[Bf-committers] [developer.blender.org] [Edited] T37518: Blender Default Settings: Preferences

[patrick boelens]

Hey everyone,

I hope I'm not beating a dead horse here, but I'd like to take this opportunity to quickly address the default option for "Cursor Depth" (On), as well as the bigger topic of this mail which is a design guideline proposal (for the UI team?).

It seems the Auto Perspective option was disabled due to it being frustrating for users. Two of the reasons gives in the Task [1] are:

"
* Blender is trying to make decisions for the user, this is OK as an opt-in for users who like, but I think we shouldn't try to second-guess user actions by default

* Its really annoying when it does _NOT_ do what you want, and we got bug 
reports from users who wonder why their view ortho/perspective is 
changing
"

These are the same reasons I cited for my dislike of having Cursor Depth on by default. Now I won't get into substantial arguments with this again - we've been down that road - but I would like to openly wonder if we could adopt this as part of the Blender design paradigm.

"This" referring to: "Keeping control in the hands of user as much as possible and, by extension, trying to limit Blender (second-)guessing what the user wants to do."

Don't get me wrong, Blender gets a lot of things right. But when I click to position my 3D cursor in the center of the scene, I expect it to go there, not on top of the default cube's surface. Likewise with the auto perspective, which many people found annoying as well.

I think the biggest problem with this kind of "predictive behaviour" is it only makes sense in some cases, and when it doesn't it can feel like an obstruction. Hence my proposal to try and keep this in mind for the future when implementing predictive features like this.

On a side-note, I am aware a lot of people agreed the Cursor Depth option should be moved to a toggle button in the 3D View footer (I might give this a go soon if nobody else wants to pick it up; sounds like a fun, relatively easy thing to put in), but I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring up this topic regardless.

Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes and thanks for reading!

Cheers,
Patrick

[1] https://developer.blender.org/T40153

> Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 06:28:19 +0200
> To: p_boelens at msn.com
> From: noreply at developer.blender.org
> Subject: [developer.blender.org] [Edited] T37518: Blender Default Settings: Preferences
> 
> campbellbarton edited the task description.
> 
> TASK DETAIL
>   https://developer.blender.org/T37518
> 
> To: carter2422, campbellbarton
> Cc: billrey, brecht, carter2422, venomgfx, andrewprice, d-medvedev, hjaarnio, dingto, oenvoyage, plyczkowski, gab3d, Lapineige, szap, monio, josiahjack, alexjf, campbellbarton, krupa, senshi, piotao, conz, alm, marcog, stepanimotion, swmo, zsoltst, cessen, cheleb, lamoot, rattyredemption, DataDay, scottpetrovic, NGMAT, metalliandy, karja, calli, michaelknubben, forest-house, koilz, lopataasdf