty. Max will be growing up, but it will be UGLY in between childhood (the last 14 years of development) and adulthood (the later part of the next 10 or so). You cannot expect the Command panel to go away overnight (I would be quite upset if it did) just because other systems to access and control the tools are being added. This does not mean that the duplication of access paths will last forever.

Just speculating...

Bobo.. so 3dsmax will get pimples...... ..... Yuck

Bobo, I understand that we are in the middle of a process and we will have bumps. The problem for me is that I don't feel that 3dsMax is facing to the right direction. When I've heard about XBR, after those slides were "leaked", I thought that.. "hey at last, they will make it great" and I was anxius to see it's next step. After those videos that Autodesk call them part of XBR, I feel really worried about the future of the program that I use most.

It's not only me, I've read a bunch of bad comments from many users and some of them are great. I don't know i but I feel that all this XBR thing, is affected by the marketing and that blocks many things. I hope that I'm wrong...

regards,
Nick

this is gonna be so fun, to see 3ds max handle this UI, i think guys at AD are pushing something not relevant, they need to clean and make a better interface, you're just adding junk and useless icons to a software already heavy and slow compared to the rest of the world.

I was thinking to come back to Max, tried 2010 trial and crashed so many times i got frustrated, wont ever come back to this software. The heavyness of the interface is what makes max completely unstable and makes it crash, the ribbon is nice yeah but at what price ?, having something that closes and open, everytime pops up text boxes with suggestion, all this graphic that pops up slow down people who work with this in professional field, stop adding stuff like this for children, its not a videogame, it should be a professional tool.

I cant stand ribbon interface on adobe products even, its useless it adds what ? a bevel on icon border ? some nifty shadow ? but slow down the entire software, way to waste resources.
This is kinda pathetic, every year AD receive tons of comments about this and they keep walking and working in the opposite direction.

I'm done with max for good, sadly i wasted a lot on this software, but now i'm done, i'm gonna just sit down and enjoy the show, because this software is gonna become a videogame interface, at least those are the signs so far.

I give a thumbs up to Ken for this sneak peak. I think the problem some are having is that the videos show a work in progress, and it looks like there is still a lot of mouse travel on the screen. What we have to be ready for is a UI that feels unfinished while the transition takes place. I'm not a big fan of the ribbon, and do everything I can in 2010 to not use it, but if they can find a way to make it fast and somehow work better with a new "command panel" I will keep an open mind.

Ken, you've just added a third element to an interface which is already a mess. As before the elements are unrelated to each other.

Please can we have a NEW interface for Max? As in all-new, built from scratch.

I have to say I really like it, the smaller see through panels to work with beside the model rather than over to the side or in a rollout tucked away, also like the look of being able to hide and show the command panel in the first video could be useful way of maximising screen space if your only using one screen, save from popping in and out of expert mode I guess...

Though overall the max interface is quite clunky at the moment the idea seem to be to change it into something faster and more useful over the next few releases, just be thankful its not as hideous as the Maya one

what i would love to see is some fuzzy logic being incorporated somehow. In Flame, you have this technology in the master keyer whereby rather than a whole slew of possible parameters being exposed, it very cleverly works out which parameters you need and brings just those up as you work. A really simple variant of this kind of workflow would be for example, the operators we see in the caddies, should automatically switch if we click on a face, edge, vertex, pivot, bone, shape, etc. so when modeling in sub object mode, you could ideally have a modeless subobject.

also it would be cool if these caddies could be tied to the mouse cursor and brought up with the space bar wherever the mouse is (a little like Maya spacebar hot menu thing) this way you wouldnt constantly have to move them around when they get in your way, you just hold space bar when you want to see them and they appear right where you already are and then adjust your parameters and let go and its gone. This is also a problem i have experienced in nuke when using the floating dialogues, they keep getting in the way.

and talking of compositing, i love in Fusion, where you have a dynamic floating pivot in the roto tool. this would be sooo cool in max, it would be nice and simple in orthographic views, and doable in perspective views. so for a selected object, wherever you click in a view is where your virtual pivot point is, this operation then gets transfered back into the actual pivot, ie an off-axis rotate (using the virtual pivot) would actually be a move and rotate on the actual pivot. its such a pain to be constantly setting up differeing transform coordinate spaces using pick and so on.
In perspective views, i would think a cool way would be when you first click in the view you create a virtual ground plane which with a hot key can be made to slide up and down in z space(max z-up) (aligned local to the camera) you then let go of the hot key and now your mouse cursor goes in x and y on that plane to get to a point in 3d space which you can now use as a pivot. Sounds like a lot of operations, but in practise would be pretty fluid.

also i think this may be pointed at in the xbr web conference, but i asked a couple of years ago, could scene states, layers, render passes all be one unified system therfore making rendering multiple passes much much easier and more powerful.

and please, sort the damn flickering fur. its whenever i turn on the fur dynamics. If there are no dynamics its ok, still there subtly but not so bad, but when i turn on dynamics, just nonsense. I tried every thing, scanline, mr, all types of shadows and lights, bias, shadowmapsize,local render, net render, etc, to no avail. I have seen loads of posts on this, half the people say they have never seen it, other half are pulling their hair out ( ;-) sorry! ). whats weird is that colleagues have had the same issue in xsi and c4d! anyhow, with dynamics i seem to not get it to work. If there is a solution and its a workflow issue, then respond to the posts. i never get any response from autodesk staff when i post about stuff like this, if it is broken then bloody well tell us and we can then try an alternative instead of blaming ourselves and trying to problem solve it for days.

fingers crossed, and lets be grateful that there is movement. at least autodesk are realising they need to rewrite the core. Multithreading and node based everything for me would be all i really need to be very very happy, and the rest is icing. Oh but also fix all the current issues where things dont do what they are supposed to (like the hair shadows).

oh and all the pflow boxes please! hahaha yes im getting greedy but hey if you dont ask.

anyway thanks for the info, its going to be very interesting.

paul

I'm on board with some other comments..and admittedly I'm a curmudgeon, but you've got the cube, and the wheel, AND the ribbon, and it's starting to feel a bit mish-mashy, as if there isn't a consistent vision for the interface. If it all had been introduced at once I would have thought you had a big meeting, everyone had conflicting ideas how the UI should work, you debated, took a vote, and implemented all the ideas anyway. I love workflow improvements, but it's starting to feel like that's the sole focus...is the ribbon considered a 'feature'? Because if I could choose between better fur, better cloth, fluid, or the ribbon, the ribbon would come in about dead last.

Forgot to mention: I'd be a lot less grumpy if one of these leaked 'new features' videos showed Toxik-like integration in Max as they did for Maya.

Here at Ilion we have developed lot of productions ready tools.
So I can say what we expect as an animation studio taking 3ds Max to the max...

The caddies seems really interesting and powerful but the ribbon and the office stuff are not professional...
Please approach all the possibilities of .NET to build a completely new user interface. Yes, rebuild the UI from scratch!
For example build custom controls (they are incredibly easy to create with .NET) library to create a new UI style.
So an artist knowing VB.NET would be able to; extend them using the established style, customize easily the user interface etc.

Use the powerful stuff of today. We need a professional tool where the artist feel comfortable.

@Meshbase:

If you don´t need fluid systems, smoke volume rendering, a working crowd simulation, multiresolution sculpting then don´t use it. But it is good to have. Most 3D Packages has it implemented. Even those ADSK already bought up, so I can see no big problem to do it.

Really I don´t need another UI Script to extrude a polygon. If I need it I can download it at scriptspot. I know that sounds brutal, but thats what I think. I like the new UI but for me this is no feature benefit its only a UI usability facelift.

But maybe what we see here is the XBR Design Version (OSX) with all the new nice buttons. And not the XBR only version.

I decide for the 3dsmax only version, and hopefully with the XBR (only) version the fluid systems, smoke volume rendering, a working crowd simulation and multiresolution sculpting will be included as the difference to Design.

Guess how much people will drop their Design version then :-)

best regards

rog!

Actually most packages don't have all those. Maya doesn't have crowd simulation or multiresolution sculpting, Softimage doesn't have fluid systems or multiresolution sculpting, Houdini doesn't have crowd simulation or multiresolution sculpting.

I know one which is for free :-) It has all that features but its UI is very bad... :-)

The UI was bad! Have you ever seen the 2.5 version??

Someone mentioned the SPACE bar and I thought I'd jump on that. It is such an important key, because of its size and location, to waste on locking the current selection. For Maya it is central to its paradigm of working quickly in the interface and I hope you will consider making better use of it. Don't waste it as it currently is now. It could be essential to the new paradigms your exploring and I thought it worth saying that I don't think there will be a revolt if Selection Locking was moved to another key.
Does anyone here think that is crucial to your workflow? So much that another key won't do?

"Does anyone here think that is crucial to your work flow? So much that another key won't do? "

No it is not crucial to my work flow. I have re-mapped the space bar / selection lock long ago. It can be used for many better things. I wish I could set it to a specific custom quad menu. I'm sure it could be used for something more efficient.

"I hope that the Tooltip help of the graphite Modeling Tools can be disabled"

That can be done manually:

In the max_root_folder/ui/ribbon/ there is a folder called 'tooltips', just rename that to something else and tooltips be gone!

@ triztan... sorry, but.... i can´t help myself, but can´t you guys just be grateful that there are tooltips and help where and when you need it?

if you are kind of a pro you could always use shortcuts or quickly press the button to not see the extended help!? in my case it´s just fine the way it is, when i stay longer on a button it´s normally because it´s a command i don´t use that much and i want the help to explain me how to use it. me likes!

@christoph

I think we need options to turn things on or off to fit the interface to both the pro and the fresh users.

Just like the viewcube and steeringwheels, I'm glad I can turn those off since I've got a 3d-controller, but I can imagine that they are helpful for a new user.

Everybody has a different work-flow and personal preferences so the best thing Autodesk can do IMHO is to make it all highly adjustable and use sensible default settings.

Personally I am really intrigued by these new Caddies. I really like the efforts to reduce mouse travel from the viewport back over to the Command Panel. I know the flyout menus and hotkeys can be customized for your most heavily used tools, but as someone who frequently has had to work on other peoples machines I try to stick with a primarily default setting.

I really appreciate Autodesk's efforts to take the best features of the different softwares they have acquired and blend them into the others. Spreading out the strong points and reducing weaknesses. in the case of Caddies, I am strongly reminded of Maya's Hotbox, Drop Downs, and Tear Off menu's. I am also glad to see them incorporated in a way that is still intuitive to a Max user.

http://www.frankdelise.com/

very first designer of 3dsmax since v1 . he has to handle it again .

oh don't tell me Frank is back on it that is great news !!!

re: shortcuts vs UI
Of course we expect experts that spend all day in max to learn the keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't mean we shouldn't make UI faster for everyone else. The caddies do not need to be limited to modeling workflows either. If you read these comments, many, many people see value in them. It's OK if you do not.

Have I missed something here? Are the caddies not just a new looking floating dialog box that you can open with the small buttons next to some of the commands. I'm sure there may be work flow differences and speed improvements, but from what I can tell I have that work flow as it stands now. Who knows though as these are sneak peak videos and I don't know how they carry across the UI.

re: mahi
Yes, they are a replacement for existing dialog boxes. That's all we're saying they are. They are faster to work with than the existing dialog boxes due to reduced mouse movement. We aren't making any grand claims about them. Part of XBR is getting more operations directly in the viewport to maximize efficiency. This is one small part of what we're doing. But, it is a part you should expect to see more of, not less of.

I my professional opinion, when my scenes get larger and larger or more complex I find working with caddies completely a pain.
They are very slow to open.
They dissappear while your graphic card fights with the display of what to show.
It might have been a good idea at the time Autodesk, but I think its Quite clear, PEOPLE WANT THE OLD STYLE BACK, or at very least the option to use the old style.
Theres on old saying Autodesk, If its not broke, then don't fix it. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE use some common sense and start putting 3ds max back to how it was like in 2010 version.
Its great having new feautures etc, but please test these things first before you put them in official releases.
I don't think it works very well.
Another thing Autodesk...I think you have completely over complicated the scene explorer..., I never ever use it now. I find it annoying. So I use OLD STYLE FLOATING Scene. But I guess thats another topic altogether. RANT over for NOW.
Atuodesk...please listen to the people who buy your software.