[Bf-committers] colored wireframe patch

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

User defined colors are nice, but best is to add a system that keeps existing and future use of color in control. Color is a UI metaphor, and should be handled with care.

We currently use color for two main functional reasons:

1) State (active, selected)
2) Type (linked data, group membership, ...)

In order to preserve functionality, and to extend that usefully, I suggest to make this system configurable - via a "Color Rule Editor".

Basically that editor would consist of these parts;

- A fixed palette of colors
Each color 'index' can have three values, for unselected, selected or active. You can mix a nice set of colors that distinguish well, and fit your theme as well.

- The rule editor
This is an editable list of (builtin, or python Expression) based rules, which you can connect to a Palette number. The default rules can be "From linked library" and "Group Member". With as last rules "Object has own color" and "Use standard colors".

The rule editor can be part of userprefs, and even allow multiple sets of rules. Depending on what you do, you then can make 3d view drawing help you visualizing what's going on, nice for debugging purposes as well.

The editor can also be used for Bones of course, and/or extended to editmodes even.

- Object/Bone properties
A new option to quickly select a color from the Palette list.

---------- But! -----------

Here's the big problem - wireframes are becoming a bit clumsy in "modern" 3D UIs. It's really something from the 90ies... and with all fancy realtime rendering people use every day, this wire color feature is not working well anymore.

Therefore we should also invent new paradigms for marking state or type info in such 3D views. For example with compositing effects, brightness, fades, sobel outlines, overlays, etc.

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 9 Jan, 2013, at 20:03, Tobias Oelgarte wrote:

> I'm all for it. I really wanted that feature for a long time and exactly 
> for that reason and some other specific cases. That all wires are black 
> is mostly good, but there are always situations in which it can strongly 
> improve the workflow to have different colors, and therefore to 
> distinguish between meshes easily.
> 
> Am 09.01.2013 19:15, schrieb Fredrik hansson:
>> http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=33817&group_id=9&atid=127
>> 
>> was getting a bit frustrated when retopologizing a mesh when both the mesh i was editing and the highpoly had black wireframes where i could not actually see what  i was selecting so i made this little patch.
>> 
>> and yes there has been 2 other patches that does this before none that actually seem to work as they were over 1-2 years old.
>> 
>> anyway this takes the object color property and applies that color to the wireframe if the new colored wireframe checkbox is ticked so pretty straightforward to use.
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