[Bf-funboard] Large Texture buttons redesign proposal

[William Reynish]

 --- Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de> skrev: > Hi
William,
> 
> I very much like the way you start with this
> proposal by organizing 
> things according to levels. Good work sofar,
> however:
> 
> About Material/Lamp/World:
> Your Layout puts them where they belong.
> That is, if they should stay in Blender. I think
> they should be 
> removed. Textures assigned to a lamp can be easily
> reached by 
> selecting the lamp. World textures could be shown
> when no object 
> is selected. What happens when you have 2 lamps with
> textures, both 
> not selected and the user clicks the Lamp button?
> If I missed something important here, please explain
> it to me! 

I can see your point Thorsten. But if the
Material/Lamp/World buttons weren't there, you would,
just as you say, have to deselect all objects to acces
the world textures. It could be very confusing if you
had to deselect all objects. It could be changed to an
Object/World toggle system, but then we might as well
have the old Material/lamp/world setup.

Generally it could be discussed what to do with
different object types and the buttons window. Related
is the lamp buttons and material buttons where lamp
buttons is completely empty with a mesh/curve object
is selected, and material buttons are completely empty
with a lamp selected. It somehow seems like a waste,
but unless we can make a clear and simple solution, we
should stick with the current system.

Not saying it couldn't be done, we just need to find a
good solution.



> Texture Channels:
> For consitency you should use the widgets used for
> Datablocks 
> everywhere. Especialy because you have Texture
> blocks just below.

Well, there is a difference in how they work. You
cannot rename texture channels, they always take their
name from the texture block(and add a number in from
of it according to the channel number like "2 -
Clouds"). Texture channels are not datablocks, but
channels containg datablocks (ie texture blocks). They
work just like the "Save image as:" menu works in the
Renderbuttons. Thus, they look just like it. 



> Texture Type:
> How are 2 listboxes supposed to work for activating
> only 1 type 
> at any time? And it doesn't help with realizing that
> Blender has 
> procedural textures, because there are no labels!
> And I think 
> it's clear enough that there are procedural textures
> in Blender 
> anyway.
> Better group them inside one listbox.

I like having things in categories, but I could live
with just having one list. Generaly, categorising
buttons helps a great deal for the understanding of an
interface. Therefore I split the texture types into
the two categories. As I said, I could live with one
list though.

> It might be better to use arrays of check- or
> option-buttons 
> sometimes. Visibility and direct access are nice to
> have!

Yes, I agree, we should over-use dropdown menus. But
whereever they create a sence of clearness that wasn't
there before I think they are a good idea. I didn't
make the Material/World/Lamp-radiobuttons a dropdown
menu because it wouldn't make anything clearer. The
other new dropdown menus do make things more clear in
my oppinion, and that is why I chose what I did.
Ofcourse I am interested in hearing peoples oppinions
about this.

The other advantage of the dropdown menu, as also
discribed in the proposal, is the fact that they allow
easy expansion, meaning it is easier to add more
texture types in the interface since you just have to
include a new item in a menu list, instead of having
to reorganise things every time you want to include a
new texture type.

Thanks for the quick responce. I'll be interested to
hear from some coders though..

Yahoo! Mail (http://dk.mail.yahoo.com) - Gratis: 6 MB lagerplads, spamfilter og virusscan