[Bf-funboard] Enhancements to Outliner

Chris Burt desoto at exenex.com
Wed Jan 16 21:13:15 CET 2008


In the middle of an involved project it has come to my attention that
the outliner, while an amazing addition to Blender, is missing some
simple by key features that, in my opinion would make it vastly more
useful.

--Menu/Hotkey access to restriction columns
Its great to have the restriction columns. Fantastic even. But as far
as I can tell, I can't control them with hotkeys, nor can I find a
menu item which gives me access to the feature. Why would I want to do
either of these things? Turn off the visibility, selection, or render
state for hundreds of items over and over gets very tedious and slow
when the only way to accomplish the task is to click each item's
restriction buttons individually. Setting the status by selecting
large numbers of items and using a hotkey or menu entry (or both) in
the outliner would save me hours.

--Click+drag reordering of relationships
While not as important as the previous item, I've often wished I could
reorganize the relationships of items in scenes and between scenes by
simply clicking and dragging the outliner entry to reposition it in
the hierarchy. I'm sure there are numerous special cases which make
this more complicated in practice than it is on paper, but I thought I
would make the suggestion anyway for the benefit of mankind.

--Common hotkeys with 3D view
Why doesn't XKEY delete things in the outliner? Why doesn't CTRL+PKEY
create parent-child relationships and ALT+PKEY clear them? Why don't
SHIFT+DKEY or ALT+DKEY duplicate items in the outliner? These and
other mysteries frustrate me as a user. I can't see solid usability
reasons why these operations should not work. Technical reasons exist
I'm sure, but from a user's perspective, the lack of this
functionality seems like oversight rather than design.

--Expand/Collapse Selected
The NUMPAD+ and NUMPAD- keys appear to have little use as they seem to
destroy whatever arrangement of visibility I have painstakingly
created for my hierarchies of objects etc. Would it not make sense for
a hotkey/menu entry to exist that collapses or expands *only* the
currently selection?

--SHIFT+GKEY menu
Speaking of selections, why is it impossible to use the SHIFT+GKEY
menu in the outliner to produce fabulously convenient selections?
After all, its possible the 3D view might not even be visible for some
work...

This isn't a complete list of the things I've discovered about the
outliner in the hours I've spent with it, but it does cover the
majority of the important issues I feel are negatively affecting the
usefulness of the feature. I'm sure these ideas have been raised
before and discussed at great length, but a refresher never seemed to
hurt anyone. While the discussion about expanding the layer system,
tying it in with groups, and using the outliner for these purposes is
still going on (I assume it always will be...), one of Blender's
greatest strongpoints, its data relationships and visualization of
them, seems to be begging for a little attention.

If I had the time and expertise to contribute to improving these
features in the codebase I would be writing a patch instead of a
lengthy email, but alas my skills in the area of coding in C are
significantly lacking and I can only lend my opinions and suggestions.
I hope that they don't fall on deaf ears.

Comments? Questions? Insults?

--Chris


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