But I am not sure if the filter menu is the right place to control them.
In view of the future and all the big updates that are coming with 2.81, 2.82…I’d like to brainstorm some ideas for a better system of “restrictions toggles” or “overrides” in a more general sense.
With overrides coming soon we will hopefully have a very powerful new system and way of working! For that we need a clear system with which we don’t loose the overview in complex scenes. We probably would like to have more of those toggles or attributes we can set per collection or even per object. It would make a lot of sense to control these overrides via the outliner.
But how are we are going to do that?
If we use the same system as today at some point we are going to end up with something like this:
That’s why I think it is not a good idea to have those toggles predefined in the outliner and you can only control their visibility via the filter menu.
I think it would be good to be able to manually “add” them via RMB click on a collection.
The first thing that comes to my mind is a sort of “tag” system like in Cinema4D.
You would RMB click on a collection and you would be able to add different tags. The tags themselves could be grouped. We could have groups like “restriction tags”, “render tags”, “custom tags”. Addons might be able to add custom tags.
I’m not sure if this is the right way but maybe someone would like to discuss this! I think it’s worth discussing because the outliner needs to be prepared for this kind of stuff!
At least on developer.blender.org developers always recommend not sharing screenshots of other softwares in design task entries to avoid legal problems. As this is an official Blender forum, perhaps the same recommendation is valid.
I’m not sure if this would be categorized as a UI papercut or something more…
But I think the outliner is pretty cluttered visually and difficult to read at a glance.
Would it be crazy to align the object data to the right, with a separator between the data and the restriction toggles?
I made a mockup
Original:
I am loving the expanded usability of collections and the outliner in 2.8 compared to 2.79.
One odd behavior that I’ve noticed is that when having multiple sub-collections within a collection, and I’ve turned on and off some sub-collections, when toggling the collection containing the sub collections on and off, all the sub collections get turned back on, as opposed only the ones that I have turned on initially.
I will only say one thing that I don’t know why is not already in the ouliner… select one object, go several objects done and shift+click to select all those objects at once, like in the file explorer, maybe there is a different shortcut… but so far I don’t find a way to select a list of objects that is not going one by one (if there is please tell me… and no, the box select is not a solution when you have 500 objects)
I guess this idea belongs to the sync-feature (preferable as a checkbox):
An issue I have with the current Outliner is that you cant immediately tell what the object is that you are clicking on if naming isnt something you take care of ( = Circle.001, Circle.002, Cube.113, Torus.041 etc). And even if you do, it is impossible to differentiate many duplicated objects that are all over the place without searching in the 3D View at the same time.
My suggestion is basically the opposite of the wonderful autoscroll suggestion:
When clicking on an object in the Outliner, I want to see the 3D View automatically operate like “View Selected” (Numpad .) on the active item, so I can quickly decide if this is the object I am looking for.
I like to imagine that this combined with the Outliner autoscrolling reduces a lot of manual searching. Autoscrolling shows the list of related content, and the 3D View points on how everything looks.
zoom to selected in viewport while selected it in outliner should be a feature but not sure if that should be the default. There should be a better way to see what is your object selected.
Clicking mesh of an object in the outliner toggles edit mode, a handy way to enter edit-mode. It would also be handy to have the ability to enter sculpt mode by alt-clicking on it. (or some other shortcut)
I second that. Would be pretty handy being able to switch between objects without leaving sculpt mode or edit mode using this method (especially sculpt mode).
I think this is the other part of synching selections, the low priority one, of syncronizing the selections between outliner and Properties editor. Meaning if you click the mesh in the outliner The properties editor should update and I cant see it doing that without enter first in edit mode.
@okuma_10 zooming would be interesting, but its not one of my priorities for the summer. As others have mentioned you can search or press numpad . to quickly find items in the outliner so currently, zooming isn’t desprately needed. And zooming out would not have much of a range (it would quickly get too small to read without intelligently changing how the outliner is drawn, which would be a large tast I think).
@Antaioz@testure about the default and industry standard keymaps: I’m going to stick to shift+click for range select in the outliner even though it is not internally consistent. If the core developers down the road decide to change the keymap, its a very simple fix.
@YAFU I can also see the outliner being used more in 2.8x. It would be a great idea to have an outliner/data editing workspace even. Moving the outliner to the N panel wouldn’t be feasible because the outliner is and editor, not a panel. But I like that idea. Maybe it could be one of the workspaces that is packaged with Blender but not opened by default.
@TakahiroKomatsu that click and drag on the triangles is part of the plan
@machieb I really would like to make custom sorting! That’s my next big goal after synced selection
@pullpullson A tagging system is a good idea, but I’m not sure I see the outliner growing that drastically large anytime soon. I’m not to familiar with the upcoming overrides project though so I’m not super qualified to say I know anything about what could happen
@justastatue I like that redesign though it does cause a large space between where the name and children of the object are. I’m sure the UI team would have to look over it too, but I’m always open to ideas like that. Noted!
@dimitar I’ll have to look into that. Definitely not a desired behavior.
@karja It’s my current plan for synced selection to highlight what was selected in the outliner, but as mentioned an auto zoom to selected wouldn’t be on by default. There is an operator for that already in the 3D view and that may be sufficient. Though if there is a need for it I’m sure it could be added. I’ll add it to the list
@CandleComet That would be cool! I’m not sure how many hidden modifier keys we want in the outliner though. I’m definitely planning on adding more features to those icons and datatypes though.
Thanks again for the input everyone! I’ve officially started now, but ideas are still welcome.
Idea: shift + click or equivalent to select long list of objects, selecting the first one and then shift+click in the last one, like in the windows/linux file explorer
@Antaioz Sorry I missed that! If I’m understanding correctly you mean will there be a way to set the active object in the outliner like in the viewport?
If so, then yes! I’m working on it! Here is a GIF of my progress
I think that GIF answers the question, but maybe I’m mistaken.
Not only did you not bother reading the initial proposal, which mentions range selection, but you also ignored the reply that was made to you that said “it’s in the proposal” (paraphrasing) - all of this is not very constructive.
