[Bf-committers] Auto-skinning menu labels

[Matt Ebb]

Hi,

I had a look at the latest auto-skinning stuff that's been recently put into
bf-blender and it's working great! However, I think that the interface to it
(when you parent the mesh to the armature) could be improved to be clearer
and more communicative.

Currently, the popup menu contains the title and options:

Vertex Groups from Bones?
-----
No Thanks
Empty
Closest Bone

The distinction between 'No Thanks' and Empty isn't that clear - I had to do
some experimenting to work out that that 'Empty' meant that groups would be
created, but no vertices would be assigned. In any case, prompting the user
with a yes/no question is generally not a good idea; it's clearest when the
options are verbs that indicate what will take place when the action is
performed. I've written about this issue before in the 'Interface' forum (
http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=1235 )
if you'd like to see my rationale. Also, in the interests of consistency,
even if 'No' is absolutely necessary, it should probably be just 'No' rather
than 'No Thanks' since to my knowledge, 'No Thanks' isn't used elsewhere in
Blender.

I propose an alternative wording:

Create Vertex Groups?
-----
Don't Create Groups
Name Groups
Create From Closest Bones

In this example, even without reading the menu title, the user can get a
pretty good idea of what will happen when the action is initiated. The
left-most words (Don't/Name/Create) are also descriptive verbs, so the user
can find the intended action quickly when scanning down the list.

Cheers,

Matt