[Bf-funboard] Blender Pie Menus Prototype Addon

[Sean Olson]

Again - Replying inline.

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Matjaz Lamut <matjaz.lamut at gmail.com>wrote:

> >From your screenshot it looks like you are using a very very old build of
> >the menus.  A lot has changed since then.  Try a new build, from here:
> >https://bitbucket.org/liquidape/blender-pie-menus/downloads
> > (always grab one with newest date)
>
> Ah yes, I was indeed using an older version. I tried with a newer one
> but I can't enable it in the user preferences, the tick box simply
> doesn't work and only for the pie menu addon. I tried the newest
> version of the addon with Blender 2.56a, on Linux Mint and on Windows
> 7 and I get the same result. It appears addon related, but maybe the
> cause is elsewhere. Is this a known issue?
>

A few people have had issues - all people who have had prior installations
of the pie menu.  Make sure to reset your userprefs and default blend to
factory default (back them up first if you want to keep them intact).
 Also, make sure you are using a new trunk build or a build from
builder.blender.org.  There have been recent API changes that make using
the new addon incompatible with old blender and vice versa.

>
> >True & False - It true that a strength is to select options very quickly.
> >Another big advantage though to having sliders and other widgets in the
> >pie is mouse movement.  With this setup you can quickly get to relevent
> >settings with very minimal mouse movement.  Currently, in the sculpt mode
> >brushes, the 'V' key is set to bring up a pie with options that are very
> >nice to access very quickly.  This pie menu greatly speeds up workflow
> >because you don't have to constantly move over to the side menu to modify
> >settings, minimize/maximize tabs, and scroll up and down.  It's a lot
> >faster.
> >...
> >Round menus have a big downside of lack of space.  You can't fit nearly as
> >much text & icons in them.  They are also limiting in that layouts are not
> >as dynamic and are limited to 8 total slices.  You go past that and you
> >really have little to no space.  We try to limit each pie to 8 slices, but
> >sometimes it just is not practical for given situations.
>
> I always imagined pie menus to be strict and spartan 8 slices, hence
> my opinion on the matter. I feel the added options, sliders and other
> widgets could also reside in some other menu-shape, not just the
> current radial. Thinking about it, I wonder whether there are any
> other possible solutions and prior examples how other applications
> solved this.
>

Pie menus of course don't need the 8 slices, but they have just been shown
to be faster with that stipulation.
We have actually gone with a hybrid solution that allows a combo of pie &
floating menus.  On most of the menus, the pie works with the button
down->swipe direction->button up, but there are also external buttons
available.  This allows for the quick angle based interaction of a
traditional pie, but if you need access to an often changed item that is
not changed as frequently as the default 8, you have access to that too.
 These work by placing your cursor directly inside the button, instead of
being angle based like the core pie.  For instance, on the view pie, the
default 8 slices are the orthogonal directions, camera, and object view.
 External buttons on that pie are local view & a perspective/orthogonal
toggle.  Before the adding the external button functionality it was our #1
request to have those extra features in the pie.  The choice is to crowd
the pie, or have external controls in some way.  We chose the latter and
are quite happy with it in practice.

About the round menus, I should've been clearer with my question. I
> was actually wondering whether there are any technical issues
> preventing their implementation. The lack of space was already
> apparent to me when making the mockup, but I'm still very attracted to
> the idea. Perhaps some design solution could solve this to an extent.
> I'm not asking about this to expect it to be implemented, but
> exploring what the possibilites are.
>

There is no technical issue with implementing pies like that, and in fact
we already did in test code.  It is just that they did not work very well
in practice, for the non-technical reasons I mentioned above.

Thanks for the feedback!  I hope to get more from you once you have the
recent version working on your system!

-Sean