About 8 months ago I had a patch committed that changed the header statistics area. It made it so that we now see “Verts:5/8” instead of “Ve:5-8”, and added the triangle count. Those changes were pretty conservative and I always wanted to revisited it. So I made a new patch that proposes much more aggressive changes.
The top two images show the current behavior in Object and in Edit mode. The bottom three are proposed Object Mode, Edit mode while nothing is selected, and Edit mode with some vertices selected:
As you can see there are icons in place of the explanatory text, which I think makes it much easier to see the numbers that matter. To my eye the top two images look like a jumbled mess that I have to dissect, while I can quickly see everything in the bottom examples.
The memory display is changed a bit. I tried having a separate area for memory stats but it didn’t work out well. Here I’ve moved it over toward the version string and it only shows the TOTAL memory in use, not with memory-mapped separated out. The number of objects in the scene (and selected) is combined with the name of the active object. It will only show items selected versus the total when it makes sense.
It certainly looks cleaner with the icons, even if there’s not much space saved. Not sure about the memory display though, haven’t used it realy myself but i can imagine it being helpful. But overall +1
I think it would be also nice to have some more resource info on the header. I t would be nice so the percent of the gpu and cpu used as well as the memory of the gpu.
Is there a reason why there is no triangle count in object mode? The tri count is honestly more useful than the face count a lot of the time. (checking speed/ram use for rendering, the poly count you’ll have after exporting to a game engine, etc)
While editing, the bmesh system keeps track of triangle count so it was pretty easy to just read that data and output it to the statistics string. In Object mode there is less detailed information available and I wasn’t able to figure out how to get that same data there.
Although it is nice having memory usage visible, I just don’t think it needs quite the quick visibility as the editing stats which is why I pushed it off to the left. But I’m sure there are lots of other ways to do it. All suggestions welcome. And criticisms too…
I’d suggest each icon/number pair could be moved closer together and leave a little extra space between each pair, just to make it a bit more obvious which number belongs with which icon. I found that I had to look all the way to the left side and ‘restart’ a couple of times to make sure I was reading it correctly.
Other than that, I think it’s brilliant. It makes it more visually oriented so I don’t have to pop into ‘logic mode’ as often. Any more ideas like this, to make Blender more visually-oriented, will be very welcome from this humble artist.
