Blender 2.8 development thread

Good point there.

So the current menu is fine for me. As one hand is on the mouse and the menu appears just below the pointer, the selection will be fast anyway.

I think the decision of Tab for search feature is because other applications work that way. Since in Blender for default map we do not care what is standard in other apps, it is a controversial decision surely.
As far as I’m concerned, I do not have problems with that change, I can get used quickly.

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I think the changing mode shortcut using numbers is fine.

I also see a lot of talk about pie menus and it looks like blender developers are looking favourably at them. As usual I think you can get used to everything, but personally I like using shortcuts a lot more, while I can’t really say I like pie menus, I find them quite clunky. I also don’t agree when Pablo says that they are for pros. Can’t say I agree here, they are a good way of looking at the options available, but as I was saying before I find them slow. Knowing the shortcuts is harder, but I think it allows you to work much faster.

Just out of curiosity, am I a minority about my feelings regarding the pie menus?

And here they are in Eevee :slight_smile:.
Usual disclaimer, this is WIP and there is no guarantee that and/or when this will end up in master (or rather, in blender2.8).

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Industry standard is what gets people in the door. That’s the only good it has, help the process of sharing. It’s not necessarily the best or the most efficient.

  1. Yes there is duplicated functionality there. The Transform Orientation has been moved to the top bar. It’s no longer needed in the N panel. The Translate Scale and Rotation widget is already in the properties panel. That only really leaves the the lock to camera view which imo should be in the view menu anyway, as well as the lock to cursor. So the only thing really relevant there is the 3D cursor settings, the view clip and lens view. That could be easily fixed if the 3D cursor were a real object that had its own properties in the properties panel or it could be moved to the top bar. The lens view should be in the view menu along with the clip properties imo.

  2. This too kind of doesn’t make sense to me. If Blender had an easier way to create custom drivers etc and customer rig interfaces then the N panel would not be needed. Even so the N panel imo is the wrong place for this.

  3. Couldn’t the be better handled by just creating a custom view widget that does this? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here.

Enhancing the N panel and making it into yet another Properties panel seems redundant to me and isn’t the point to reduce developer work? They probably want to work smarter instead of just harder. A lot of the issues with the properties panel other than feature creep is Blender’s non-blocking UI concept and the way these panels are embedded in the application. they are a separate view all kind of working on their own doing their own thing, they have their own menus. They don’t really work together all that well.

A way to deal with the issue of working in fullscreen that other application have already tackled is that the properties panel can be easily collapsed with a shortcut key.

I’ll make mockup at some point to kind of show what I mean.

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don’t touch Blender’s pie menus!
acutally I prefer Blender to maya, because it combines straight shortcuts with pie menus, having to go through pie menus all the time is slower and time consuming.
Also with Pie menu editor addon is very easy to customize your own workflow.

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The Properties Editor is what seems redundant/misplaced/inconsistent to me. I mean if you want to use modifiers in the graph editor, they’re in the graph editor’s n-panel. If you want to use modifiers in the 3d view, they’re in the Properties Editor instead.

Most editors keep themselves pretty tidy. 3d view just dumps its settings all over the damn place, though. And, so far, the topbar seems to be continuing the trend.

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Pie menus are about a fraction of a second slower than regular shortcuts in my opinion. Press the button, move the mouse, done. Up, down, left, right, after a while it just feels natural.
I think regular shortcuts are only “significantly” faster for very repetitive tasks and toggles like Undo, Redo, Select & Deselect All.
You would also get a lot more out of Pie Menus, 1 hotkey for 8 commands.

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I probably lack the “muscle memory” for pie menus, but my brain always struggle to know which way to go with the mouse when I enter a pie menu. I find shortcuts more intuitive.

Oh, I was about to go to sleep when I saw your message. I could not wait to compile to test it :grinning:
ies

Thanks Lukas!

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Can the light be soft like in Cycles?

The only real issue with that is that it leaves those that have or need the Outliner view close by out of the loop then. I agree with the premise tho. Basically the Object, Constraints, Modifiers, and Materials (particles and dynamics should only show up when the relevant modifiers are added to the object) should be in their own properties panel. Which is what I was getting at. The issue is the the N panel imo is the wrong place for that as you may want work on an object and edit its values from the Outliner or even another view entirely without having to use the 3D View. And again because of Blender layout engine that makes it difficult to work with certain layouts since you will constantly have to expand window in and out to access all the necessary properties.

Most 3D apps who have properties panels make those separate from the view for good reason. You may want all your properties on a separate window. Maybe you need a very specific layout. It’s going to be very important imo when /if blender goes all node based for people to have a single place to access properties for selected objects. Having it tied to the view is imo bad design and will only constrain the ability for users to customize their layout.

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I have not been able to do it. Since this is WIP, I’m not sure if this could be possible later with some extra configuration, or if this is a limitation of the type of engine that Eevee is.
Maybe you could use cotact shadows, bloom and volumetrics as a workaround to get something less hard to the eyes.

That’s a valid flaw in my idea I hadn’t considered. Since the outliner might actually be useful in 2.8, it may not be a good idea to move the Properties Editor.

Trying to solve Blender’s UI is like playing one of those whack-a-mole games.

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Does anyone know what they are going to do with grease pencil? I use blender a lot and it enters grease edit a often. If tab is pressed without active object . 99.9% of users never going to be in this mode. More - it automaticly changes to grease edit when i import multiple stl, i assume its a bug.

So could they make grease pencil light for those 99.9% of peasants who just want guidelines tool not have 3 separate menus in 2 shelves ) Just want color and snaping and thiccness.

All other functions should be enabled by users in prefs or shipped in special 2d layout. Sorry its buging me too much.

Also, it woud be nice to see some menus pie-fied, like sculpt stroke menu (e). Its so much faster than a menu. What do you guys think?

I think they’re planning to have a separate annotation tool. I don’t remember seeing any workflow/ui stuff for it yet, though.

+Real problem is you can not go back to object mode by pressing tab again. It’s frustrating.

Anyway, their plan with grease pencil is to make a 2d animation tool in blender. There are some 2d animators who are already (trying to) using gpencil as animation tool.

https://twitter.com/ryo_timo/status/963280258026807297?s=19

I know! but I repeat is not the same, and I started my journey with blender long time ago.

AutoCAD is IMO a complete UI disaster. The aliases are much slower to use than traditional shortcuts and you have to confirm them with spacebar all the time. At the same time there are traditional shortcuts (that need ctrl, shift or alt to work) but those shortcuts don’t need to be confirmed with spacebar. That is not very consistent. You can’t even have simple one letter shortcuts in AutoCAD which Blender uses for the most frequent things and they are the main reason why modelling in Blender is so fast.