Blender UI paper cuts

[kaio]

EDIT: Paper cut below appears to have been resolved. Thanks!

Inconsistent scrollbar width across the UI.

With a UI scale of 1.0, the text editor gets a 3 pixel hotspot for scrolling.

In contrast, the scrollbar in the hotkey editor has a 9 pixel margin - three times as large, which even at that can be considered unnecessarily narrow when width is what most monitors have most real estate of.

[Harleya]

In Preferences / Themes the list of categories has two items at the bottom that are without an icon. Not a problem on its own, but when an item like this does not have an icon it should line up with the rest of the text, not be pushed to the left margin:

These two items are set to use ICON_NONE, which you would think would work. Unfortunately the codebase assumes that ICON_NONE means no icon, not a blank space for one. I think we need a dedicated ICON_BLANK for situations like this.

[berg]

Sequence Editor - Media / File Browser
-> please enable folders by default
-> add easy/fast drive switching

Cut - 1: With the current default filter setting “FOLDERS DISABLED” your unable to navigate through your project folders. Solution for it would be enabling folder in filter settings by default.

Cut - 2: Switching to another drive takes to many actions. Solution for it would be using a simple dropdown or popover which lists all the drives. (See a screenshot of Total Commander as example)

Example: From Total Commander (Double Pane File Browser)

Why is both important
We need to remove as much entry barriers from the tools as possible. If I want to try / use the sequence editor among the first things i want to do is to get content into my timeline and that usually is a Video / Audio file, Image sequence or Image.

“If im unable to turn on the car it does not matter that it has loads of horsepower”

[berg]

…now the more serious part:

Working with fonts or typography is very important for many areas (motion design, compositing…) or fields (advertising, image film…). You all know that, so…

Why is this a (big)ui paper cut:

• Users are used to easy font selection for years, even decades by now.
  – Even if it is just a drop down populated with the available fonts found on the system without an preview
• Users will get lost using the current method on the way finding fonts
  – Where is the font directory of my system?
  With that alone we filter the usergroup of that feature down to “tech savvy” users*
  – Many users wouldn’t even know that you could use any .ttf file, let alone what a true type font is.

Benefits:

• A solution for that benefits blender as a whole as it could be used in many areas of blender.
• Boost blenders usability for motion graphics a lot.
• Will close a big gap to other software in that field.
  (Cinema4D and Maya seemed to push motion graphics and typography quite hard the last years)
• Will give a nice synergy with blenders future developments (animation nodes…)

To be fair i think we need to talk about why this was not done so far. Reason might be that this is quite a complex topic considering how different operating systems handle fonts, security, internationalization…

Nonetheless i think a baseline set of typography tools is considered to be standard by now:
Just to name some of it:

• Easy font selection
• Font preview
• Style switching (Size, leading, tracking / kerning…)

Lets bring some attention to this topic

Have a nice day everyone,
Stephan

[Grinsegold]

Congrats, community !!! 1000 papercuts, also known as chinese torture

Yes, i know. Don’t be Forrest Gump.

[eobet]

So many things in Blender has “been there for many many years”, but the discoverability is utter crap. Partly due to the shortcut heavy nightmare that Blender used to be, and partly due to UI inconsistency (that’s been pointed out so much in this thread).

Sorry, had to vent a bit, but I really, really hope that the developers put together a group which will pour over this thread and actually implement a majority of what’s been suggested. Because frankly, I’m a beginner and so far, I have mostly seen good suggestions, and I see the thread just passed the death by a 1000 cuts threshold. And sure, some suggestions may contradict what power users want or are used to… but those are the same people used to “right click select” anyway and they were wrong.

[Grinsegold]

they were wrong

I am? Well, let’s calm down now. This is not a matter of life and death, just my favorite toy. People are starving to death while we discuss how to improve Blender.

[lsscpp]

Hey! Checkmarks clickable area has shrinked! It was more comfortable to click on a wider area as in 2.7x

[Gvgeo]

Is there really a space between the properties button groups? Every time, first I search to find the space, and then I look for the button I want.
With bigger space it will easier to see the group, and find the button.

Even with color coding or different theme, I feel it will be better to be a little bigger. Maybe not so big like in the example, where I put twice the separator.

[kame404]

Add an option to change color to solid mode random color.

[Grinsegold]

different theme

The fiesr thing i did in 2.8 was increasing the contrast of the theme (since my eyes are not the best and i have a rather small monitor). If you want, you can try my custom theme. Just minor changes compared to the default. Put it into:
home/.config/blender/2.80/scripts/presets/interface_theme

i_said_save_goddammit_.xml (39.9 KB)

and this is my pastel green theme based on the former one:

grinsegreen.xml (39.9 KB)

[Grinsegold]

I can work on a patch when I’m back from holiday

Yes please. Colours are very helpful for distinguishing without looking at it and thus faster than what we have now. But imho it should be pastel rather than strong, and not just equally spaced hue but noticable changes from knob to knob. Colours are information. If we use them wisely, they won’t hurt our eyes or distract them from perceiving the object materials.
Here’s a color theme proposal:

[MichailSoluyanov]

Meshes can reset align via W-menu, Curves can’t:

!

Also Join and convert to

[zebus3d]

Could you put ctrl + tab back to be possible to select vertices, edges and faces just as easily as spacebar to is now optional?. This way I won’t be forced to create my own addon just for this. In addition this key combination remains compatible with 1, 2, 3

[megalomaniak]

Honestly all I want is for it to be in the keymap, I’m fine if it defaults to disabled/deactivated, but so I won’t have to create it from scratch again. Not too big of a deal though. Also creating it as a pie menu right now has a bug where the options get drawn on top of each other.

Btw it’s VIEW3D_MT_edit_mesh_select_mode for the name field for those who want to re-implement it for themselves, but as shown above wm.call_menu_pie has an issue so go with wm.call_menu instead.

[boustalahit]

Hi there,
I found some inconsistancy between panels on the “add a new material” button :
If I click on “add a new material” button on the properties panel, it makes a duplicate of the current material attached, with all the nodes, and I’m quite happy with that. If I click this same button on the node editor panel, it creates a totally new Principled BSDF material without any node attached. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but I found it inconsistant since this is the exact same button. Maybe there should be 2 buttons, one to actually add a new material, and one to duplicate the shading node network.

[Scrubs]

Hello,

I model small objects and therefore I set the unit system to Millimeters and the unit scale to 0.001.

Currently, if I do a mathematical operation in a number field and if I don’t specify any units, it divides my input numbers by 1000.

Example with a field containing the value 4mm:

• 4mm+1 => 4.001mm
• 4mm+1mm => 5mm
• 4+1 => 5mm

It would make more sense if all three operations would equal 5mm.

[Derzo]

There are no icons in the delete menu for vert, edges and face (should be for both delete and dissolve)

[zimlorog]

My kingdom for this!

I often cleanup meshes that were created with CAD or similar programs, and being able to see how much of something I have selected is super helpful.

Even though I don’t like having the properties panel open, I’ll take having this info there if that means easier readability.

[MichailSoluyanov]

O - toggles proportional editing

I suggest to this:

O - toggles proportional editing beetwen usual and connected
Alt + O - turns off proportional editing