[Bf-funboard] Named Layers Blender wiki page
Matt Ebb
matt at mke3.net
Sat Nov 10 02:14:03 CET 2007
On 10/11/2007, at 6:42 AM, Jason van Gumster wrote:
>
> "Sangwoo Hong" <sahngwoo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Then perhaps it should be called "sets" instead of "layers". Why use
>> a word that has misleading implicit meaning when a perfectly fine
>> word exists that actually describes what it does which you use to
>> describe what it actually does. :)
>
> Layering systems similar to Blender's do exist in other apps and their
> called layers there, too. I definitely recall seeing this in a couple
> CAD apps.
I always thought that 'layers' was a bad metaphor for what Blender does.
A little while ago I was thinking about layer systems etc, and
thought maybe instead of layers you could call it 'tags'. The idea of
tags is pretty common these days, especially on the web on sites like
flickr where you can add tags to photos as a way of categorising and
describing them.
So rather than put an object in a layer (which is a bit
counterintuitive when having multiple layers), you'd apply a tag to
an object. In essence, it could work very similarly to how Blender
does now, where before you press M to move an object to a layer, here
you would press M and apply a tag to the object. You'd be able to add
as many tags as you like, with various names (and maybe could even
start off with a default 1-20 as in Blender now).
Though I guess there's a lot of overlap between this idea (and
layers) and groups. It would be interesting to think about that too -
where do you draw the line between layers and groups? Are there (and
what are the) fundamental differences in what they're used for.
It's conceivable that we could easily use the 'Groups' display in the
outliner to work as a layer system, by adding the view/select/render
icons there (individual objects in multiple groups would just show
the ORed result of all groups its in or something like that).
cheers
Matt
------------------------------------------
Matt Ebb . matt at mke3.net . http://mke3.net
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