and the template “General” can’t be “All-purpose” (or whatever synonym) and/or the column of the editor type select be “3d” or whatever (…this is a mixed one in relation to others colums).
For the others items of the list I know that are difficult to solve but, again, I think that this could be included in the header re-thinking of the homestretch period as an issue.
There is probably an argument to getting rid of both of the "Add"s…
Yes, the “Add” Object and “Add” Mesh menus would be better labelled as “Insert”. But the selection modes should be New, Append, Remove, Difference, Intersection
In 2.7x, when you pressed alt+r in the image/uv editor, it would reload the image in the editor and also in the 3d viewport. In 2.8, alt+r still reloads the image in the editor, but it’s not refreshing the viewport. Has this been taken away or am I doing something wrong?
I agree that for example the two Add UI elements can be confusing. (Sorry I haven’t properly looked at the other issues like “General” and possible solutions to that yet but will try to do so ASAP).
I also agree that replacing it with another term would help. Maybe in the viewport menu it could be called Add Item (or shorter Add Itm) or the aformentioned Insert (although Insert could be confused with inserting from the clipboard by some users.)
Harleya has good ideas.
the selection switches:
Other labels off the top of my head: Plus, Minus, Add to Sel., Add S.
.
One observation - the selection switches are actually radio buttons (only one can be ON). There is an often used UI element for radio buttons - a circle before the label (dot in the circle means the button is on) … they look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_button
I am not saying Blender should necessarily use the classic circular radio buttons, maybe it wouldn’t fit into the whole theme. I am just saying that in theory if the Add were a circular radio button, users would not confuse it with a menu … it would be immediately clear that it is just a switch.
.
Well designed graphical icons can also sometimes be the solution. Unfortunately Blender doesn’t allow you to swap the text labels for your custom icons (or icons followed by text labels for that matter). I know you probably want to teach your students the defaults but sometimes one has to customize the interface in order to be efficient.
This is what I like about Modo. Of course Modo has its own issues when it comes to UI (like every application) but you can customize almost anything … Toolbars with text-only buttons? No problem. You like icons better? No problem - just change it. Icons with text labels next to them? Also possible. Your own icons you designed? You bet! Vertical, horizontal, …
This is what I miss in Blender. Blender doesn’t even have any customizable toolbar whatsoever. It is still too “rigid” in this area. But theres a big interest in custom toolbar over at rightclickselect website so there is a chance it will make it into Blender in the future.
Not really. Creation implies making something from nothing. So when using Blender you are creating. But primtives are things that already exist and so are inserted, added, appended to your work.
I’m curious about the comment about “insert” having some overlap with clipboard usage. I can only think of usages of “copy”, “paste”, and maybe “link” used with clipboards.
When I pause rendering the viewport when it reads Path Tracing blah or Rendering Done, it shows Rendering Paused. However, when I pause it when it is Updating Image or Initializing, it is not replaced to Rendering Paused.
It’s slightly harder to implement than one might think, because it requires some refactoring of the Proportional Editing logic in Edit Mode. It goes deeper than just the UI layer.
When multiple objects are selected only the object the mouse was clicked on is moved leaving the rest of the selected items where they were. Shouldn’t all of the selected objects be activated/moved instead?
Objects were moved using “Select and activate item(s)” tool. It is hard to understand the purpose of this tool, it looks like (tool icon) a move tool everyone used to from other programs, but the tool name “Select and activate item(s)” makes it a bit confusing.
I know it was already suggested many times, but maybe combine it with “Select Box” tool, so that selection is activated when click-and-drag event is activated outside of the selection and move the selection when click-and-drag event is fired inside of it?
Yes, from a developers point of view this is definitely true, but I’m approaching this thought from a new users perspective, especially an artists that is still completely new to CG.
Contextually no cube(except the default objects, ofc.) or anything exists in the scene until it’s created, sure the program/computer already has the recipe for the cube or cylinder etc, but from the users perspective it is something they create(and further tweak/define the parameters of).
Do anything in blender, like turn on the line numbering and syntax highlights, go to the workspace and file state you want to see on startup, save startup file, it’s in the file menu, don’t forget the confirmation because it’s easy to miss
I think whoever created all this active tools in 2.8 went too far and overdid them. In my opinion doing something like rip edge, smooth vertices, edge slide etc will never be used using tool bar. It’s just not practial, you don’t repeat these tools 10 times in a row. And extrude, inset and bevel active tools won’t work because they will take away move/rotate/scale tools from people who even use gizmos. How would people use it? Let’s take this simple shape for example :
switch to scale > scale
And there is 3+1 type of extrudes
Extrude tool
And all the time you would need to drag your mouse from tool shelf to object to scale and extrude. Or use hotkeys anyway.
The way other softwares work around extrude/inset and move, scale at the same time by allowing users to use hold shift(or ctrl) for example to drag gizmo axis and tweak your settings afterwords but i think this is not gonna work for blender, “adjust last operation” works only for the last operation in blender. They won’t be able to move/scale and tweak anything after, like in maya for example. And maya doesn’t have inset as far as i know, extrude and inset in maya merged into 1 tool.
And imho i don’t even know why we have extrude (and even 3 types of them) when inset already can do all of this and more. Probably for speed, pressing hotkeys faster than clicking checkboxes.
Don’t beat me, i’m blender user and never used maya. Just trying to explain why these active tools probably not gonna work. At least for experienced users (maybe only for people who prefer to use G/S/R and for some reason don’t want to press E, but that will be strange), but if their purpose was to be for kids or people who never used 3d modeling before and need some visual representation of what they’re doing then it could be useful but probably will confuse everyone else, and they will think “these blender devs are crazy, how do we supposed to use it?”.
Imho blender needed more tool oriented menus (preferably pie menus) with the most used tool on top for quick access. Doing active tools for every operator is not the best idea since you’re losing ability to move/rot/scale with gizmos(but that’s just my opinion).
I see “edit” and “edit mode”. At first it seems a bit confusing, but as soon as student has been taught to read more than one word at a time, everything becomes clear.
Although I know that the first door is in the bathroom and the second in my office, specially if doors are similar, I write on the first door “bathroom” and on the second “office”. Why?
Once the client goes once in the toilet they learn the way to my office
Excuse for the somewhat rough example but trying to use the appropriate and univocal terms is a facilitation for all users, not just students. I know that this case is very hard to resolve having used those terms for a long time.
