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BCon (Blender Conference) and UI discussions

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kat:


If you've not yet seen BlenderGuru's talk on Improving Blenders UI and Brecht's UI analysis and challenges from this years Blender Conference (#bcon or #bcon13), do, as they're both worth a watch.

A couple of notable points; first and foremost is Andrews realising the 'mistake' of his initial approach to the problem, it was unfortunately based on not having a more complete grasp of Blenders general environment and program ecosystem, it really isn't like other applications (both points he acknowledges in the talk). His latest modified ideas make much more sense now, not because the original ideas were wrong necessarily, but because they are now more appropriately contextualised with respect to the way Blender works; this is so very important and something initially (and still is in some quarters) grossly underestimated in the clamor for change.

Brecht's talk is much more pragmatic and reasoned around Blender being more akin to a series of editors held in place by a broader program container. This makes it difficult to implement certain types of change because Blender uses the mouse to determine where and what is to be affected by a particular action. As an example of this, open Blender and position the mouse over the 3DView, press "A" and everything is selected; do this over the Properties panel and it collapses whatever property sub-section the mouse happens to be hovering over; do this over the Outliner and all entries listed are highlighted (but not selected).

So, fundamentally, this means that Blender doesn't have the kind of hierarchical structure that might otherwise better lend itself to the type of 'global' changes being discussed in the broader conversation about the UI without perhaps tweaking what's going on under the hood. What then are the repercussions of this? Would it mean the Outliner becoming a 'master' or 'parent' editor to which everything else is subservient or a child - would this then allow for the data selection alluded to in Brecht's talk, about being able to double click a data point in the Outliner and having that open in the respective editor. Allied to this is then a question of whether the Outliner needs to be visible all the time (or at least easily accessible), in such instance how are other panels/editors organised - would it be possible to 'dock' or overlay them given Blender mechanics?

But... all this is sophistry at present and ignores a more pressing and important issue; how much of this UI issue is really to do with Blender truly being "a difficult application to use", versus how much of it is simply down to users not knowing where things are or what they do. The two are not synonymous. Neither is the problem particular to Blender (it's expressly naive to think otherwise it should be noted); anyone new to 3D, irrespective as to the application used, faces the same fundamental obstacle of not knowing what all the buttons do. How then is this problem solved by other software providers. How do they address what is ostensibly an informational issue.

The interesting take-away point from the two talks linked above is the creation of a UI team which Brecht will head (no solid info on other team members at time of writing), and it certainly important they have executive authority so-to-speak - open-source democratisation works to a point before it's just spinning its wheels.

Further Reading

* Who is Blender for?
* Blender User Interface design - change for the sake of change
* Just why isn't Blender Taken More Seriously?

kat:
An interesting update on Blender UI development; testing 'tab' based toolshelf content. Basically the toolshelf content (for now?) has been broken down into a set of (not yet finalised) sub-sections each of which has a 'tab' associated with it - which currently reside on the far left of the screen rather than being to the right of the tool column and closer to the 3DView/Workspace. No word on whether tabs can (will) be (able to be) re-ordered, removable or collapsible, but options can be pinned so they remain visible at all times.

Allowance is being built into the system to cater to 'custom' additions - activating an AddOn tool might place further tools in the the toolshelf for example, these have to be considered. Tabs are also aligned vertically, which likely means text labels are images(?) - if more than an allotted(?) amount of tabs are available/used it's not clear as of yet what that means for 'text' or tab display (or what happens if font size/dpi is increased) - do they scroll, shrink, collapse etc..

Although features etc. might change it looks interesting nonetheless so far.

ratty redemption [RIP]:
i watched that youtube video and it does look quite useful.

what i'm not at all happy with is in the latest alpha builds, not only can we no longer turn off user preferences > interface > rotate around selection but also ... > input > continuous grab or at least they removed them from the preferences that can get saved and loaded each time blender is run.

ok so those might be bugs, but equally annoying is what appears to a design choice of no longer centering the 3d window's visible layers, when pressing the home key or using 3d view > view menu > view all as some of the scene is now hidden behind the properties panel and or tool shelf if they are open.

i thought blender's ui designers had decided against overlapping windows?

kat:
Not keen on using non-public releases for that very reason, features get disabled/removed whilst others are being tested. But yes, BF has not been keen to use overlay property panels post 2.50 for a number of reasons (including it being a step backwards to pre-2.50), least of which is that sort of interfaces transparency is quite resource hungry relative to standard panels and buttons. Would certainly agree that changes which don't provide an immediate and logical benefit should always be optional.

WRT rotating around a selection, rather than using a 'global' setting in Preferences, what they might be opting for is the more user/instance controllable "NumPad." (Del) which focuses the camera/manipulations on selected items.

Might be worth checking the IU page to see what discussion is going on with respect to the points you raise, and/or alert the devs to their being issues if they've not already been made aware of them.

ratty redemption [RIP]:
thanks kat, and today was the first time i've seen the new bug tracker site, but i've found the relative page and they are certainly testing those features i mentioned, as well a few others.

i also installed a slightly older alpha/beta (?) version from builder.blender.org of a few days ago, which i had previously downloaded but not installed, and that still allowed these preferences to be saved to the startup file. so maybe they just disabled them over the weekend for some reason?

oh, and i did find where in the older versions of blender we can toggle on or off the feature to use those resource hungry overlay property and tool panels user preferences > system > region overlap

what concerns me the most, is that according to the header of the ui page "these changes have been discussed and approved by UI leads"

so that leaves me with a lack of confidence they are to retain as much of blender's user preferences that existing users are familiar with.

http://developer.blender.org/T37518

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