I’m very new to this forum, literally my first post.
I’ve been using Blender for 4 years now as a car designer (ex Land Rover, Bentley, Dyson). I wanted to make a small unit with a few buttons and maybe dials to improve the user experience for blender users. I have some ideas of shortcut/hotkeys i could implement, but wanted to hear from all the newbies and pro users what they would find helpful… (or tell me this is a totally dumb idea and go away lol).
Welcome!
As a industrial product designer working on bicycles, Blender helped to easier visualize new ideas and concepts. Product design is a niche, but it seems to be growing. For example featuring in courses (on lemanoosh).
Your idea to have shortcuts available does resonate with me, as I have gone this path myself. I am using a logitech g600 mmo mouse with 12 buttons.
Only to me remembering more than 6 button-shortcuts on this mouse is proven to be difficult to me, and I keep coming back to the standard blender shortcuts. Can anyone relate tho this? Also with different add-ons come different shortcuts, and it becomes too complicated to remember everything.
So I would prefer a somehow visual shortcut bar with icons, something like the macbook touchbar but then a keyboard. Combined with a add-on that manages the shortcuts for me. It would only become very specific and expensive I think
For now I use all navigation related shortcuts on my G600, view-left, right, front. Center to view, camera view. That works quite well.
I like the idea of the Macbook style touch bar, although physical buttons for this may make more sense, it;s the whole hand eye coordination thing.
So far i’m looking at hotkeys for mirroring, easily apply and remove materials without going into the blender file menu everytime, single key add lights… that sort of thing. Things that beginners will find easy to understand, but pro users can use to save time and frustration going down through menus.
Im still dreaming about bloody simply thing:
I hate typing numbers on keyboard, especially if its something like 0.01 and below. And blender shift+drag slider are doesnt provide enougth increment division. I found myself tons of time typing numbers simply because its unable to pick correct value by shift+drag.
So i was thinking about some box with a big encoder knob and maybe + few buttons, like A, B, C.
Ideally im imagine this in such way:
you click in desired value area to “active” it
rotating the knob change value to higher or lover value by some predifined value*
rotating knob while pressing A, B or C will divide increment value by 2/4/8 or something like that.
*if i drag something with a mouse it looks like default increment are 0.1
Yeah come to think of it, i also have this dragging sensitivity issue, mostly with the camera tap, anything like depth of field or clip start are way too sensitive. Thanks, noted.
Of course I’m not everyone else, but I don’t see the point of something like this when you already have a regular keyboard at hand with a seemingly endless combinations of shortcuts. I mean having to lift you hand to move it and press another set of keys seems like a slowdown to me.
I do see the point of something like this in other softwares though where you only do a more limited set of things like maybe color grading, or perhaps if you do music the difference between playing on a piano keyboard and a computer keyboard is quite substantial.
But Blender is such a huge and advanced software, you really think you’d be faster with even more input keys than you already have?
It’s extremely easy to hook up physical dials or sliders to Blender with an Arduino Leonardo and a handful of parts from AliExpress. I don’t see the utility in hooking up buttons in a keyboard style, but having dials and sliders is very useful.
Currently I’m working on V2 of my Leonardo Blender analog controller, yesterday I was experimenting with small camera adjustments using linear potentiometers (sliders), and it’s a game-changer. Feels a lot more natural and gives better control than a mouse or keyboard
Do you have your project archived some where (github, etc)? And do you have a BOM? I would be very interested in this if you do.
I can see why the Blackmagic panels are expensive, they are using very high quality dials and sliders. But you should be able to make something useful with cheaper componets.
I think the idea is, at least for the Blackmagic panels, is that you don’t have to move your hands between the interfaces. There are exceptions, like for inputting text, that is handled much better by a keyboard. I think, for me, that having a physical interface that is tied directly to a specific function would make using Blender easier.
I guess the problem I see with that is blender has so many different functions that you’d necessarily be bouncing back and forth from the custom blender keyboard to the regular one.
If you just did virtual cinematography, or retopoing, or some other limited task within blender, I could see the utility, but if you are a generalist, it’s hard to beat having 100+ keys with decades of muscle memory familiarity right at your fingertips.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. If I could have one that handled mesh creation and sculpting, that would be awesome. Even the Blackmagic panels are limited to audio, video, and color correction.
If you do go the DIY route, make sure you get a Leonardo, as most Arduino models don’t work as USB input devices. Or some Raspberry Pis will work, but I don’t know which ones
I also use a g600 and it’s a game changer. I also use it in place of not having a numeric keypad on my laptop. Works great. Only 12 keys, but double that with the shift option. Plus you can use double-click hot key shortcuts for more. Such as middle button for top view, double click it for bottom view. Left button for left view, double click it for right view. Works especially well for camera/Viewport related hotkeys.
As for learning key placement, it helps if you use it for your most used hotkeys (which also saves time not having to move your hands/fingers). With enough repetition, it becomes muscle memory. I don’t know the actual button/combo for some hotkeys because I rely on muscle memory to tell me.
That said, if you have trouble remembering, just draw a little button map on a piece of paper to glance at.
And finally, the mouse doesn’t work on a Mac. One of the reasons why I boot up my windows laptop to run blender than my MacBook.
As for the idea of the original post… It’s a neat idea, but also sounds like a lot of work and a significant investment. I’d only do it if you really enjoy doing that sort of thing. In which case, the process is the reward regardless of how things turn out.
I have a whole pile of Raspberry PIs around including some Picos which I was thinking I would use. The Pico is only $4 and has 26 GPIO pins with 3 12-bit ADCs and is running at around 133 MHz. $5 for the one with WIFI. At that price you could use several of them?
Adafruit has this linear potentiometer with motor that looks interesting. A bit pricy at $25 though.
I was thinking you could either set the slide to where you had it before or to reset it when starting clean. Maybe a rough single-level undo type function?
