[Bf-committers] Texture assignment workflow is confusing

Yves Poissant ypoissant2 at videotron.ca
Wed May 12 23:27:21 CEST 2010


I must say that the current UI for texture and material management in 2.5. 
is pretty confusing to me too. It is better than in 2.4x but still very 
prone to making the wrong decision, clicking on the wrong button, etc. So 
I'm glad to see this discussion.

> I think that nodes are much more simple to understand than the stack
> method because you can see where the data comes from and where it goes
> too. Nodes already have a simple and a detailed view that you can turn
> on and off for each node.

>From a UI point of view, I find directly manipulating the nodes.to get 
something as simple as assigning a texture or a material, is unnecessarily 
complex. The problemn I have with nodes is that for simple tasks, it is 
workflow disruptive and forces the user to stop thinking about the texturing 
task and switch to thinking about the data flow in the application.

That said, I agree that the node system is very powerfull and should be 
kept. But I would see the node system as a sort of machinery that can be 
created/manipulated/programmed at a more abstract level through direct 
manipulation (click, drag and drop, select) of the objects of interest in 
the UI. For this to work, the node system just needs to be available for 
scripting. This way, it is possible to program sort of UI macros that build 
the noodle on the fly as the user interracts for some simple tasks. Then the 
noodle can be edited directly if needed. Once the nodes system is fully 
scriptable and can be linked to UI manipulations, then this opens up the 
door for users creating their own macros and designing texture and material 
UI concepts either based on other UIs or on new designs.

Yves 



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