The Blender devs have a long history of letting UI languish and being resistant to change. They didn’t even bother trying to actively fill the position when the last person quit because they couldn’t get anything reviewed. Hey that’s just like the sculpting module, just like dyntopo, there seems to be a pattern…
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I think my answer would go too far often topic (and encourage even more off topic comments), and probably be inflammatory (not towards you.) So, I’ll just leave it at that.
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And that’s why every experiment should be implemented and come to realized?
In my view, we are lacking the context of what the purpose of those is, because I see many things that could be going on.
Personally, when I worked on this kind of stuff, I oftentimes had an influx of ideas, while at other times I was more keen to finish things. So, it might be that those are experiments which are just been presented. Something to potentially pick up in the future.
Or it might be that a larger refactoring is planned and they check if several ideas work individually and together.
Or …
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You just have to replace vertical click and drag for multi-value editing by an horizontal one.
Doing it in a slider is problematic, but we could imagine clicking on a symbol between values or use Alt key (in this region, that can not correspond to editing properties of a multi-object selection).
With a middle click on a label and a drag to slide the whole, you could display the same amount of supplementary settings.
If you have an aversion for scrolling ; we could imagine page up, page down keys displaying several pages of settings.
Anyways, that is just a recall of what I already proposed.
But my preference would go to F9 panel as an editor, that could be displayed anywhere.
I heard the response that is a problem for some operators. I don’t understand why it is not same issue to have it as a floating panel over the whole window.
But as a panel stuck into the operator, I would just want it at the right bottom corner, instead of the left one.
That’s just a simple UV sphere. Now imagine something like the Gears, Rock Generator or addon created ones with many options. Displaying them all horizontally is poor UI design and kills discoverability(as you’ve shown with the problem trying to do scrolling).
I only disagree with the horizontal display part, being able to place it anywhere in the UI would be a boon to some users I’m sure. It’s definitely strange to me that you press F9 and you get two of them on screen. It seems like if there were a problem with some operators and it being located elsewhere, the floater would also be an issue for them. Sounds made-up or just bad info to me.
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N panel: crowd tabs populated by addons still is a nightmare to navigate.
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OK. I just looked at Gears settings from extra object addon .
Location, Rotation, alignement + a basic array of 3 values + number of teeth = same thing of what is shown for adding a sphere.
So, there would be only 6 settings + operator presets that would be hidden when tweaking the operator.
The 6 settings at bottom of current panel are location and rotation.
So, you could display, without an issue the 10 characteristics of the gear, and just scroll once to modify its position.
The interest of location and rotation fields in this panel, is to paste values. You would probably begin by that, and scroll twice.
But most of the time, those settings are useless. You create the object, and then, you move it or rotate it with translate or rotate operator.
Most of the time, you don’t change values in this panel. You use mouse movements to determine them and you just fix them in this panel, afterwards.
Most of time, panel is open, just to check values, not to modify them.
For rock generator, there are 23 settings at maximum.
In two scrollings, you have inspected all of them.
There are 4 sets of setting in the panel. One made of one setting.
That would be equivalent to 3 pages of settings in a row.
With Page Up/ Page Down to pass from one page to the other, that would not be horrible ; because that would be coherent with use of operator.
You define the Scale ranges, deformations and then number of rocks and seed.
In fact, scrolling in an horizontal row, that way, could allow to display many pages.
Or same solution than the one used for Sapling addon could be used.
A dropdown menu to switch to another set of settings.
Those old object generators don’t follow the guideline applied to others like Ivygen, where you just have a panel in sidebar and just an Update button in the F9 panel.
Anyways, for such generators, use of Geometry Nodes and assets libraries is the future.
Nobody really wants slow operators with several dozens of field values to precise.
We like quick option checkboxes, that may change behaviour, and reduce the amount tools needed. But we don’t like to set dozens of field values.
I don’t think that people will create node tools with dozens of settings.
I think that, for so many characteristics, people will prefer GN modifiers.
I’ll just reply as a short, instead of line-by-line:
No thank you.
I 100% want a “toolbar with command buttons”. I absolutely do not want some horizontal scrolling thing with 33 fields and 4 pages from Hell.
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personally i need something like this
A top bar is not as useful if you can’t drag and drop buttons
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Purpose of my wall of text was to say that is an unjustified fear.
In worst of case, for old outdated object generators, that should be replaced by GN modifiers ; you would have to scroll a little bit.
But reality for almost all operators, there would be no scrolling at all and that would be more discrete, than a panel.
Now, I remember that I also proposed to mix Adjust Operator panel with Info editor, displaying the python info of last operator used, as another view of editor. That way, that could be an editor, that could be localized anywhere.
But that would require the last context used by last operator, to be memorized.
That is all I had to say about F9 panel alternatives.
That is out of scope of Harley’s Topbar experiment, anyways.
That link doesn’t work correctly, maybe screenshot it so we can see exactly what you’re talking about?
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It’s an experiment from jacques, this should help a lot moving from shader graph, to comp graph, to geo node graph etc…, but that can have another solution
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Except this did make it to PR, or otherwise I would not have posted it.
And that is not the only one in the tracker either.
Unfortunately, there have been cases in the past where Harley and the core team clashed on subjects that quite often are really only controversial in a FOSS environment (such as having to educate the devs. on why good default values are good for users).
Though more UI stuff seems to be getting through now based on what I have seen in dev. builds, so the situation appears to be getting better.
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If this is going in the direction of a “Maya command shelf” type of thing, I’m all for it. But the shelf over there is all about allowing the user to store quick code snippets -and in Blender the asset shelf/viewer kinda aims to be that already, except not for scripts (yet?).
Not sure what Harley envisions with this since the description is very barebones. If it’s “just” a static ribbon mirroring commands that already exist in menus, I’d say it feels a bit moot
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The day I can customize it is the day I’ll use it.
I need a full blown undo/history editor more than undo/redo buttons. Pretty much everything else is rarely used or already in my quick menu. Not enough value to justify the space and the change to the tab appearance for me.
What I really need is a way to export my quick favorites list to a python file so I can rearrange it and share it with another install of blender.
Having custom shelves, which could contain custom icons, that could run Python code would really speed up my Blender game art workflow
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At present, I have around 3-5 third party addons that I’ve recoded, just to remove them from their own native N-panel and consolidate them all into one custom n-panel… most of these, i really only need like 1-2 buttons max, out of ALL the buttons or options they have.
Saves a lot of npanel clutter.
Beyond that, I really don’t like how npanels are workspace specific all the time. Sometimes yes, sometimes a PITA.
So if I had a bar at the top, that would accept any operator command and be persistent through the application - yeah, please.
And ditto to the Maya comparison - yeah, dropping a script in there (ie, Mel script on a shelf) would be extremely nice.
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What I would really like is a way to tell the outliner that when I press TAB I want the properties editor. Then tell the properties editor that when I press TAB I want the outliner. I don’t need UI for that. Need shortcut support.
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Being able to manually define where that appears should be an easy fix. I don’t get why they won’t let us have this.
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I doubt it will help, but i just upvoted it.