How many of you are aware you can change texture paths in a .max file without even loading 3ds Max? Why did we need to do this? The existing architecture is too much of a “black box” for data and making it difficult for some users to migrate to newer releases or collaborate efficiently across various networked project structures.

One of the first goals established for Project XBR was to reduce barriers with how data persists in 3ds Max and to better control how data gets loaded, stored and unloaded. XBR:Data could possibly touch on several aspects of Import/Export, but we also set out to change the main .max file format and Load/Save. And whether you knew it or not the 3ds Max 2010 file format is significantly different than how it was previously structured. This metamorphosis has been occurring for several years completely transparent to end users, but with XBR Phase 1 and the 3ds Max 2010 release there was a very key aspect of this work that surfaced.

NEW in 3ds Max 2010: The 3ds Max scene file now provides Asset Metadata in a separate stream which can be accessed and modified by external applications. The Asset data is generated and managed by the AssetManager and AssetUser objects.

If you are looking for more technical details about what this really means please see Christopher Diggins blog post "Reading and Modifying Asset File Paths in the 3ds Max File". For the rest of us that don't really get into the nuts and bolts of things... in simple terms we have started to restructure the .max file format to be more of a package file format containing several streams of data. Today most of those streams are not readable outside of the 3dsmax.exe, but with 3ds Max 2010 we did expose a couple key interfaces that would enable users to begin altering data dependencies without even loading 3dsmax.exe

What's next for XBR:Data? What if you could Save to a Previous Release!?