When I added manipulators in Blender they had preselect highlighting, as do buttons. That is an OK convention for UI widgets. This got lost in porting to 2.5, and I would always agree on bringing that back.
Selection of faces/edges/vertices/bones/etc in Blender is not “click and guess” but IMHO one of the best working features of Blender - in which we beat other programs still. In 3d views you just don’t have singular selection possible (small elements, overlapping elements, etc). For that reason Blender has a heuristics that includes the distance to mouse, and cycles based on this distance (including on Z depth). If this doesn’t work well, I would call that a bug to solve - and have developers make it more predictable on single/2nd clicks…
Next to that, one of the key design concepts in Blender is to follow the non-modal “Select -> Operate” paradigm. Selection is the state, operations the user’s toolbox that should be fast accessible. In other programs (like Maya) they use the “Operator -> Select” approach; that means you first set the tool (translate) and then apply that on selections. In such a modal UI a preselect is more understandable to use.
I’ve been blessed to work with great developers and Ui designers in the past decade, and for sure will welcome them in the team. It’s not very uncommon from new developers to require to first investigate a bit how things work, what the designs are, how we intended to have things work, and what’s been agreed on together in the long history of Blender.
More over; for a student who’s getting paid for 2 months of GSoC, we can expect to be even more flexible and stick to agreed topics first. Students were hired to be working for us (the developers mostly) to help out! That students also have their own ideas and aspirations is great, but there’s nothing better than a successful GSoC project to get such things smoothly happen.
Classy post by Ton, even though I don´t agree with his conclusion
I´m very much looking forward to that experimental UI build from you though, Vino, and I think it´ll be a great way to demonstrate your UI philosophy in a more direct way.
In response to Ton I’ll only say that I’ve been working on my approved list with only a few exceptions since the start of the project. I’ll continue to do so until someone clears me to work on the more important things.
Ey, vino. I’ve seen in my bratwurst build that you have fixed the problem about resize in the lists (shift+mousewheel). This could be easily a fix for the trunk. I agree it would be great to put a handle below to drag it, but at least it would be usable for now. Great work, i like a lot of your improvements (too many X though)
I didn’t do that on purpose, but I’ll bet you I know exactly which revision fixed it, specifically the changes in wm_event_system.c. I’m pretty sure it can be separated from the modal stuff I was working on, it’s just old code that’s obsolete now and interfering with other stuff. You’ll have to get Ton or Drecht to merge it to trunk though, I’m not allowed.
I am a bit er…irritated with the way things can go, I understand this(Blender) was Ton’s baby, but for many cases, when I have a dense mesh, I grow tired of the trial and error clicking to select the correct vert…so, to me, pre-selection highlighting is a good thing, what is the BIG Drawback of having it?..Ton?
It wasn’t on my list but my mentor approved it. I also redid the tooltips thing I had done earlier. They both required me to find a place to store a “global” variable without it actually being global in scope. I couldn’t store it in RNA because that’s serialized to disk. It’s complicated, anyway they’re both done now.
Awesome! Sound Life!
Such an awesome song,I approve!
your patch is also nice though ( =D )
I jest,very good patch and as it should be.
Your accidental fixing of the shift+scroll list to expand is also appreciated.
I do hope it’s trunkable.
@Justinbarret:yup. In those cases though I think I’d like it if I could hold shift (to add to selection) and then press one of the arrow keys to jump to the nearest vertex depending on the arrow you chose. It’s one of the few features I miss from Maya.
This way you could trace an edge ,a face,an entire loop or more by quickly pressing the arrows and moving the ACTIVE vertex around (and you still can add or remove from selection)
I know these kinds of features seem to be difficult for everybody to agree on and hence your periods of mild frustration, but… this is an A class UI fix that I believe everyone will thank you for doing! Its great!
+1
but it adresses the same problem.
If hover highlighting is definitly out of the question I’d be happy to accept any other means to solve finicky selections with very dense meshes. And what I dexribed seems to me the easy to implement and doesn’t involve flashy selecting which ton seems to dislike.
It might be additional button pressing,but do you really thing it would take that long?
It could select that 1 vertex that is out of reach. Select some face in a mouth that is closed. Select the half of an edgeloop very precisly without need of deselect…
It COULD be finicky but more importantly it could be very precise vertex by vertex selecti1on. (maybe it could even be edge by edge or face by face?)
Additional possibilities (but not necessary for it to work):
when adding to selection you could press “right”-> then press 20 -> 20 verteces/faces/edges to the right get selected
Press shift+ctrl up (or whatever) -> select the part of the loop on top of the current selection
Press alt left ->press 10-> 10 selections (faces /edges/vertices) get subtracted from the selection (depending on where the active selection is)
etc…
If done right this could be very powerful. it’s basicly a more precise Grow/shrink feature.
but I’m just brainstorming here. I welcome other views on how to solve finicky selections
I’m getting some weird selection issues in a fresh build. Particularly on check boxes/icon buttons. Also in the filemanager things tend to stick to your cursor if you have previews turned on. Running Arch Linux if it’s relevant.
If you’re talking about the bratwurst branch, can you give some more specific instructions to reproduce it so I can see if I can track it down? The sticking to cursor thing I think I’ve noticed before in the outliner, but the selection issues I haven’t.
JustinBarrett and Bollebib: The selection problem is very easily solved by pre-selection highlighting and it makes no sense to try to concoct esoteric solutions when there’s a simple one, despite what Ton thinks about it.
I haven’t fixed any of the issues from last week yet. There’s some new issues this week, some people have already reported some in this thread. I meant to make a build that could be used for sending crash reports but there was an unexpected hangup with that.
Drag-toggle is a cool feature.
But it does not work in source column of animation editors.
Left click and drag is already used by border selection in this region.
When I try to expand an animation channel by a left click on white triangle, subchannels are flickering.
