Yes! I find the primacy of the Collections view completely confusing. I would much rather see a parenting hierarchy view as the default, as I think in most cases you’re likely to parent something to something before you get to the point of needing Collections for scene management.
I agree with all the confusion or potential confusion demonstrated in this video clip. I would love to see someone demo a complete workflow using the current Collections-based UI involving assembly of a model (robot with arms etc.) that includes parenting, along with what the expectations are for utilizing Collections and View Layers.
I feel like I need both the Scene Outliner as well as the Collections Outliner (to replace the old layers grid):
But here in the Scene Outliner, The View Layers and Scene Collection items in the list don’t seem to serve any purpose and nothing is shown when you expand them.
The names of the different Outliner display modes (and the quantity of them) are likely to be confusing to a beginner as well. For example there’s “Scenes” (plural) and “View Layer” (singular). I think “View Layer” is a very confusing and unintuitive name, and including the word “layer” will confuse users who really are looking for “collections” as a replacement for the old “layers”.
I believe the default themes in Blender should have more consistent text colour. At the moment the timeline, dopesheet, and probably a few other editors have dark text while pretty much every other editor has light text. This stands out to me “like a sore thumb” and I believe should be changed by default.
Replying to myself: This was brought up in Pablo’s stream today. Apparently it’s a theme problem. It’s part of “Region Background” for the UV/Image Editor theme category. Changing the alpha there will fix both UV and Texture Paint workspace issues.
Please look back at the original piemenus, there are more logic and useful than new one.
For example O menu. Now O only toggle prop. ed. on/off and shift O to change falloff. But with old pie menu we can do it with one button
But you have to move your cursor out and away from the circle (or away from the whole manipulator) first in order to do that. That takes a little bit of time and it is one more unnecessary step. If you do this a lot it adds up.
Whereas in Maya and other 3D software you select your vertex and move it right away because your cursor is already inside the circle (or square). It is faster, simpler and more direct than the Blender method:
Also what if I want to reserve the left-click-anywhere operation for deselection of everything. It is probably not possible in Blender right now but it might be in the future. Or someone finds a way to hack Blender to do that. Then I would be left only with the option of grabbing the circle’s curve.
Click to deselect in Maya:
The inside area of the circle doesn’t serve any purpose in Blender right now as far as I know. It is just confusing and counter-intuitive for beginners who will try to grab it and hit one of the axes instead. Then they will observe that they have to aim for the circle’s curve instead which is quite a fiddly operation. This might discourage them before they learn about the grab-anywhere trick. This is not a good advert for Blender.
So why not to make it easier and more elegant for everyone (beginners and long time users). There is a reason other professional 3D apps have had this feature basically from day one.
Please consider fixing this at least in the future.
If I can make a suggestion for the outliner, it would be to make the little numbers bigger and actually readable as in the screenshot above. The only problem I foresee is that people would probably confuse which number is for which item.
I also took the freedom to remove the | and change it for a filled circle and made the text centered vertically on its grid cell. I think it looks much cleaner.
But I showed the N panel in my screenshot, not the T panel.
Why would add-ons move from the T panel to the N panel in 2.8? Shouldn’t they get their own, unique lower-left corner floating pop-ups like the other tools got?
Addons can add themselves to anywhere. Addons can define active tools in the toolbar, complete custom Editors, panels in Properties, or panels in the viewport and menu entries anywhere.
There’s no ‘addon area’ - the whole UI can be altered or augmented by the addon.
yeah i know ,but to have both toolbar and Addons dispalyed at the same time, each has to be in seperate area and not the same one, if you work in full screen mode you’ll use both and not keep clicking tabs to swtich between them IMO.
Hell yes.
On a similar note - please make the visibility options less obtrusive in the outliner. Now the 4 huge white icons seem way more important than the object data.
Also everything else is dim and subtle in the whole interface beside those.
Here’s a quick comparison of C4d’s object manager and Blender’s outliner
The first square is for assigning to layers (that would be collection for us). It has a color so you know instantly which layer your object is in. I know we can assign objects to multiple collections (I have no idea how though) but that’s actually an overcomplicated feature for any basic user so this method is pretty nice.
They too have a layer/collection view: there the objects are under those colored squares and the whole view is super easy on the eye.
the two other dots actually cover our eye and camera icons in 1/8 of the space as those. And it does more because it acts as an override if the top of the hierarchy is hidden you can still turn those dots to green to still keep them visible. Brilliant imho…
the checkmark would be the disabling object toggle. But how is it not redundant for us when we have viewport visibility and also viewport selection toggle right beside it. Just asking as a simple-minded user…
So their benefits:
less space
more subtle / not in your face white
they are not so explicit and yet they do more!
I’m all in for the new icons but I honestly hate these in the outliner.
they are big, obtrusive and WAAAAAYYYY too explicit and detailed.
When you can solve something (better) with 2 dots and a check mark then you definitely don’t have to draw an elaborate monitor and camera icon for the same task.
As a graphic designer I’m gladly proposing something if someone tells me why we need all the first 3 of them side by side everywhere.
