(and colour blindess) Re: [Bf-funboard] Object Hierarchy / Visibilty Management

Luke Wenke bf-funboard@blender.org
Thu, 4 Dec 2003 01:58:32 +1000


Hi,
Going through that whole link:
I like the red diagonal line (though the official "no food", "no smoking",
etc, signs seem to have the line go from the upper-left to lower-right - the
opposite to how it is now).
Blue locks are good.
I don't like how there are basically four shades of grey used in the
backgrounds. (I know some have a 3d look but I don't think that is
noticeable enough).
For more contrast I suggest that white be used as a background colour.
The background colours could be this:
Empty non-visible - white
Empty visible - light grey
Occupied non-visible - medium-light or medium grey
Occupied visible - medium-dark or dark grey
If layers have sublayers, my suggestion is that the lower-right corned have
a tiny black circle or square. It could go right in the corner, with no gap
between the edge.
The active layer could have a little coloured star in the lower-left corner.
(It could even go over the lower-left border so that it doesn't obscure the
other things much. Or there could be a bright coloured border around it...
(maybe green, so the colour scheme could be red/green/blue.)
I think those suggestions would make things a lot easier to notice.

BTW, in karim's layer manager pic,
http://www.karimnassar.com/phoenix/images/layer_manager.jpg
it looks like you can toggle whether there is data in a layer or not (the
shaded triangle in that pop-up thing). Since the layer buttons are much more
visually complicated now I don't think you should be able to change the
colour of each layer independently (or the alpha).

Also, about colour blindness considerations: (people might want to include
this in the docs)
This has statistics and simulations of colourblindness:
http://www.iamcal.com/toys/colors/
This shows the colour wheel for 3 types of colour blindness:
http://www.otal.umd.edu/uupractice/color/
It seems that yellow/cyan/magenta(pink) is probably the best combination
(which Blender often uses) and red/green/blue is ok. Other possibilities:
red/yellow/cyan, or red/blue/yellow <- probably the best - yellow could be
for the active layer)

- Luke.

> http://wrstud.urz.uni-wuppertal.de/~ka0394/en/blender_ui/layers/
> (please scroll down, it's at the bottom)