The Toolbar

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
1

I’m guilty of not having done much with 2.8 but so far I’m not liking the new toolbar.
It is clean, yes, but it seems like it’s far too oriented for beginners.
By that I mean that for object mode, after a day of using blender, most users will no longer need the big icons. After two days, most will no longer really need the buttons and rather use the hotkeys G,R,S.
However the functions like moving origin, smooth/flat shading, joining objects, etc. are missing, which are used rarely but that makes it all the more important to be easy to find.
Same for edit mode. After knowing what each button does, most won’t need the pictures, but functions like recalculating/flipping normals, x-mirror, removing doubles, etc.
Same with sculpting or texture drawing. The buttons take up all the space, the settings are hidden in dropdowns and can’t be seen all at once.
It would be really great to be able to either pin that into the toolbar, or have the dropdowns open in the toolbar and the buttons at the top bar.
You don’t need the dropdowns all the time, but when you do, you want to see them all and not click through them one by one, so it can be toggled on and off with T while the buttons stay on top.
Having to click through dropdown menus seems like it’s going to slow down the workflow. Then again, it might be a matter of getting used to it.
I think that at least the functions I mentioned should be easier to find, since beginners might not look for them if they don’t know that they exist…
Blender had a very steep learning curve and it’s good that it seems like it’s now easier for people new to blender to get started.
But it seems like the efficiency and fast workflow suffered a bit in the process.
What are your thoughts?

Edit: I thought it wasn’t that much of a deal, since you could press space and type “remove doubles” or “flip normals” or “select non manifold” but pressing space now opens the same menu as the toolbar. Was that removed? I really liked that feature of just typing stuff, especially obscure stuff which is buried in five layers of menu dropdowns like selecting non manifold. Or is there a setting I’m not seeing?
Edit edit: searching is a different key which for me is “ö” which is right of “L”

2

Well not sure if you looked at many other applications but they all have tool icons.

Fact is some people use marking/pie menu, some use key shortcuts, and some use icons.

So this is not just for beginners.

3

Well, there was a reason why many had a 4000k software but turned to Blender for modeling. I’m not against icons, it just seems that it’s all icons that are often used and thus replaced by using hotkeys once you’ve spent some time in Blender.
Other less used but important functions on the other hand are hidden in many layers of menus or missing entirely like setting origin or removing doubles, etc.
When sculpting the settings are vertical drop down menus in the top bar.
Autodesk software have ribbons on top, and I think that’s where the icons for the sculpt brushes and other icons should go, while the vertical menus would be better off and a lot more overseeable in the vertical toolbar and a better use of the space. Seems a lot more convenient to have all settings you need displayed at once than cycling through menus. For example messing around with dyntopo resolution, you need to click on the dropdown, change it, click on the viewport before you can sculpt and repeat. In the old one you could change value and instantly sculpt. Two extra clicks might seem really petty, but they do add up over time. I don’t mean to nag about it, it just seems like it’d be more convenient to switch the content of the topbar with the toolbar and have the toolbar stuff as a ribbon menu or the option to switch or drag and drop and pin

4

The master tool settings tab is coming.

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5

Back in the day, Blender was first and foremost a program that had to be used via hotkeys.

original.png1024×712 167 KB

The problem was professionals wouldn’t use it because at minimum, you at least need to have access to the tools by using the mouse (and considering Blender today, it would not be possible to memorize every combination).

What’s actually being done is creating a new keymap that is a lot more minimalist than the one in 2.79 (though the current map will be available as well). Making the program easier to newer or more casual users (through things like the toolbar), will benefit Blender as a whole via a larger userbase.

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6

I’m fine with the toolbar as long as they keep going with it. It seems like they’ve kind of stalled out on it. Tools got added right away but that was it. But I also realize that maybe some of the delay is due to the existence of a plan to have a new custom panel for users to put tools from addons and such. That’s still in the planning stage AFAIK.

And again, this is probably just another place in 2.8 development where a very loose idea is laid out in code, we see and talk about how much we hate it (cuz it’s not done), and the developer get’s discouraged and stops working on it.

I really wish there was a clearer way to see where things are in their development other than spending hours scrolling through commit logs.

7

I don’t hate it at all, but I’d be a lot happier if I could pin some tools there that are in the top bar, make the icons smaller and maybe pin thin favourites menu there as well. It does seem to change fast, the UI already looks different than what can be seen in some videos introducing the new UI.
I guess it’s very tricky to add features while keeping it simple and decide one the cutoff in order to not make it too bloated. Allowing to pin own buttons would be a great addition in that regard. Then maybe it could get permission to “phone home” in regards to what buttons get pinned as well as used most for possible future additions. Like if 70% of users use “set origin” more often than they use the rotate button on the toolbar, the “set origin” button should have a raison d’être in there somewhere.
VertexSupa said that there will be a master tools settings tab, so that might be the all the things I wished for in a toolbar.

tl;dr: I like where it’s going, but while it’s good it’s getting cleaner, I’d like to retain some buttons that aren’t used as often as the basic operations but still on a somewhat regular basis, that got degraded to menus or are completely hidden.
Maybe a checkbox that you can tick to show advanced settings

8

You can make the icons in the toolbar smaller by ctrl-middle mouse scrolling while hovering over the bar.

9

True point but an icon area is always populated with the most often used tools and to my understanding we can soon custom configure the toolbar.

for teaching purpose it is a great tool for those who did not memorize the hotkeys yet or when reading a menu entry don’t know what it was.

for pros well they will use hotkeys and pie menu more

also consider those who here and there would use blender and thus lack the repetition to keep the hotkeys in memory

I think the dev team is on a very good way to finally make the UI great more logical cleaning up all the chaos and making customizing it easier.

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10

I think you are missing current toolbar role in 2.8x design that is different that in 2.5x, 2.6x, 2.7x.
Concept of active tool used by a left click and maybe manipulator was introduced in 2.8.
For validation of that idea, icons added to toolbar during codequest were just tools that could correspond to this workflow : press button in toolbar, then use the tool with left click.

So, toolbar was purged of any button that does require that.
Join or Shade Smooth operator means action is done on a large selection of objects after one press on button.
There is no reason to transform these tools as modal tools to repeat action, object per object, by a succession of left click.

In other words, toolbar was restricted to tools repetitively used. The ones that would be interesting to have them as modes.

Same kind of logical design choices were made for Topbar or popovers in editors headers.

So, discovery of existing tools from toolbar is no longer principal point of use of toolbar.
IMO, it always was a bad point. That is stupid to consider that a new user is not able to open a menu and browse its content.
If you are doing 3D on a computer, there is an high probability that you are able to read.

It is no longer true that you have many layers of menus to investigate.
In 2.8 edit mode, there are Vertex, Edge, Face menus in header of 3DView. There is no menu with more than 2 layers (main menu_sub-menu_no submenu of sub-menu).
More menus instead of submenus is the move in 2.8.

There will always be hundreds of tools available in Blender. No new user will never be all-knowing about the software.
But sincerely, retaining that a tool is in such tab of such panel of toolbar is not more complicated than retaining it is in such menu.
And it is a lot easier to maintain for developers that don’t have to duplicate dozens of tools in both locations.

In 2.8, favorites menu was introduced. A new user will discover a tool that he will use frequentely.
To have a quick access to it, he just have to add it to his favorites menu.

Quick access is the real reason why toolbar makes things easy. It is not discovery.
And code for favorites menu could be reused to customize Topbar and toolbar.
So, quick access is not a problem.

OK. If you don’t know what is doing the button, you just have to press it to test it and you will have an idea or not. It depends if tools are using same principles and you expect to find one or two related marks.
You press Translate. OK obvious behaviour.
You press Rotate. OK obvious behaviour
You press Scale. OK obvious behaviour.
You press Mirror. Nothing happens. OK. header does not look the same. There is a message. Oh! you have to press X or Y or Z.
You press Duplicate button. Default cube is duplicated. OK.
You press Join button. Nothing happens. You need a selection of 2 objects. You had to read tooltip before.
You press Set Origin. A menu pops up. You press each item. Nothing changes. Default Cube is centered like 3DCursor to scene origin. In default scene, everything is centered. So, Set origin without a previous change will change nothing.
You press Shade Smooth. Now default cube looks weird. Because smooth shading on a cube, it is something weird. Will you conclude it would be perfect on a sphere from that or will you conclude that there is a graphical bug ?
You press Data button. Now pop-up menu with 4 columns and 12 items. Obviously a tool for experts.
A toolbar that contains tools that don’t have same workflow is not a real help.
Anyways, user to understand how it works have to read tooltips, manual, to look at tutorials.

So, is it really a pain in the ass after discovering an aspect of software after a tutorial or reading of chapter of manual to browse corresponding menu ? Of course, no.

Well-organized menus will always be better teachers than a catch-all toolbar.

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11

You make a very good point… I actually realise I’m being far to negative on what is essentially a work in progress.

What I would like to look at instead is icons for the rest of the toolbar.

12

I thought I’d have a look at the existing toolbar icons to have a look at creating some more for the missing functions… but looking at the folders they’re all .dat files. What can I open a .dat with?

13

Work on the toolbar and active tools have been halted for a while during the code quest, because it’s quite independant from other areas. Work will resume now that the code quest is done. There’s a lengthy todo list with lots it items and improvements to be done, available at developer.blender.org.

It’s one of the core 2.8 features, and it’s important that we complete the initial targets for it, so that it becomes a useful and powerful part of Blender. At the moment it’s incomplete.

The concept behind this new toolbar is fairly different from what we had in 2.5 - 2.7, because it revolves around the concept of active tools. For many types of actions, the old toolbar didn’t work, because they executed as soon as you activated the button. Any tool with a transform didn’t work well like this. Now we have the ability to add powerful tools and features here as active tools with tool settings. We’ve also integrated manipulators, so that active tools can display custom things on the screen to aid their use in a visual way. You’ll see this get fleshed out over the next few months.

Tool settings can either be accessed in the top bar, or via the new Tool Settings section in the Properties Editor, if you prefer to trade screen space for quick access to all the panels in there.

The .dat files are converted Blender meshes, used as icons. Once 2.8 is released, there will be a way to add custom icons - esp useful for addon developers who want to add additional active tools to the toolbar.

For accessing commands (as opposed to active tools), we may still add a way to see your favourites in a ‘bar’, using the same list as the Q-menu, with the ability to add/remove your own, just as you can already do in 2.8. This way, it’ll be more powerful than the 2.5-2.7 toolbar, which had a haphazard, somewhat random and fixed subset of commands displayed here.

Until then, you can find all the commands in the menus, and add your most-used ones to the Quick Favourites for quick access. In Blender 2.8, we’ve also fleshed out the old W-menu, which was a rather random list of commands, mainly available in Edit Mode. Now it’s more context sensitive and includes a more consistent list of relevant commands in various modes and editors.

I’m confident that most users will get to like the whole paradigm, once everything falls into place.

Cheers

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