Perhaps I just need to rephrase my subject in order to get proper feedback.
Many of you have now had a chance to watch all of the 2.5 “tour” videos and to try the Blender 2.5 interface for yourselves. Quite frankly, I’m worried. I do realize that much has been improved related to organization of the interface, but, to me, it looks even busier and more cluttered and less friendly to use than ever.
I do much of my work on a notebook pc. I have limited screen real estate. I am not alone. I need a Blender interface that is friendly to my eyes, uncluttered, simple, showing me the tools I use the most.
I know Blender is rated as a kind of “Swiss Army Knife” of 3D applications, but I also have gotten a clear picture and written testimony that supports the idea of Blender being an “artist’s 3D tool”. I mean for real artists, not technical director wannabe’s.
I don’t have anything against technical directors, but that is not what I am, nor is it something I aspire to become.
Isn’t there anyone out there, in agreement with me, that sees and understands that what artists need is a simple “looking”, uncluttered workspace dedicated to the functions that we artists use most?
I think there may be a paying job for someone willing to use 2.5’s flexibility to create a “for profit” artist’s interface for Blender.
I don’t have to ask you to tell me what you think, that comes without solicitation.
I guess what we’re all hopping for is to turn our beloved “Swiss army knife” in to a tool box of individual tools. In other words, don’t fix the tools together in a particular way, let each person organize everything as they see fit, no strings attached, even to the point that they can through out tools they never use.
I know that if I had complete freedom in the UI I would start mixing and matching tools into one window that have to do with both modeling, and texture/materials, such that all the tools I need to make a single object would be lined up in a row on the buttons menu like a road map. I would even like to have certain buttons/options show up multiple times. this would make a new kind of “liner workflow” and if you merged this in with the redo/undo history…
the move to put the numeric panel (n) and the tools panel(t) in the editor space means that for most tasks you just use the relevent editor full screen for all the tasks…
ok, so that’s only just beginning, but try it… for many tasks just the one view maximised has everything to hand…
yes, there’s a lot in the buttons window, but that window is only really needed for a few tasks (like materials, rigging and rendering…) new ON SCREEN widgets for lights might even make lighting not need that panel…
don’t forget it’s WIP, and the focus is still on porting over at the moment rather than enhancing… though obviously some enhancements are going on the “workflow and new proposals” review is stil to happen,
i could be wrong but doesn’t blender 2.5 allow you to modify the interface easily with python?
if that’s the case your proposal should probably be directed to script writers, not developers
I hope Blender doesn’t choose this wrong way,actually more power and control is needed,not simplification,the user must have freedom,not a closed system where he can’t do nothing.
What does it mean “real artist”?
The computer is a technical media,when I do oil paints I don’t try to use as medium water,I use the right medium,here is the same…
First: Sorry by my english… @alienkid10 - You can customize everything!!! What are you talking about? You can get your “horizontal buttons” back, just configure your UI! And sorry, but it really DON’T look like MAX… It’s unique as always… but more flexible and fully customizable!!! @brucegregory - Every software have a “learning curve”, a necessary time to get fully understood. Blender is going to be completely different. Are you sure that you’re not just confuse with the differences? I confess that i get the same point of you, but I download Blender 2.50 every day from graphicall.org, I’m on a mac, and I wondering on every build! It’s confuse! I assume! But the features and the possibilities are AWESOME!!! Very quick and easer! You can think and work at the same time!!! Because everything is running in real time, it gives you, maybe, some new ideas wile you producing. The new organization are going to be more fast to use, the current blender is NOT organized. The new blender going to be RIGHT or MORE organized. It’s not BAD! It’s GOOD!
You have mentioned doing everything, or most things, in one window. What I’m also wondering is whether the new system allows for the creation of custom, icon/text based buttons placed freely within that one window - that one window being the 3D window…
If this were possible, it would solve a lot issues for me, and probably a lot of other users. I like Atemporalskill’s ideas for a row of buttons like a roadmap - the map following any given workflow.
Can the interface be bent into this kind of submission?
I’m concerned about screen space too, but i think that the “vertical revolution” makes sense, since the monitor market for graphic artists (and not only them) says “widescreen”.
you know how it work in Adobe products: pressing a single key (tab) you can hide all of the palettes/widgets/toolbars and get full focus on the canvas, which is a fresh air breathe while doing heavy jobs
Maybe the same concept could be translated to blender. I was thinking of “pinnable” areas or something like that, making you able to define which workareas to keep.
Actually in 2.49 you can already do it now with Ctrl+UPArrow (or SHIFT+Space) but this is limited to one area
bruce, the new toolbar that’s just gone in is customisable to add buttons to trigger operators so you can put most things you want in there…(think maya shelf for example)
At the moment this is text based…
the final design? don’t know how flexible it’ll be yet… but as the toolbar contents are python that’s very customisable…
With teh space handlers in 2.4x you could add buttons and overlays stuff but it was very hacky…
I hope we’ll still get this sort of access in a cleaner way with the new system!
Yes it does, but this is not an excuse for a bad interface.
But yes it also means the solution is now in the communities hands rather than the coders hands.
I have some concerns too, but i am waiting until it is further defined, as i plan to get in there and make some changes and support the efforts rather than complain.
There are two main concerns that i have which can only solved by coders.
There is a huge amount of wasted space around widgets, this is hard-coded and confusing, the interface actually looks more confusing as a result of this spacing.
The interface is “Too flexible” i.e. everything can be dragged in an extendable way. there is no natural snap points/widths etc… i.e. toolbars do not need to be 100% flexible they can be open-small, open-large, and closed. we don’t need all this flexibility its just bad design dropping all those decisions onto users. users are there to do 3D, not to drag the interface around and recode it.
But again this is such early days that i think this is unfair to actually say. These issues do need to be resolved, but still its very early days, and they are doing a great job. I’d love to see the community inputting their layouts, and that is the real gold of the new interface.
I too am currently not ‘loving’ the interface, but it’s early days, supposed highly configurable and we wait to see open minded.
But things like the N Panel now a full vertical and why do I need such stuff as the ‘view’ panel every where, I never personally use the grid or xyz axis icon. i just want to set camera clipping off or waaaay back, grid off etc and save it in my default scene, then very rarely open the view panel, or background image there’s another one, they were cool when they floated and collapsed taking up no space just a floating bar, now it’s a solid grey vertical panel stealing workspace for nothing. a small stupid niggle but not an advancement from previous versions.
I also think there are still text descriptions on buttons that are far too long meaning you have to stretch left unnecessarily to read them in full, once you know whats on the button it probably doesn’t concern but all the same.
But I’m digging what the devs are doing, a superb job and looking forward to python gurus creating clean, fresh minimalist UI to show the power of configurability and getting max screen ‘real estate’ and I’m running dual monitor set ups.
I did ask a simple question about customising the sequence editor colour correction tab which has found it’s way back into the N key panel, wanting all three colour wheels on the screen together side by side, instead of coloured buttons to keep clicking on, as now, but no go, the level of configurability appears superficial at text on the screen and adding a button here and there level, not components of the interface like the colour wheel as a simple example.
Yes, 2.5 will be very customizable. But it should still have sane, usable defaults. Otherwise you end up with something like Maya that requires lots of user scripts to become usable. Users shouldn’t have to become pseudo-developers just to use the application. Blender should be sane and usable out-of-the-box and be customizable for those who need to customize.
Also, I’d say people writing scripts that get included in official Blender releases count as developers. This will probably be even more the case with 2.5 since core parts of the application are now Python-based.
It seems with every attempt to answer the legal questions regarding Blender’s licensing requirements, that more questions emerge - so now I’ll add to the soup:
If a group of developers dedicated themselves to making a set of custom interface “overlays”, (for lack of a better term), each one having a specific “market” that it addresses, could these overlays be packaged and sold, (along with other application specific modules and training material), as a “for profit”, retail product?
I think I understand that the basic Blender product must be included with the package, along with the license statement, but, since these interface and other components are solely the work of a private team of developers, and they are built “on top of” the basic Blender product - I believe they can be sold as separate retail entities.
Ton tried to clear this up in the thread regarding the AAA game company using Blender as its core engine - what they owned and what they could charge for - but it still left a few questions that needed to be clarified and answered.
Bruce, if you make a modified blender and distribute it, then it must comply with the gpl… but yes you can charge for it…(you can even charge if you don’t change it!)
"on demand " though you must provide your sourcecode to comply…NB your modding blender rather than producing “program output”, so this isn’t really like the video game examples…
If you distribute your scripts seperately and provide instructions for the user to install them then you can license them any way you like. Just include a EULA setting out your licensing terms… I guess you’d have to forbid the end user to distribute " patched" blender or your scripts without your permision… This is fairly common…
Though seeing as they’re python scripts there’s not really any copy protection… you could distrubute pyc files for the various platforms I guess…
I doubt you’d find much of a market for this though!
Personally, no matter how much time I spend on a script for blender it pails into insignificance compared to the total man hours that it’s taken to develop blender so far… I’d just release it to whoever wanted it as a “thankyou”
Sounds like a bum deal, all around, to me. Maybe that is why some Blender contributors have decided to take a different path and develop their own applications that read Blender files. Perhaps its time for this. There is not enough gratitude within the entire Blender community to make any ambitious endeavor based on Blender, that actually would make Blender palatable, more useful and pleasurable to use, that would make such a venture worth “contributing”.
Ton is probably the most unrewarded man in software development, today. Maybe it is time he reconsiders a new licensing scheme that would begin to reward people, including himself, for their contributions. I don’t think the GPL, as it applies to Blender, stands to reign in perpetuity. Man does not live on gratitude, alone.
Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, My paint form the core of my graphics software, all are GPL, all develop pretty rapidly… add yafaray, luxrender…qtpfsGUI
I find it completely viable to use GPL software for most of my production needs… and think that this model has a great future…
I’ve written some scripts which amount to quite a bit of development time, but readily release them back to the community… It’s not much, (I’m a slow scripter) but if everyone does that then things go far…
i think if blender WASN’T GPL it’d be no-where near it’s current functionality…
Peoples passion and motivation cannot be “bought”, not truly… great teams do stuff because they want to make things succeed… whether paid or not… whether commercial or not…
QFT. I think in the future many of the little pieces of software I write will be under this license because honestly I just like writing code and don’t really care if I’m “rewarded” for it (unless it’s my job, in which case the reward is the whole point)
and if you merged this in with the redo/undo history… 
