After a couple of months of 2.8, I decided to put down a list about what kind of polishing I hope will be done for the stable 2.8 release.
Please let me know your opinion and sorry for the broken english.
Cheers
Max
summary:
ability to rotate the viewport when the mouse is the transparent area occupied by the side panels.
T panel transform tools (move, rotate, scale, transform) should operate only when the user actively clicking on perform the active select operation (box, lasso, circle)
At the moment is not possibile to scale an object evenly when the “trasform” gizmo is active, infact is possibile only to scale on the 3 axis separately.
The outliner has too much highlight, selecting and object from the outliner or from the view, lead to different type of highlight. Blue banner appear if an object is selected form the outliner, white bright text if the object is selected from the viewport. We also have a persistent grey highlight that stay there to indicate basically nothing.
The collection/sub-collection in wich the selected object is located should be highlighted as well, so the user can spot it easily.
Box selecting should be the main selection tool in all the editors to have more consistent feeling, especially in the outliner, graph editor and node editor.
In the outliner is not possible to delete items using the delete button or x button. Is possible to assign a shortcut, but it doesn’t actually work.
Adding a new object should be always in the main collection, to avoid the problem of create new objects in hided collections that are active.
To me the entire concept of “active collection” doesn’t make any sense since there are not operations related to the concept of collection except when the user create a new object.
Local view (this got fixed in more recent builds)
Having a pinned/main perspective view that is shared across the workspace would be helpful. Treat the default perspective view has a separate camera (that is actually what I’m doing, I create a camera that I use as 3d view across the workspaces).
This pinned perspective view shared all the perspective information, such has point of view, renderer, overlays, fov, etc…
This would really help to prevent unconfrtable feeling when switching a lot between workspaces. This also do not broke the concept of having multiple perspective views in the same workspace, since only one is the main and shared one.
Thanks for the input. Most of these issues are known and on the todo list. But the core developers are doing bugfixing now, rather than addressing these kinds of issues. Hopefully there will be time allocated to UI before release so we can iron out this stuff.
Here are just some of the design tasks that relate to what you mentioned:
I couldn’t agree more! I made this post about the isolate mode (local view).
It looks like the camera movement anti-feature annoys many users.
Also there is no way to add objects to the isolate mode, but you can remove objects. And removing objects will ask for a confirmation which is another annoyance for me.
I couldn’t agree more either.
My biggest gripe is with the active tools.
They are not activated with the corresponding shortcut so I can’t get out of them with a shortcut. Once I’m in there’s no way out without clicking.
Although this is just partially true as W brings back to the last used selection tool.
But that has it’s own flaws. You can’t stop a different selection method (like circle select with right click) either. So circling W is the only escape method from any active tool.
And while I kind of understand that some tools are good to have modal versions it’s definitely strange to have the different selection and transform methods decoupled from the shortcuts. Why?
I’m talking about the new active tools, which once activated, always remain active …
for a classic blender user, the fact that once the tool is used, this by pressing “esc” is not disabled and returns to the “select mode” status … it’s frustrating and a bit annoying, because you have to click with the mouse directly on a “select tool” to deactivate an active tool
Couldn’t agree more when using the active gizmo of a tool. I assume that (new) users who use the toolbar mostly interact with the mouse vs hotkeys could expect this kind of behaviour. As an example; When click / click-dragging the mouse somewhere in the viewport not using the gizmo, a user probably wants to make a new selection instead of using the tool’s active gizmo.
this is a completely new necessity, which emerges with the fact that now the workspaces work more like work areas where you can switch fast … up to blender 2.79 the work mode, was done through the various types of edit mode … paint , sculpt etc … in the same 3d window, the workspaces before were more of the configurations optimized for animation, video editing etc … with which you went in specific cases and not there was this continuous change from one workspace to another
I’m not entirely sure, we should think about it a little, but I believe that, together with this potential modality, the independence between the various 3d views among the various working mode modes should also be resolved …
then instances of “3d view navigation” plus “independent working modes” for each 3d view
I agree with everything except this. There should just be a safeguard against adding objects to hidden collections as that happens a lot. Something like “If active collection is hidden, make active collection the Scene Collection” But that is just a safeguard against hidden active collections, otherwise I think it’s best to add objects to the active collection.
Since one object can be in many collections it also doesn’t make sense to do this differently. I was just annoyed when I had to turn on a heavy layer to pick one object out of it.
BTW this is exactly the same problem that also happens in 3ds Max although I think there it’s in less cases. I think in 3ds Max this happens when you import fbx there’s a bug that imports it into active layer that is in fact hidden. Otherwise objects get added to the 0(Default) layer that is equivalent to the Scene Collection in Blender 2.8.
