Dev:2.5/Source/Development/Proposals/UI/December 2010 - Vilem Novak

Proposal for further evolution of the post 2.55 UI

I put together a 2.5 UI proposal/feedback as I feel it as user and addons coder, I allready produced with 2.5 several shorter projects.

I'd love if those who did put together concepts for the 2.5 UI could look into this, I think most of the ideas are in-line with the current evolution of the ui(some are maybe just repeating something that's planned).

ファイル:UI proposal tabs lists outliner etc vildanovak.pdf

please comment and add ideas below.

--Zeauro 15:12, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the scrolling problem. In 2.49, a panel can hide an other panel (for example Output and Render Layers panels). Buttons in square panel space give to each panel an easily recognizable aspect.

But your solutions are not good for me. I need to be able to reorder panels. I will not put on top of Properties Editor same panels if I use Boïds or Particle with No physics. Physics panel don't have same size or same interest in these two cases.

If I want to control how far from emitter, a particle should die; I must be able to rearrange settings in Emission,Velocity and Physics panels. If tabs only display the content of one panel at a time; I would become mad.

Tabs are useless if they can display the content of several panels.It does not solve scrolling problem. Tabs take same space as panels'headers. With your solution, I should keep all of them visible. But actually, panels without interest can stay out of 2D view. I have not the benefits of 2 screens. I don't want to loose space with that.

I'd rather Alberto Torres's proposal. Give a user ability to create automatic columns by setting width of a panel. Maybe it could help to create horizontal Properties editor. It would be great if panel's order could be remembered for each object.

--harkyman 17 December 2010

None of these have been issues for me so far, perhaps because I made myself a custom screen for dealing with materials that shows all of the props and controls I need, in multiple panels, without scrolling. Nothing moves. When I want to edit my materials, instead of reconfiguring a generic screen to show a single column of props that I'll have to fling about, I switch to my materials screen. That's either two clicks (one to open the screens drop down, and a second to select the screen), or Ctrl-Left (or Right) a few times depending on what other screen I am in.

For people who choose not to work that way (multiple task-specific screens is the interface's intent), something like allowing divisions within the props window like you have with other window types could help. You could, for example, put the material preview panel in a separate division of the window, letting you scroll the rest of the props without moving it. The ability to "pin" a panel in place would also work toward this goal.

However, I think that an adjustment of work flow to use different well-configured screens (which is what I teach) avoids most of the problems that this proposal addresses.

--Pildanovak 2 January 2011

This is quite a good solution, however I would consider it still a workaround. The issues I see are:

- you would have to make a custom screen for each set of panels to get this comfortable workflow.(textures, rendersettings,e.t.c.).

- the layout will be very different with different window sizes, so it really doesn't help much with the muscle-memory problem I talked about. I guess single panel layout stays approximately the same even with a different property-window width, while the panel ordering within a page can change dramatically with blender window size, also if you e.g. enable an addon and you have suddenly 1 panel more.

- you can't really use well some other blender features - like realtime glsl preview or the preview render, as if you would with a standard-sized 3d view.