[Bf-taskforce25] Button Layouts

[Brian Staub]

heya William.

you obviously spend a lot of time thinking this stuff through, because i never have anything to critique in your designs.
these are beautiful, sir!

cheers





________________________________
From: William Reynish <william at reynish.com>
To: The Blender 2.5 TaskForce <bf-taskforce25 at blender.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 3:43:11 AM
Subject: [Bf-taskforce25] Button Layouts

Hi All,

I've already posted some of these mockups on IRC and talked to people  
about them, but I thought I'd post them here for consistencies sake. I  
realize some of these things are perhaps better suited to be added or  
tweaked later, after things start working, but I'll post it now while  
I remember.

First is the concept of 'enabler panels' (to give it a name), which is  
a solution to all the 'Enable' buttons at the top of panels now in  
2.5. The idea is to put the check boxes inside the panel header  
itself, which makes the functionality clearer (no more ambiguous  
'enable' label), less redundant (for efficient use of space), and also  
more useful, because you can enable or disable panels even when they  
are collapsed. This is useful for panels like Ambient Occlusion,  
Stars, Mist, Transparency, Reflections, Subsurface Scattering, Stamp,  
etc, everywhere an 'enable' button makes sense.

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/enabler_panels.png

Here's a version with bigger header text to better distinguish headers  
from content:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/enabler_panels2.png


Next are solutions for dynamic content, things in the Properties  
Editor that can change, be added or deleted by the user (shapes,  
vertex groups, vertex colors, UV layers, texture layers etc). In 2.4x  
this is handled in quite an inconsistent and clumsy way, so I've been  
thinking of ways to improve that, using a consistent list-UI for it:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/meshproperties.png

The advantage is that you get an nicer overview of the data that's  
associated with your objects, and a faster way of scanning through,  
deleting and using the items in those lists. In cases where the user  
has huge amount of items in a list, they can be resized, or even  
scanned through the outliner (as is possible currently )
As Ton mentioned, eventually one could eventually have multiple views  
for these lists with image previews for materials, shapes and the like.


Lastly, I saw Brecht has already started doing modifiers for 2.5 -  
already looks really neat, even though much is missing. Made me think  
about ways of improving the modifiers slightly, from their 2.4x  
versions:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/modifiers.png

I included the wonderful modifier icons from jendrzych to help quickly  
identify each type of modifier. Secondly, as 2.5 will be able to  
handle drag and drop, there's no need for the clumsy old arrows for  
moving items up or down - dragging the handle would be both easier and  
faster, since you could then move items many steps up or down at a  
time. Also, modifiers don't really belong in the ObData context,  
because the modifier data is stored with the object, not the  
associated ObData.



Cheers,

-William
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