[Bf-taskforce25] Fwd:Button Layouts

[William Reynish]

Hi,

I appreciate your thoughts on this subject - a thoughtful response.

On 6 May, 2009, at 7:35 PM, Vilem Novak wrote:

> Hello, this discussion cought my attention.
>
> As others, I fully agree William's designs are very satisfactory
>  in most directions, but bringing my 2 cents to discussion too:
>
> What I somewhat disagree with is in this picture:
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/meshproperties.png
>
> I think the little browsers are really unnecessary if that kind of  
> data
> would be represented in outliner in some reasonable way. The problem  
> with
> such data lists is that their window is simply never big enough, and  
> sliders
> can just sometimes become very noncomfortable to handle. As example  
> of this can
> be an
> emty materials list(1 - 3 materials on object) vs a loong list of  
> vertexgroups
> with armature rigged mesh.

True, I've been thinking along the same lines - it may be impractical  
if there are hundreds of vertex groups, and that the outliner may be  
used in that case for selection.


Having a sort of list (via outliner or list-template) would certainly  
be nice from a workflow perspective:
Say you are going through your vertex groups, checking for a mistake  
that you want to correct. Currently this is very slow, because you  
have to wade through this huge list every time you want to jump to the  
next item.
Using a list view for this you simply press the down arrow to jump to  
the next item and you're there. No need to enter a huge menu.

Just to extend and explain more about the idea behind the list  
template, I imagine you can resize it to fit any size you want, but  
your comments made me think that in certain situations it might be  
nice to just have the old style menu.

So one solution could be to make it a little more flexible, like so:
http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/listview_resize.png


>  This kind of design resembles 2.4x in following the paradigma of  
> stuffing
> everything inside the panels. I propose to display everything like  
> this only in outliner
> as foldable folders under the certain mesh/databloc.(materials, uv's,
> vertcolors,  vertexgroups aka weightmaps, tex-face groups,..). When  
> the data get's clicked
> on-selected it display's it's properties in property window(not  
> there yet?). This will
> change  greatly the readability of the UI, although changing the way  
> it was in 2.4x.
> Also,I thought adding data blocks is some thing "operatorish", and  
> thus supposed
> to  be in menu or shortcut, but not in panels, where tweakable  
> properties of data
> are, that's  just about the 'add buttons', other features  could be  
> accesible true property
> window and through  outliner too(delete, rename...).
>
> Having things in 2 spaces can be sometimes much more readable than  
> in 1 space,
> outliner even with  possibly bigger width could be extended to serve  
> more purposes like that.

Yes, all good points, and good analysis. I've also been thinking about  
using the actual Outliner, and that may be a very good idea. The  
outliner would probably need to change in it's behavior a little to  
accommodate this addition, because you'd have to be able to do a few  
things more, like choosing the 'active' shape etc. that's required by  
these features.

Problem is then, how do you assign or remove (using vertex groups as  
example) vertices to groups? How do you even add/delete them? Within  
the outliner somehow? Or using a shortcut in the 3D window? Just  
questions, perhaps you have ideas?

The nice thing about what you propose here is that the Properties  
editor is really a context-sensitive viewer that simply shows whatever  
you've selected in the outliner. That's a very clear definition that's  
easy to understand, and users will know what to expect when selecting  
items in the outliner.

> If there is despite this the decision to make such list views, I  
> guess they'd
> better be actually  little outliners hooked up to some boxes.

Yes, not far from original idea, but could be even more consistent  
with Outliner + provide searching and sorting in a nice way. Would be  
very nice for loooong vert. group lists to be able to find all '.L'  
groups or all groups starting with 'face_'.

I'd be happy to hear if you have any further ideas on the subject.

Cheers,

-William