Yeah I had mentioned this in the long 2.8 thread that was closed when I was trying to explain why adding properties to the N panel is redundant. If Blender had a real window manager, where you can easily tile, collapse, restore, attach and detach windows then the Properties panel is just another panel that can be detached, collapsed, etc. If Blender allowed like a macros bar where you could drag and drop icons and scripts to it, that just another embeddable view, which means the T panel would also be redundant for the most part.
What I would have loved to see for 2.8 is for the devs to make the UI tools more robust and drag and drop and not require Python scripting, etc. Then the community could make Blender look and work however they wanted it to.
As much as people hate on Maya’s UI, etc. The fact is Maya is where its at because you can make it look and work however you want for the most part, studios love that. C4D is extremely customizable and most of that is done without one drop of scripting. That was my hope for 2.8 but that isn’t where things are going.
Now that I think of it, there are no instances I know of where Maya and C4D users are concerned about the customizable UI leading to tutorials people can’t follow. It appears to be a thing isolated to the Blender community.
We can indeed use a system where we can add or arrange buttons without scripting (a good place to start would be a place that will be used often, the toolbar).
That would be good to have in each Header in 2.8. Also the possibility of being able to choose alignment to the left (or right) of all the buttons/fields. Except for 3DView, I feel very uncomfortable having the buttons and fields scattered across the entire monitor/header width.
I Like the idea of multiple editors “blending” together.
the way I have it set up in blender is to use the downslash hotkey as a toggle.
In the viewport it toggles between different shading
-but, if in any of the animation editors, it toggles between them (Timeline to> dope sheet to> graph editor and back to timeline)
If in the property editor it toggles with the outliner (I dont use the outliner alot so it is a quick way to get it when I want to pick something and get back)
You get the idea, and I do the same for a couple more.
I prefer that than to have memorizing the default editor shortcuts, or changing the entire layout to uv etc.
But what would be great is a way to merge some of the editors on the same window, in a functional way as was mentioned before, I have seen an animation software have an overlay of the graphic editor on the viewport, that would be awesome if done correctly! automatically framing the curves of the selected objects, in a way that you can animate a complex char and still see and edit the curves in the same viewport.
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Regnas
(• I don't speak English "by default", so... )
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Something around those lines needs to come by default in blender.
Also don’t forget to throw the drivers editor there too.
For a short time the timeline became part of the dopesheet, and this was dope… which is a word I have never used for good ever before.
I would like to see NLA merged with dopesheet. I would like to be able to tab into an action on the NLA and get a dopesheet of that action timed as it was in the NLA. At the moment editing actions when you have already started using the NLA can get strangly confusing. Infact, I would like to see the NLA just given some love in general.
I agree that the NLA editor needs love, though I can’t pinpoint exactly what. I actually only discovered the damn thing a few months ago and have sort of fallen in love with it, despite how odd and strange it can be at times.
