Tango Icon Theme

[jimmac]

I've been occasionally working on a blender icon theme that follows the Tango Style Guideline. Not that Blender actually follows any interface guidelines on any of the platforms it runs, I just felt the default icons are somewhat 1990. I don't have complete coverage yet, but the most exposed icons are themed.



To use the icons, you sadly have to recompile blender. Here's a quick howto:

1. Download the icon sheet PNG
2. Copy this to your source folder - $src/blender/release/datafiles/blenderbuttons (note the missing extension)
3. Compile the buttons with:
   gcc datatoc.c
   ./a.out blenderbuttons
   cp blenderbuttons.c ../../source/blender/src/
4. Compile blender as you would normally do.

Where these don't work so well is the button context header. The lower opacity makes them a bit unclear. I'd prefer the current button context was highlighted differently than making the other contexts semi-opaque.

Alternatively you can use a a grayscale version of the icons.

[Oxben]

The icons look great!

But, where is the HOWTO file, I can't find it in my source tree.
Thanks.

[jimmac]

Apologies for the HOWTO. It'a actually something I've written, not in the sources

gcc datatoc.c
./a.out blenderbuttons
cp blenderbuttons.c ../../source/blender/src/

[homebody]

I, for one, vote for inclusion of this icon theme as blender default.

BTW, the antialiased font looks better aligned to screen pixels... Why are fonts blurry in my blender? Is there any configuration about turn on hinting?

[Oxben]

Originally Posted by jimmac Apologies for the HOWTO. It'a actually something I've written, not in the sources gcc datatoc.c ./a.out blenderbuttons cp blenderbuttons.c ../../source/blender/src/

Re-compiled blender.
Looks great!

I also vote for this theme as "Default theme".

[bigkahuna]

Originally Posted by Oxben ...I also vote for this theme as "Default theme".

Me too! You'll need to add a "sculpt" icon for 2.43 though. Very nice!

[Oxben]

I have a problem with at least one icon:
- The Syntax Highlighting button in the Text Editor window looks like a donut when it is not selected. And it looks like the unselected Syntax Highlighting button when it is selected.

It seems the icon sheet is "offseted" by one on this line.

But, may be I don't use the same build as you and your build as a different icon sheet.
I compiled 2.42a sources.

[jimmac]

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll try to fix the quirks when I get time to work on this again.

[Koba]

Great!

Try to get this into the next release for Christmas!

Koba

[slikdigit]

awesome! nice to see blender getting the tango treatment I'll give this a shot the next compile. Thanks Jimmac!

[Aligorith]

These look quite cool.

Aligorith

[mpan3]

Please try to get it into the next official release

[Alltaken]

got my vote......

Alltaken

[Kid Tripod]

I'm not sure if you changed the player control icons, but I don't like the ones in the screenshot.

The rest though, I didn't realise how much of an improvement they are over the standard ones until doing a quick side by side test. Much, much better.

Personally though I think you're much better off simply doing decent icons rather than going after the current fad-style that is tango/XP.

[86point5]

I'm not a C programmer, so I've never poked into the Blender sources, but maybe someone who has can answer this.

It seems to me that it would be good to have some set of icons be built into the app as default, but let the user drop an iconfile.png into some specific location in their blender directory to use as an override (loaded dynamically).

That way a single look can be distributed as the Blender standard - but if someone wanted to make a Windows/Mac/Bluecurve/etc styled version it would be a process of dropping it in without having to change it for everyone. This would also allow users to go and modify a single icon out of the set if desired (increase visibility of frequently used selection, etc.)

Is there any reason that would make it extremely difficult to add the dynamic load of icon capability into the source?

[Laughing cheese]

I happen to like XP icons...

And yes, I second[or quadruple?] the motion to make this the default Blender icon theme!

I also vote for having a standard resolution...

And do any of you actually zoom in on panels and stuff?

[Delta]

These really look great! I don't have the resources to compile myself, but, looking from the screenshots, the icons do make blender look a lot fresher. Count me as another person for getting this into 2.43.

Kind Regards,
~Delta

[Vassilios]

It would be cool if you have in the "User Preferences" a Option for Icon Themes to choose!
so the Blender user can Choose what a Icon theme he like!
.....the normal Icon Theme or this new one.....or maybe upcomming others also!

[jimmac]

Originally Posted by Kid Tripod Personally though I think you're much better off simply doing decent icons rather than going after the current fad-style that is tango/XP.

I'm affraid I'm only capable of fad, indecent icons.

[slikdigit]

any chance that these, or future varient can be incorporated into cvs? If not for the next release, at least it might be worthwhile considering them for the upcoming 2.5 ui redesign- some might argue that changing the icons too much (esp. considering that they are not themable without a recompile) hurts people learning from current tutorials and documentation. 2.5 being planned as a clean break, would make it a likely candidate for changing the icons.
On the other hand, these icons probably are recognizable/similar enough, that it could be safe to do right away.