Okay, I’ll be starting my personal vendetta with 3ds Max UI!
What I aim is something like the Maya team did in 2011 for Maya when they converted their UI to Qt. This doesn’t mean that 3ds Max as we know it has to change, but the underlying technology would make a huge difference for users and developers! Not to mention that Qt is cross-platform *wink wink*
Anyway, this is definitely a long term project since something like this would definitely take time to implement, but hell, no pain no gain right! Just imagine being able to completly customize your UI or as a developer, to create your tools and seamless embed them in 3ds Max! If you want you can read a bit more about Qt on Wikipedia.
Long story short, how can you help!? Easy, check the link below, it’s for Autodesk UserVoice, if you are not registered please register and vote. Share the link, ask your friends and coworkers to support the idea.
On my side, I’ll make the best I can to raise awareness with Autodesk that their user base wants this and is up for the challenge. Let’s do this!
Vote here!
4 Responses
Jenni O'Connor
Okay. 🙂
Jenni O'Connor
…and let me expand on that a bit. 🙂
There is already QT in 3ds Max in the Slate editor, PFlow, Caddies, the Welcome screen, and likely more things I’m not aware of. QT is definitely a tool in our toolbox. We also recently hired the two developers of the Slate editor, Roman and Ulrich from Thinking Apes, and these guys are fantastic with QT.
That said, Max is a massive program with a lot of dependencies on things working the way that they do. We have the competing problems of wanting to revamp things as you describe – and we want cool UI as much as anyone – and needing to keep things working for developers and users. I don’t think taking a year off to do UI is going to make anyone as happy as it would be to add new features, so we need to balance the need to evolve the UI and to add modern and amazing fun things to play with.
Absolutely, please got to User Voice and add some votes for the things you are passionate about. This helps a lot, and we review this regularly.
– Jenni
Artur Leao
Thanks for sharing Jenni! I love to know a bit more that’s for sure and I’m positive everyone else coming by will also like to find out more! I’m somewhat aware of the dependencies that exist on something like this, but like I said, we got to make our voices heard to help you guys prioritize!
It’s great to have this feedback from the ADSK team, and you can count on us to keep being demanding! In the end, we all win.
Thanks a bunch Jenni, hope to see you around more 🙂
Aaron
A problematic issue of this, while I am for it, would be some parts of max’s maxscript intergration was done pretty lazily, over the course of many many years and many many developers no doubt. Some things that come to mind are the skinops commands, or any ops commands for that matter. There are not appropriate maxscript hooks built in, so maxscript literally ‘clicks’ the button in the ui, if the modifier panel is not open, or the object is not actually selected, it wont work. So a QT UI rebuild, which I would be for, would have lots of landmines like this, as well as break compatibility with previous scripts or tools. If Autodesk went this would be a good opportunity of fix this and other issues, like the gradient ramp not having any accessibility, but say goodbye to new features for one and a half release cycles if they do this.