As some of you are aware, there was a leak of some slides that I presented at AU in Las Vegas in early December. We've since been trying to figure out what to do about that and we're getting closer to making some decisions. Meanwhile, we might as well give you the information that is already present on the slides that were leaked.

Preface: Excalibur (or XBR) is a restructuring of 3ds Max that is intended to occur over three phases (not releases) and addresses fundamental improvements in workflow, UI and performance. 3ds Max 2010 is part of Phase I and you can see elements of some of the changes in the release. Things like the visual quality of the viewport, the use of metasl, new UIs, etc. Well, that was a launching pad for XBR, but we're really only about 50 meters above the launch pad at this point and we still have a long way to go before we reach our destination. Yes, we could have built a new codebase from the ground-up, but we'd prefer to bring you all along with us on this journey instead of forcing you to "abandon ship" because we started from scratch with an application that was new and shiny but didn't quite solve any real problems for you. For a product in our position, #1 professional tool in the world, that isn't something you take lightly. So instead, we decided to approach this in three major phases. I think Bobo put it best when he said that, “you are changing the engine of the race car while it is going 100 miles an hour”, or words to that effect. Yes, this isn’t for the faint of heart, but we’re pretty confident we can pull this off, and 3ds Max 2010 helped build our confidence.

Until we figure out our official position on revealing XBR, here are the slides that were leaked presented a little more clearly.