Dev:Source/Modeling/HeMesh/UI

Half-Edge Mesh User-Interface Design

Introduction

Since HE mesh is growing in size, it is now time to consider UI design issues. Generally a Blender Object UI seems (to me) to consist of the following:

• A single menu that contains all the commands (plus their hotkeys) so newbies can easily find access to new features.
• Hotkeys, some of which lead to menus, others simply do something. These are the real power of the UI, the "newbie menu" is just there for learning purposes.

Hotkeys/Menus

Like oter Blener Objects, HE Mesh's tools/commands fall into the following categories:

WKEY Specials Menu

This contains Subdivide/Subdivide Smooth, Smooth (average verts), Merge, and a few other things.

EKEY Extrude Menu

This contains Extrude Region, Faces, Verts, plus "extend" boundary edges.

Other Hotkeys:

And then there is the other hotkeys. Select linked verts, select/deselect all, all the transform ones, macro hotkeys, etc.

UI Design Issues

Multiple Selection Modes

The advantages of Ton's (or whoever came up with it) multiple selection modes idea, is rather then having to change selmode for a certain tool, you can instead enter multiple-selmode and retain both selection modes. Like, for example, executing Extrude Verts in face mode will enter Face-Vert selection mode.

Macro/Construction History Editor

The macro/construction history editor I plan to make as a new window type. Unfortunately, as this may break backwards compatibility (past experiments have shown that Blender crashes when it finds an unkown window are ID in a .blend file) I may have to find some way to hijack some other window type.

Anyway, essentially the macro/command history editor will work on individual command "stacks." Things like adding new commands, rearranging them, etc will be supported.

Comments

-- JosephEagar - 17 Mar 2005