GSoC - User Interface Tasklist

[anon94939438]

I’ve been thinking about the very same topic, and have compiled my thoughts on this (and other points) into a google doc:

Blender

The relevant sections are all after the first one about modeling tools, but I’ll paste some of them here to join the discussion (I’ll reply to some other posts later, but I’m at work now).

• Outliner: clicking on icons in the outliner should lead to the relevant section of Blender, the way it does when you click the Mesh icon and it takes you into edit mode on that model. Clicking on the ‘material’ part behind an object’s name could take you to the material page.

• 

• Implement deleting of modifiers in outliner.

• ctrl-rmb on the origin in editmode deselects the object… what’s the purpose of this?

• Align Camera to view can not be undone.

• Toggle all visual aids on/off: vertices, edges, face-dots, edge seams, sharp edges, bevel weights, grid… Possibly use ‘Render Only’ for this? Everything except selection overlay and selection highlighting?
  Ofcourse, introducing another shade mode would be even better, much like you have solid and wireframe now, one without any of the visual aids.

• When normals are flipped and one-sided, it would be helpful if you could see through them in Solid Shade mode. Now I need to switch to Texture Shade for that to work (say I flip the normals on a sphere, I want to be able to see the back wall of it, essentially looking inside)

• Missing themeing control for Face-dot opacity.

• When alt-scrolling through a dropbox with icons, the icon doesn’t change untill you move the mousecursor away.

• Shear has a control (mmb) that does not show up in the Operator (or Redo Last) window

• Turning N- and T-panel on and off should preferably not move the 3d view content.

• Dynamically adjust grid to encompass all meshes.

• Repeat Action could be more solid. Doesn’t repeat selection, loses track of the previous action when a selection is made…

• Transform menu, Vertex menu, Edge menu, Face menu, Specials menu, Extrude menu… The logic to this fragmentation seems to have gotten lost over time, and in addition to that some tools (shrink/fatten?) are nowhere to be found in the menus. With a reworking of the tools now that Bmesh is in trunk, could we also look at this and ensure we don’t just throw everything into the specials category?

• Give primitives default uv’s. Especially useful on spline-extruded tubes etc.

• Name new objects ‘Sphere 001’ ‘Cube 001’ etc.

• Outliner: Drag eyes to hide and unhide multiple objects at once.

• 

• Outliner: Folders/Groups.

• Correctly assign shortcuts through rightclicking a command and choosing Add/Change Shortcut for commands in a sub-menu.

• If your mousecursor is on top of the selection, scaling will work erratically. This is often the case, since you need to select something before you scale it. I now need to move my mousecursor away before pressing S to prevent this, but instead we could set a minimum strength.

• Tab to switch between Object mode and Edit mode when tapped, give a menu with all modes when held. Selects option highlighted when Tab’s released.

• Undo also undoes switching mesh select modes. Is this correct behaviour?

• Cancelling Extrude or Duplicate does not undo the creation of extra geometry, and as it shares the same space as the original selection it’s undetectable. I would prefer to see this caused by a deliberate action (press 0?) rather than in this way, which can easily be evoked accidentally.

• Loopcut: You lose your selection if you invoke loopcut and cancel. Undo does not bring your previous selection back.

• Allow Header customisation (scrolling, minimised menus) to be saved with user settings.

• ctrl-n in editmode triggers ‘make normals consistent’ rather than reloading the startup file. Inconsistent hotkey configurations between different modes can be confusing.

• Shortcut keys for different tabs in the Properties Editor (F-keys?). Shortcut key to step through them (ctrl-tab & ctrl-shift tab?)

• Allow the user to re-orden (drag & drop?) Screen Lay-outs. New Screen Layouts could be ordered by creation, not alphabetically.

• Hide & Reveal Hidden: When nothing’s selected, (context!) the hide shortcut could Reveal Hidden instead, much like how A deselects when there’s something selected, but selects all when nothing’s selected anymore.

• Option to temporarily hide or fade out viewport palettes (t and n ones) while viewport is being manipulated, or a tool is active. This way you gain viewport space, but only during actions in which the user can’t make use of these palettes anyway.

• Warn when creating conflicting hotkey

• The way multi-select works right now can give unexpected results: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17715/BL_multiselect_subd.gif

• as it stands the Circle Select works differently from regular select. This is extremely counterintuitive. lmb now selects instead of rmb, and Instead of shift-drag deselecting, mmb does! This type of inconsistency seems to me to be unintended and ultimately unwanted I hope?

• Select linked also works differently, and in fact seems to incorporate my other request (Selection Highlighting): You just hold your cursor over the mesh part you want, and press L, Blender will pick whatever’s closest. Existing selections make no difference.

• Shortcut to reset Sliders/Values. You can already hover and ctrl-c/ctrl-v, how about x or ctrl-x to reset the value? Rmb>v works, but is less elegant and doesn’t always work (with dropdowns, it’s rmb>d)

• Automatic saving of textures when they’re changed internally.

• Automatic reloading of textures when they’re changed externally.

• Tooltips in menus currently only show a helpful line of text for the main ‘tool’, not it’s variations ‘Select Similar>Material, Image, Area’ etc.

• Drag and drop interface to set hotkeys. One column for hotkeys, one column for tools and one for mouse functions.

• User preference to disallow non-manifold geometry.

• Visual gridsize relative to zoom level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhPegnPWgwM

• ctrl-click extrude could be repositioned in ‘realtime’ when hotkeys are held (click-drag)

• Selected components always visible through mesh?

• ‘Operator’ tab scales (up and down) to its contents. When a tool has no options, it only shows the header with the operator name. Leaves more space in the tool panel!

• Rendering images to clipboard.

• External editors: set external editor in options, one per data-type. one-click export/import of (2d) splines to inkscape/illustrator, bitmap to photoshop/gimp (already in), text to word/libreoffice, meshdata to Silo/wings/3dsmax etc. Bit of a longshot, I realise.

• Ability to edit primitive parameters after creation. Like: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2011-October/033769.html

• Outliner: Integrate layers. User preference to ‘show layers in outliner’, otherwise the outliner appears as it does now, in a flat structure. Layers can be renamed, but are still linked to the current 20 Scene Layers as they are now, and can still be switched to with the 20 buttons in the 3d window header. This is only a way to visualise them in the Outliner. This might fall apart visually when items in different layers are parented to eachother?
  Scenes already do this, but I’m not familiar enough with them to say whether they’ll suffice, or they will be problematic to use this way.

• Ability to add or delete/hide buttons in the viewport side-bars without having to script. Another tab in preferences, much like the input one, would work nicely. Earlier betas had the option to add buttons.

• Add alternate names to tools that can be accessed by the search tool. This way, those that come to Blender from other software will have less trouble adjusting, as it will help them find the function they want even if the name is different in Blender. It could work like Google, when it can’t find something it would say ‘did you mean…?’ In the case of Chamfer (as bevel is called in Max), a Max user would search for that and get ‘did you mean Bevel?’

• Ability to zoom/scale Headers/menubars and the outliner.

• Toggleable grid (grid and axis-lines at the same time!) with hotkey.

• Viewport tool palettes are very messy and long, tabs could help, as could icons.

• Verse integration, what happened? Seemed like a brilliant tool. Eskil’s talk at Bcon made it sound like it was a sure thing.

• Display of tri-count, options to toggle display of verts, tris and/or quads for the scene and selection.

• Export selected

• Bring back Floating Palettes. Non-overlapping ui is great, but for some things a palette is useful.

• http://tenderlovingdesign.com/storage/blender/Modifier_Proposal.pdf

If any of these have been fixed since I wrote them down, or I’ve made a mistake, let me know! I put a lot of work into this, and I welcome the feedback.

[rebellion (Luca Carella)]

An Hexagon like toolbar is immediately: the tool are grouped by function(surface, edge, and vertex, etc…), another good stuff is to add the possibility to create custom toolbar by dragging the item (gimp-like). another problem are Add-ons: most of them go in the tool shelf and in a small monitor it’s a problem. It can be solved using the Hexagon-like toolbar.

Transform the Outliner in a More sophisticated layer manager: when the scene have a lot of Object it’s difficult to find it
also in the outliner (specially when an object is intsancied (ALT+ D)), the object is the same but in other location, with other size and rotation, but in the outliner is view like a different object.

I really like the FPS viewport scrolling

[bobizib]

At the beginning, blender was only designed for pro users. That’s why we now have a very fast workflow comparing to other apps (which all use weak “standard” to allow new users to understand the basis quickly).
I’m not against facilitate new users experience, but not to the detriment of professional users.
Should we get an option in user pref “hobbyist and inneficient workflow”?

Blender is known as a “hobbyists” software for now… ok, but i think it’s better to push up blender users skill instead of push down blender workflow.

Well, that’s said (in a really bad english). Your GSOC’s first goal is really cool, but modify workflow to bring blender to align with other apps standard is not a really good idea (yeah, i love cursor ^^).

[mrjynx]

I think blender could learn from zbrush. which has the option to completely remove all buttons. then you only drag the buttons you need into the ui. so you can set up any configuration you want.
this is great for n00bs because when you first open it all the buttons you need are there, and when you become pro you can get rid of all that you dont need and only keep what you use.

this could also work in the future with the pie menu idea, you just drag the functions you want onto the pie menu.

May not be within the scope of this thread but I will save this idea for future suggestions.

[ManuelGrad]

woah! i’m looking sooo forward to!

[ejnaren]

More versatile Tool Shelf.
Sculpting has some very nice graphics but normal modelling tools do not.
Finding the right button for a modelling tool is not easy as it is only plain text.
It would be great with Tool Icons.

Anyway good luck!

[roofoo]

A feature that I’m missing from 2.49 is the ability to link the scale when changing dimensions of an object in the properties panel. You could change the dimension of one axis, and the others would change to keep the object proportional. There is no way to do that in 2.5+.

2.4x:

2.5x

[zeauro]

@Vino

I disagree. I think placing a delete button on each item increases usability as it makes the delete function more apparent. It helps answer the question, “How do I delete this?” as the delete functionality is spacially associated with the object being deleted. I think that the instance of a user accidentally deleting objects will be low. If the user is stupid and wants to delete all of his objects, I don’t think we can do anything about that. Errors by the user can be overcome by the undo feature.

I saved user settings when I just wanted to access to user preferences. Now, I use Ctrl Alt U instead of File Menu. And I know, I am not the only one.
So I am quite persuaded that people will have this kind of trouble.

@Vino

Shift F may be a first person view with mouse control but it is not an “FPS” control in the sense of how most first person games work. Shift F mouse controls the velocity of the camera, a first person game mouse controls the position/angle of the camera. To me, a computer first person game player, the Shift F functionality is completely unusable.

After doing Shift F, you have access to WASD keys to move view. Mouse controls both : velocity of the camera and position/angle of the camera. Maybe it is the problem. It should not change velocity.

@Vino

I don’t know what the dissolving an edge feature does, I haven’t used it. If it does what I describe above then I think it should be the default action when a user selects an edge and presses the delete key.

Dissolve does it like this and it is in the delete menu.
We don’t want to loose actual “delete” behaviour and only have “dissolve” behaviour.
“Delete” and “Dissolve” have names describing perfectly what they do.
Even if it is not newbie expected behaviour, I don’t think it should change.

@Vino

As far as the drag feature, I would propose that it be handled some different way. The selection mouse button is for selecting, not for dragging. If a user clicks a polygon, the expected behavior is that polygon is selected. If the user clicks empty space, the expected behavior is that nothing is selected. Overloading the selection tool to drag in special circumstances is confusing.

But it does both. Select and Drag is an appreciated operator. It increase speed of worklow.
Dragging is the most current operation and it needs a previous selection.
Like 3D cursor as a pivot point, is a tool which speeds up modelling process.
You don’t have to go to a special mode to move object’s origin in order to accomplish a transformation like in other 3D packages.
You just me 3D cursor with a right click.

A friendly newbies interface should not delete what made us loving blender.

@Pea,
things that seems to be ignored.

Implement deleting of modifiers in outliner.

You can select an objet with modifiers and an object without modifiers like a lamp.
And then Ctrl L -> modifiers

ctrl-rmb on the origin in editmode deselects the object… what’s the purpose of this?

Creating a vertex-parent or hook in edit mode needs to another selected objet.
If you did not select the right one, you need to deselect it.

ctrl-n in editmode triggers ‘make normals consistent’ rather than reloading the startup file. Inconsistent hotkey configurations between different modes can be confusing.

It is the power of mode’s keymaps. You can reuse a simple shortcut to do something else.
If you don’t choose this, you have to create complicated shortcuts like “Ctrl Alt Shift W left click” to do things.

as it stands the Circle Select works differently from regular select. This is extremely counterintuitive. lmb now selects instead of rmb, and Instead of shift-drag deselecting, mmb does! This type of inconsistency seems to me to be unintended and ultimately unwanted I hope?

Personally, I think it is a good choice to keep “rmb exit”.
What is great with 2.5 and 2.6 for people that use tablets. They can find operator in Input section and change or add a better shortcut. If it is elegant, I don’t see why a tablet shortcut proposal could be added to default keymap.

Select linked also works differently, and in fact seems to incorporate my other request (Selection Highlighting): You just hold your cursor over the mesh part you want, and press L, Blender will pick whatever’s closest. Existing selections make no difference.

Same name for different operators, L is different of Ctrl L.

Shortcut to reset Sliders/Values. You can already hover and ctrl-c/ctrl-v, how about x or ctrl-x to reset the value? Rmb>v works, but is less elegant and doesn’t always work (with dropdowns, it’s rmb>d)

Backspace

[Bao2]

@roofoo

A feature that I’m missing from 2.49 is the ability to link the scale when changing dimensions of an object in the properties panel. You could change the dimension of one axis, and the others would change to keep the object proportional. There is no way to do that in 2.5+.

Scaling only in X: S X
Scaling in X and Y: S Shift Z
Scaling in X and Z: S Shift Y
Scaling in Y and Z: S Shift X
Sclaing X Y and Z: S

[roofoo]

@Bao2

Scaling only in X: S X
Scaling in X and Y: S Shift Z
Scaling in X and Z: S Shift Y
Scaling in Y and Z: S Shift X
Sclaing X Y and Z: S

That’s not what I mean. I want to type in a value in the dimensions field, and have the others automatically change as well, keeping the object proportional.

[Bao2]

@roofoo

That’s not what I mean. I want to type in a value in the dimensions field,

Scaling 30% in X and Z: S Shift Y 1.3
But yeah, having it there would not harm anyone and it would help newbies.

[demohero]

@eugenio jr.

2: Still on the dragging number fields, I always found and actually complained a few times already about the extreme sensitivity when sliding values. Sometimes it’s plain impossible to do that. There are cases that moving 100 pixels goes from 10 to 10000. And even using shift or alt to smooth things out is not enough. I find this particularly evident when dragging the current frame number field below the timeslider. It feels like an exponential type of increase and for the user (me, at least) very bad and unpredictable.

Eugenio

1+

I find it very annoying too. I hope there will be a solution for this extreme sensitivity. Even Shift is not a saver here.

Look at the example below:

Click here

[Vino]

@bobizib

At the beginning, blender was only designed for pro users. That’s why we now have a very fast workflow comparing to other apps (which all use weak “standard” to allow new users to understand the basis quickly).

This is also why Blender has such little adoption. Little attention has been paid to the new user experience. New users become frustrated with how different and at times nonsensical Blender is, and usually simply stop using it.

If Blender were used by more people, then Blender would get more developers and more designers, which would benefit users with more features, so I believe that everybody is to benefit from making Blender more usable.

@bobizib

I’m not against facilitate new users experience, but not to the detriment of professional users.

This is a false dichotomy. There is not a choice between new user experience versus professional/experienced users. We can have both. I think that improving the experience for new users will also improve the experience of professional users and create more professional/experienced users in time.

[roofoo]

@Bao2

Scaling 30% in X and Z: S Shift Y 1.3
But yeah, having it there would not harm anyone and it would help newbies.

You’re still not getting it. What if I want to make an object that is 1.33 x 2 x 0.5 meters be 1.75 meters in X direction, but I don’t know the scaling factor? In 2.49 you could type 1.75 in the DimX box, and if Link Scale is enabled, the DimY and DimZ values will adjust automatically so the object is still proportional. So I get the object scaled up exactly, without having to calculate the scaling percentage first.

[Vino]

@zeauro

I saved user settings when I just wanted to access to user preferences. Now, I use Ctrl Alt U instead of File Menu. And I know, I am not the only one.
So I am quite persuaded that people will have this kind of trouble.

This is a problem with the design of the user settings area of the menu. It should be redesigned to reduce accidental clicks, and the “Save user settings” feature shouldn’t save the entire project, but only the user settings, like it claims.

The X’s on lists won’t have this problem since the list items are on opposite ends of the list box from the X. Crappy visual incoming:

List item name … X
List item name 2 … X
List item 3 … X

To select users would click the left or middle, to delete they would click the right. If they make an error, undoing it should be a simple task, Ctrl-Z or Edit->Undo or what have you.

@zeauro

Dissolve does it like this and it is in the delete menu.
We don’t want to loose actual “delete” behaviour and only have “dissolve” behaviour.
“Delete” and “Dissolve” have names describing perfectly what they do.

Delete perhaps, but not dissolve. What does “Dissolve” mean in the context of modeling? It’s a made up word. You know what it means because you have used Blender, but a new user doesn’t. The definition of “Dissolve” is “To become incorporated into a liquid” - The word doesn’t even apply to a 3D modeling situation where there are no liquids. To a new user it sounds exotic - it may do some crazy thing but the new user only wants to delete, so she skips the “Dissolve” entry without thinking.

Nobody said anything about losing the current delete behavior. It just shouldn’t be default. The expected behavior is to delete only the edge and not the surrounding faces. If the user wanted to delete the faces, she would have selected the faces and not the edges. If advanced users want to do something different then they can rebind the key or pull up the delete menu, or do any number of other things to get at that functionality.

@zeauro

But it does both. Select and Drag is an appreciated operator. It increase speed of worklow.

Therein lies the problem, it does both. One button does two things. One input is overloaded to have two features. This is a primary cause of confusion among beginners of a tool. Mapping a single button to a single feature with a 1:1 relationship between buttons and features is a good idea for usability.

@zeauro

A friendly newbies interface should not delete what made us loving blender.

As previously expressed, we don’t have to. Blender isn’t a newbies versus old-timers affair. I believe we can please both. I’ve developed a number of schemes for the basic manipulation of objects in Blender that is both easier to understand for new beginners and also faster to use than Blender’s current system.

If your only argument is “I like it the way it is because I’m used to it” then I apologize if you fail to convince me. I think it can be better for all involved.

[abc123]

good topic
blender will be bad…
users who dont use blender will change blender? strange…

[JohnnyBlack]

I ll just put my request here.
The actual animations handling system is old and really annoying.
Here is what I mean: For example you have 3 cubes, each has 3 actions ( idle,run,attack) , now I want to create groups of them so it won’t be a mess there. Idle Group[cube_idle ,cube2_idle , cube3_idle] and so on.
If we are having more than 10 animations it gets really messy and hard to keep them clean, also the ability to enable Fake user for all of them at one click.
Also the camera animations are very hard to manage since it can’t be found in dope sheet window.

I am not sure if this is the right thread but I needed to place this somewhere.

[Bao2]

@roofoo

You’re still not getting it. What if I want to make an object that is 1.33 x 2 x 0.5 meters be 1.75 meters in X direction, but I don’t know the scaling factor?

Yes I get it now. It would be easier than using the calculator (or the python console) that is the only way of doing it now. So in the python console I would write: 1.75/1.33 <enter> (gives 1.31…)
and then use S 1.31. And this is really annoying if you do this many times. I noticed the lack of that link scale button the first day of using 2.5 version but I really thought it was not necessary. Until today!

[Uncle_Entity]

@Vino

Nobody said anything about losing the current delete behavior. It just shouldn’t be default. The expected behavior is to delete only the edge and not the surrounding faces. If the user wanted to delete the faces, she would have selected the faces and not the edges. If advanced users want to do something different then they can rebind the key or pull up the delete menu, or do any number of other things to get at that functionality.

How does one delete an edge and keep the face (which is now made up of three edges?

If you’re talking about mapping ‘dissolve’ to delete and ‘delete’ to something totally different then, well, just don’t do that – dissolve merges the remaining geometry while delete gets rid of whatever you’ve selected and leaves you with mesh that it the result of not having the missing piece… easy, peasy.

Please, for the love of dog, don’t go messing up all the modeling tools so they don’t do what they’ve always done just because some imaginary person is too lazy to watch a youtube vid on how to use blender’s modeling tools.

[PolyHertz]

I fully agree on almost everything you’ve said Vino. In fact I registered here to show my support for your work

Particularly these are all things I’d like to see happen:

@Vino

The expected behavior of a cancel operation is to undo completely the previous operation and leave everything exactly the way it was. If you want extrude to allow scaling then I would suggest it be implemented in another way, for example an extrude + scale command, or extrude + confirm and then scale.

@Vino

dissolving…should be the default action when a user selects an edge and presses the delete key.
The expected behavior is to delete only the edge and not the surrounding faces. If the user wanted to delete the faces, she would have selected the faces and not the edges.

@Vino

The selection mouse button is for selecting, not for dragging. If a user clicks a polygon, the expected behavior is that polygon is selected. If the user clicks empty space, the expected behavior is that nothing is selected. Overloading the selection tool to drag in special circumstances is confusing.

@Vino

“Save user settings” feature shouldn’t save the entire project, but only the user settings, like it claims.

Aside from those things, theres a few other changes I’d like to see:

-Dragging windows should proportionally scale those around them. For example, if you drag down the top menu it’ll stop 1/3 of the way down the screen with the default UI. This is because it only scales down the menus directly linked to it, but not the ones parented to them.

-Modifiers should be drag/drop enabled so they can be quickly re-ordered like other menu items, instead of using the attached (much slower) arrow buttons. Letting you drag/drop them onto other meshs in the viewport or outliner could be useful too.

-“Apply All” / “Delete All” buttons for modifiers on selected objects.

-Focus (“.”) should recenter to the grid if nothing is selected.

-“Reload All Edited” under the existing “Save All Edited” button in texture paint menu. Right now if you make any edits to a texture externally you need to reload it through the UV editor.

And listen to Pea, he knows what he’s talking about.

–

Also not sure if these pertain to what you’re doing, but I’ll throw them out there anyway:

-Rectangle marquee selection (border select) should be implemented as just like Lasso selection, not as its own non-navigatable mode.

-Paint/Raycast Select should be the default selection method instead of stuck in another non-navigatable mode like border select currently is.

-Export selected. Modo is the only other modeling app I’ve seen that lacks this ability natively, and people have been complaining about it for years.