[Bf-committers] Display modes for 3D-View from user perspective

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Hello,

I noticed some recent changes on how blender renders the content inside 
the 3D-View and at first i thought that it would be a bug in the current 
revisions. So I opened a bug report after some curious postings inside 
blendpolis.de (a well known German community website/forum for blender) 
regarding this recent change. One of the first problems was to figure 
out how to get a shadeless textured view onto a model. Even after 
several tries nobody found a solution. Inside the bug report Brecht 
mentioned that this change was intentional and not a bug. To achieve the 
essential view for texturing/painting the user will now have to move all 
lights to a separate layer and he is forced to hide this layer. Only 
then you will get back to usual shadeless view for texturing. So far the 
current situation.

As I was continuing my work on a model it just felt wrong. I have lights 
spread out on multiple layers and I need this shadeless textured mode 
for projection painting. So what i had to do now? I had to disable all 
light layers (Shift+Click) to be able to continue the texturing and for 
a simple test render i had to enable all this layers again. The problem 
is, that i have to continue all steps over and over again, which simply 
isn't fun anymore. So I was soon forced to step back and to use an older 
version, in which i can just switch from solid to textured for 
painting/texturing and from there to GLSL to get a rough preview.

I think that the current solution is neither suited for beginners (even 
long time users are confused or annoyed) and the additional draw types 
(e.g. solid shaded textured view or plain OpenGL-Lights Multitexture) 
seem pretty useless to me, i came up with two ideas to make the best out 
of it.

Option #1:
Add an additional checkbox under "Textured Solid", to disable all lights 
and enforce the shadeless, textured mode. It would at least provide a 
convenient way to switch between texturing (as a working step) and the 
GLSL preview.

Option #2 (I would prefer it over #1):
Remove this options and reduce the display modes to the following set of 
options:

1. Bounding Box (not affected by anything currently found under the 
GLSL/Multitexture/Singletexture option inside the 3D-View properties)
2. Wireframe (as previous mode not affected)
3. Solid view (Keep it solid, no textures, the typical view for modeling)
4. Only Textures, no Shading. (the typical view for texturing/unwrapping)
5. Only Shading, no Textures. (uses GLSL for lighting, but does not 
utilize textures or nodes, fast/rough preview for lighting in scenes, 
could be useful for sculpting)
6. Full GLSL (fast preview)

Any other combination did not make much sense to me in the usual 
workflow. Why not reduce the display modes to this set of options, 
instead spreading them over multiple locations (3d-view toolbar, 3d-view 
properties under "Display") or making them even depend on (in)visible 
lights/layers?

Best wishes from
Tobias Oelgarte