[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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