[Bf-committers] uv's in edit mode

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hey all,

I think everyone can agree UV Face Select Mode should be merged into the
renewed Edit Mode (if no functionality is lost). I don't mind doing some
coding to convert the UV Editor and UV Face Select Mode functionality to
Edit Mode.

The UV Editor and UV Mapping would work in all three sub-modes.
Selections for faces are always valid, so this shouldn't be a problem.

There are, however, conflicts. Edit Mode is crowded as is, and adding
more will not make this any better.

- Hotkey conflicts: I could find three of them: U for unwrap, Shift+K
for clearing vertex colors, and R for rotating uv's. I would propose
shift+U for unwrap (or U, with shift+U for 'reload original data').
Either way, 'unwrap' should be quickly accessible. The other two could
be put in some (popup-)menu?

- There will also be 2 more panels in the Editing Buttons while in Edit
Mode (Texture Face and UV Calculation). Maybe a new 'Texture/Paint/UV
Buttons' context should be created. The 3d view header menu's will also
get some extra entries. The Mesh menu is already huge, and the 3d view
header has also gotten quite long with the new sub-modes (especially on
the 1024x768 resolution I've got here).

- In UV Face Select Mode there is an Active Face. There is no such thing
in Edit Mode. Having an Active Face when modeling seems confusing to me.
I couldn't immediately think of an alternative for the colored edges to
see the relation with the face in the UV Editor. Also for copying
Texture Face data, working with 'Active' and 'Selected' seems to be the
most consistent with the way Blender works now. AFAIK, colored edges and
copying would be the only reason to keep the Active Face.

- Another problem is that the painting modes (Vertex and Texture, don't
know about Weight) would need to be merged in too, because they can be
combined with UV Face Select Mode to only paint in the selected faces.
I'm not familiar with the paint code though.

Any suggestions?

I'll probably talk to Ton on IRC about this further ... Just did some
thinking in advance :).

Cheers,
Brecht.