[Bf-taskforce25] Modifier Layout Proposal

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 14:57 -0700, Nathan Vegdahl wrote:
> But having said that, I do think that having compact stack, and
> selecting items in the stack to see their settings, is an excellent
> idea.  But I'd rather have a vertical stack with text as well as
> icons.  And I think in practice you would need extremely large stacks
> for that to become a space issue.

I'm also wondering why it is the modifier stack that these mockups are
being made for. As far as I can see, there isn't actually a problem here
to be solved?

If the full particle or cloth panels for example would be moved to the
modifiers panel, more advanced organization may be useful, though I'm
not a proponent of that, it's doesn't really solve any problem besides
being more consistent. But consistency is not a sufficient argument in
my opinion, for the problems it introduces, we can also communicate the
relation with their entry in the modifier stack better.

With the current modifier stack, taking up a full tab, you can see and
edit all modifiers immediately. Personally I haven't seen situations
where the modifiers take up so much space for which an extra level of
navigation would be justified. I imagine in very complex rigs this may
be the case, but I have not seen it in any rig, and even in that case I
think a modifier grouping/folders type thing would be more useful.

Keeping the navigation hierarchy as flat as possible is a good thing in
my opinion.


Though some things do definitely require an extra level in the
hierarchy, in particular materials, textures, bones and particle
systems. They each work a bit different now in 2.4x, materials use the
"3 Mat 2" number button to switch between active materials (particles do
the same), bones are simply cut off to 4 max, and textures use a fixed
size stack.

It's not necessarily good to make those consistent, there may be
different requirements, I'm not sure, but I think there's definitely
similarities. It would be interesting to see mockups for these cases too
(supporting unlimited number of materials/textures, even though they are
limited now, this is likely to change).

Cheers,
Brecht.