Blender UI paper cuts

[foodi]

I’m sure this has been discussed somewhere, pretty sure there’s a proposal on Right Click Select, but after a bit of searching I’ve been unable to locate it…

Is there a plan to get Layer Renderability (Exclude, Indirect Only, Holdout, Mask) displayed visually in the Outliner? Currently only the Exclude flag is shown by grayed out Collection titles.

It’s extremely frustrating to have to right click and enter the View Layer menu to see which layers have been set to Indirect Only, or Holdout. This is completely fundamental for rendering out different passes and if it doesn’t make it into 2.80 final, i’ll be very sad

Edit: If anyone finds the proposal on Right Click Select, please let me know.

[Keavon]

Shouldn’t Lock Camera to View in the View n-panel be greyed out unless you are looking through a camera? This seems to have no effect unless you are in a camera (Numpad 0).

Conversely, the two input elements above it do get greyed out while in a camera:

[no4me]

PaperCut

rotate a canvas in Image Editor - paint mode (I haven’t paint in Blender much, so if its possible correct me please)

[wo262]

Paper Cut!

In Armature Edit mode, you can scale Bbones with ctrl+alt+S, in X and Y axes even! But you can’t SET a specific bbone scale, so if you scaled your bbones to 0, you can’t thicken them back up, since ctrl+alt+s scales as a percentage of the current scale (I had to create a python script to do it ) There is nothing on the N sidebar Transform panel either, there you can find Envelope radius for head, tail and envelope, but nothing for Bbone scale.

Proposal, put ScaleB X and ScaleB Y as properties in the Transform panel in the N sidebar and the Bone properties, then the user can change multiple bones at a time with Alt, like with any other property. Also, since that panel would be getting crowded, one possibility can be to hide the Bbone specific properties and the Envelope specific properties when the Armature drawing isn’t set to Bbone or Envelope respectively. Something like that already happens with ctrl+alt+s, where it scales Bbone size or Envelope bone radius depending on the drawing of the armature

[eobet]

Wohoo! Hierarchies are now visible in the default outliner view mode, thank you Blender devs!

This again makes me wonder what the “scene” outliner view mode is good for, but since I hopefully no longer need to ever use it, I guess I don’t have to care anymore and will leave the complaining about that to someone else.

[eobet]

Color coding is also important in this scenario, because the small circle that appears currently is not representative of actual change that will happen across the entire selection:

Also, because of the proportional editing is represented with a circle only, I wasn’t even aware that you were allowed to do what I do in the above screenshot (you can even select vertices on the opposite ends of the model, and still get “locally” affected proportional modifications. It actually works, but it has low discoverability because of the lack of colorization on the vertices which will actually be affected (should be an overlay toggle).

EDIT: Damn, forgot about this thread.

[Hadriscus]

Campbell just committed changes to proportional editing, to make it a toggle with options. I really hope gradient overlay comes next, along with proper geodesic distance computation !

[Alberto]

About the N-panel, Actually it have two problems

• The problem of N-panel position, that make hard to use the UI if we move to the left and we keep the AT here.

• If we try to solve the first problem with a transparent tab background we find that the tabs don’t work with any theme parameter, it appear to be hardcoded or hide from user hand. We only can change color, not style options.

• We can’t make really transparent the tab BG because the tabs outline option, inside 3D view, can’t be transparent.

[kromar]

No, you can use ctrl+0 on any object and lock the camera to the object to do alignement. So limiting it to cameras would break this possibility.

[TheCharacterhero]

Add please render mode of wireframe mode in workbench

[kromar]

when selecting or double clicking a collection in the outliner i think it would be natural that the objects inside would be selected. currently its a bit clumsy to select content of a collection.

[Zeirus]

Usually when I create a new collection I have to click on the name and rename it. Wouldn’t it be better if it was already “edited” for renaming after its creation?

[Alberto]

Other Papercut

Recover the Normal Tools panel in the N-Shelf

Old Custom Normals Panel

Maybe It’s something for @Howard_Trickey or @RohanRathi

[Howard_Trickey]

I happen to have just been discussing with others devs what to do about the mess that is the current UI for custom normal tools.
Not sure that the best idea is to reproduce this panel in the N panel – not sure about adding clutter there.

One thought would be to use the “Item” subpanel that currently shows vertex position, bevel weights, etc., to show custom normals too, and editing that box would change the normals. Much of the rest could probably be supplied by better menu options (?).

[Alberto]

Menu options are a option for modal tools and learn the shortcut or to configura a shortcut. When a modeler works with normals need to access hundred of times to that controls, constantly. For example, average normals weight., merge, split… It’s a pain.

If they were modal tools coud understand a few the problem, but actually all are tools that you click to obtain an effect. And that tools need inputs from a vector field or menus.

For example

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All these controls, multiply, copy, paste, add,… needs the Vector input, so you can’t hide it inside the menu. They are correlated. This vector is not the actual vector of the selected items. Is the vector that you want to use to make an operation. So it cannot be in “item” field.

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This controls is used like a bucle, you made, one, other time, until you smooth enough. So hide in a menu where you need to repeat the search 4-5 times each time…

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This controls only work with that menu, so they need to be placed in same site. And these are more used controls of the Custom Normals, By far. Could be that in Item field? I see some problems with that, first that then we divide the custom noral tools in three places (menus + Custom Normals Panel + Items)

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Same here, menu input that don’t work with the menus or item panel, so need to be in the Custom normals panel.

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The only controls that could go in the menu are the these. And in this point, where you need all the rest of tools and controls in the panel… I don’t see logic in put it outside, but yes, it could go out.

Maybe the toolkit could need some redesign, but it’s is needed in the N-panel, at least the main parts. @Howard_Trickey If you like I can do some mockups. Could be great the @cgstrive pov about this

Other considerations

Trying the custom normals in 2.8 I have found a bug using point To… If you try to use with Ctrl+RMB (Point to cursor) it made extrude to mouse (Yeah, inside the modal “point to” tool). And if you try only RMB it crash.

[Howard_Trickey]

Thanks for your long response, Alberto. A lot to think about there. It may indeed be best to make a panel.

But some thoughts that went into what I previously said, addressing some of the things you said:

For the vector input: it is already the case that some things in the item panel can be used for input: e.g., to change a vertex location you can enter new values there. So Copy/Paste kinds of things seem like they could fit into that usage. Add and Multiply are a bit more problematic. I wonder how much these are really used though. Seems like most of what they are good for could be gotten by other means like the commands that point at things or in certain directions. And/or maybe there are more intuitive ways to get the effects people use them for than adding and multiplying by other vectors. E.g., if multiply is used to zero out the vector on certain dimensions, maybe there is a more natural way to say that that doesn’t require so much of a math mind to understand. Or one could try to force it into the item panel by using “*” and"+" buttons to modify the entry? I don’t know. I really would like to know if anyone actually uses the add and multiply features.

For the face strength issue: I was thinking of changing the menus to be cascading, with separate entries for “set to weak”, “set to medium”, “set to strong”. These could be bound to keys for people who execute these over and over, and this is likely to be even faster than having to change a dropdown and hit a button.

[Alberto]

I really would like to know if anyone actually uses the add and multiply features.

Multiply and add are used in cartoon shading, for example.

The face strengh could be good if you add in face menu, for example. But then, how make the user to see the face strengh or select all face with same strengh like actually it do?

[no4me]

This plugin would be awesome

[Alberto]

Actually we have all that controls in blender2.8, hide in a menu.

[nokipaike]

are perhaps 10 years that no more I have used softimage xsi … I had forgotten how softimage and blender seems to me that they vaguely have a similar soul