Two meetings in fact: January 13 and 14.
First one only covered the 2.92 and 2.93 topics. Second one was more “meta-level”.
Present: Dalai Felinto (Jan 13 meeting only), Hans Goudey, Julian Eisel, Nathan Craddock (Jan 14 meeting only), Pablo Vazquez
Announcements
- Julian worked on an article for UI module planning for 2021 and on.
- The team went through it in the meeting. No immediate objections it seems, but needs more review and work before publishing.
- All this is high level planning, not a specific feature roadmap.
- Julian also worked on a “Blender Design Manifesto”.
- Tries to explain key values of the UI module team with regards to user experience and usability.
- Wasn’t covered in the meeting, but shared with the team afterwards.
- Also needs more review and work before publishing.
- In future we might do the meetings a bit different.
- Keep the weekly UI meetings general, do topic specific ones as needed (e.g. Asset Browser).
- Invite regular contributors to meetings. (We want to give them more responsibilities and include them better.)
2.92 Release
- Node socket colors
- Yellow float sockets will be changed back to grey for the release.
- Data-block selector design changes
- We have a design (and most code) ready to bring user count and fake user back.
- However, some new ideas were proposed and a different design proposal prepared. (T84669)
- It’s too late to do this in 2.92 and we shouldn’t change design twice in consecutive releases.
- Decision: Revert to old design for the release, work on the newest one for 2.93.
- Ctrl+G behavior (D10042: Change operators to add new “group” collections to the scene)
- Currently creates a collection but doesn’t link it to the scene. This is confusing, it looks like nothing happened.
- Blender doesn’t have a grouping system similar to other apps. 2.8 design is to use collections for that (objects can be in multiple collections).
- Longer term, real grouping would be a good goal.
- For now we can try to meet user expectations as close as possible, but there will still be issues.
- Asset Browser
- Was disabled for the 2.92 release. Reasons: Not enough time to polish, design decisions need re-evaluation.
- Master will have it as experimental feature still.
- Feature complete milestone 1 is now a 2.93 target.
2.93 Release
- Asset Browser
- Important 2.93 target: Built-in asset library (T55239: Built-In Assets)
- UI team thinks being able to add an asset to an external library is important to support.
- Some people involved with the Asset Browser project didn’t want to make this part of the design. For understandable reasons - but these can be addressed.
- Needs reevaluation: What is our definition of an asset?
- Currently, data-blocks have to be explicitly marked as asset. Isn’t that mixing the definition of what an asset is with the action of making it public to other Asset Browsers?
- The latter should still be an explicit action so users have control over which data-blocks are available for simple browsing.
- Users may be confused by “Mark Asset”. For them all data-blocks or other data may be considered an asset.
- Should “Mark Asset” be something like “Publish”, or “Promote”?
- Another proposal: Only consider data-blocks as public assets if they are part of an asset library. “Mark Asset” would then become “Add to Asset Library” with a choice between available libraries, including the “Current File” one.
- To be discussed further.
- Categories need reevaluation
- Some categories don’t make much sense. They were simply taken from the existing filter options for link/append.
- A suggestion was made to remove categories and have a good filtering system instead.
- But a better filtering system is planned anyway, that can work well together with the categories. Especially for big asset libraries, a top-level categorization will be important.
- Node trees are an issue: We need a way to differentiate the types of node trees, currently they all show up under “Shading”.
- Some remaining tasks can be picked up by contributors.
- For example: Adding drag & drop for assets all over Blender (e.g. dragging image into compositor, dragging sound into VSE, …)
Next meeting: 2020-01-20, 3PM CET.