User/Jeske/BlenderUIPhilosophyQuestions
Blender UI Philosophy Questions
The Blender 2.5 UI set-out some guiding principles and concepts that worked well. However, Blender has grown since then, and some new work has bent or broken those design principles to fit much desired functionality into Blender.
This document is an attempt to collect up some of those issues and pose questions about them.
Issues in the current UI:
- 3d-view and rendering specific stuff is showing up in "global" UI
- "Add" menu in the info-header is only relevant for 3dview workspaces
- "verts / faces" text-info in the info-header is only relevant for 3dview
- "Blender Render" only matters if the user is doing 3d rendering. What does it mean for a compositing or VSE project? And why is it a global setting, instead of a per-scene-per-render-config setting?
- Clash between global "Properties" editor and view-property-sidebar
- it seems 3dview "owns" the global properties editor, while other workspaces (VSE, Movie Clip Editor) put their property editing in their own property sidebars
- "global" settings which affect compositing and VSE -- even if there is no 3d rendering needed -- are located in the global 3d property panel intermixed with 3d rendering settings.... where should they go?
Simple questions:
- okay to show non-modal popups? (seems yes, as Blender has them)
- okay to show modal popups? (seems no, as Blender is against modal windows, and instead uses view-config modes)
- okay to grab the cursor or not? (such as in a maya-style view-nav-gismo)
More complex questions:
- What is the philosophy behind view-property-sidebars vs the global property space?
- This used to be more clear. Sidebar was for things that "don't change the content", like view-style-changes. Except for the Transform subpanel. However, non-3d spaces, such as movie-clip-editor and video-sequence-editor are using their sidebars as a "local" property space.
- It would be nice if the solution to this conundrum provided a way to use tools like the video-sequence-editor without digging between 3d render settings.
- idea?: re-task the properties-space as ONLY scene-global properties (resolution, stage-toggles, etc..) then put the space-specific into their property-sidebar, and enable "splitting" the property sidebar to add any space editor to it (such as an outliner)
