There has to be a better way of storing themes, and general settings of Blender.
For example if you have a .blend file with a scene which contains a tracking set-up, or a few images in the 3D viewport, and you load a file with out the UI then none of the tracking settings, or image settings are loaded.
This is quite silly when you think about it as these settings should NOT be grouped with the UI in the global sense, they are for a specific scene and should not need to load the global UI settings for them work.
It becomes even more of an issue when you have multiple versions of Blender running, as far as I know you cannot choose where to save the default settings so you end up with all versions using the same start-up file which can cause a lot of headaches.
Is this up for re-factoring as part of 2.6x?
The viewport settings should be separate and load regardless of selecting ‘load ui’. That is just one example of something which I personally think needs a rethink.
Well I would also like feedback from other people before I make proper suggestions as that way I’ll know if something that isn’t working for me isn’t an error on my part.
For starters though I would recommend that the ‘global’ interface settings, such as the ones set in the user preferences, and the various screens that can be created by the user should be stored in a .blend file, or text document, and the other scene/ screen specific settings like ‘image background’, lens value for 3D view etcetera should be stored and loaded regardless of whether or not the load ui button is active.
If the ui button is not active then it would load the global values, for things such as the screen set-ups, but it would look at the values stored for the things above and load those instead of loading the defaults.
That way you could actually have a custom UI set-up in a Blender file and choose whether or not to load it, but not worry about having to set-up (again!) the things like image backgrounds etcetera.
This becomes worse in the tracking branch when not loading the ui the 3D view becomes unworkable as the track points change to the default sizes and none of the images/ movieclips are loaded.
EDIT:
I’ll just adding working in a team environment, I think, would make this a very serious issue, if each team member had the interface set-up to the individual needs, but HAD to load the UI in order to get background images, and other various things loaded, then that would act as a major deterrent to those artists who would have to either note down the values/ settings and then set-up the required items such as the images themselves, or make use of the other artists UI presets.
For multiple versions of blender all you need to do is create a “config” folder inside the 2.59 (or whatever version) folder next to teh executable… then when you open blender it’ll populate that config and when you save defaults it’s specific to that version.
As for other stuff, it’s being worked on… not sure to what design, but hey!
I think the preset system could be expanded better, especially for brushes for paint and sculpt… there’s often a lot of pain to append and set those up!
Hmm doing that doesn’t seem to work on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit with either 2.59 official build, or one of the latest Bmesh builds.
I do just click load factory defaults, and then make my changes and click save user settings, after I’ve created the config folder in the same directory as the executable right?
Hopefully they can make this a target for 2.6x as a major usability issue for some of us, especially saving out brush pre-sets and things like that. Perhaps having it write a text file with the settings like it does with some of the simpler pre-sets would allow a user to simply export/ import, and edit out of Blender the pre-sets.