Blender UI paper cuts

Suggestion for how to handle the disappearing header problem.

The information that appears in the header is pretty sloppy, and it makes the header disappear while using operators. Now that we have the status bar, information about operator hotkeys can be displayed at the bottom of the screen, but the other information is still left behind in the header.

Why not have the operator panel pop up while you are performing an operation instead of after you confirm the operation? Most of the information is the same anyway, and it is presented in a much cleaner way in the operator panel.

For this to work the operator panel would have to live update, and it would have to contain extra information like axis lock: ‘along global z’ etc… If you press escape or right click to cancel the current operator, then the operator panel could go back to displaying the previous operation.

Does anyone know a reason not to do it this way? This just makes sense to me. :slight_smile:

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yes, oh my god, yes!!! i’ve been saying this for ages!

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I think that the iris icon looks too much like the other round icons.
The little camera is more distinct in my opinion.

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The axis designations are cut-off in Bone Constraint > Limit Location & Scale at smaller column width.

32%20PM

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Okay, this is admittedly a very small paper cut in that it probably only annoys me and nobody else…

Shading

Although this is only a small error, it has slightly larger bad result. If the display scale is close to 1 (0.95 - 1.05) then the positioning of the icon is clamped to nearest integer. The result is that the icon is not perfectly centered but noticeably off to the left. It has two pixel padding on the left, and three on the right.

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Hide/close the header, now what? Might be able to remove most of them, but the one for header should probably remain.

i think the colors are mismatched

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Yes, this would only apply to the toolbar and sidebar where we have menu entries to open or close them.

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A problem that I have repeatedly referred to in the past.

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I swapped them. We use red for remove in Blender, so the tools which remove details I made red. We could also make it so the blue ones are green and the yellow ones are white - this would follow more closely the convention elsewhere in Blender.

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It’s not the positioning of the icon that is a problem, that should always be pixel aligned. It’s the layout code that should make aligned buttons one pixel smaller to account for the overlapping outlines.

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I still thinking that stylish and coloured icons make hard to create new brushes and maintain the style.

Hi! First post here! I’m not sure if my proposal belongs here but, how about automatically renaming single user object data when changing the object name?

I mean, if I duplicate for example, a cube a couple of times, and then I rename the three resulting cubes “cube_a” , “cube_b” and “cube_c”, it would be nice if blender automatically renamed the mesh data as well accordingly. Of course this should happen only if the mesh data has a single user.

It could be an option in the outliner that you can turn on and off, like a checkbox somewhere that says “Auto-Rename Object Data” or “Keep Object and Data Names Consistent”. That’s the default Maya renaming behaviour and that’s one of the few things I miss from.

Having such an option would help keeping the names of the meshes (and object data in general) clean, whithout having to manually rename your object twice basically.
It’s easy to keep in mind to correctly name your objects in your scene while working, since generally you can look at the outliner to check the names at a glance, but It’s easier to forget to rename the mesh data as well.

Keeping the object data names consistent is useful when you want to append just the object data of some object, from a scene to another. If you forget to rename everything correcty, when you open the append windows, you just stare at a list of “Cube.001, Cube.002…ecc”.

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So … are you going to change tool properties icon colors , I’m not saying to change colors entirely , just tint it with same color for consistency , here is my proposal

BTW … after coloring T panel sculpt icons are looking amazing thanks @billrey

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When International Fonts is set to “Japanese”, some characters are displayed in Simplified Chinese.

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Yes, we could make the brush icons fit the toolbar icons more. But I’m not too worried about the brush icons, which I hope can become dynamic anyway. With that change, there would be no mismatch.

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The most important information in an image node is the name of the image and its location, either with relative or absolute paths. My suggestion is that in the legend when you leave the mouse over the name of the image also appear its location as in the following mockup:


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I like your suggestion, one step better would be to show a thumbnail of the image on each image texture node.

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Oh, my god yes! Thumbnails all the way, like in 3D Studio Max (ugh, can’t believe I said that). :stuck_out_tongue:

Every Youtube tutorial on material nodes always put in extra nodes to preview what they are doing in the viewport constantly, and it seems like such a hassle. Especially for a beginner who might not understand what it going on at each step.

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Agree,

For BOX selection I proposed solution for 3D viewport and it could be used for other areas as well.
Blender 2.8 - Shortcuts feedback its better than [B] for box selection