@natecraddock: Thanks for your already hard work! Now with your improvements the outliner becomes the attention it needs to deal with lots of geometry in a deep hirearchy! I have to work with such hierarchies every day and often it is a pain. Especially if you see, other software packages, have the features in their outliners, that you would need.
So I have one other thing, that you could maybe write on your outliner to do list.
In the moment it is only possilble to filter objects in the blender outliner: all/visible/selected/active
It would be nice to also have a filter for invisible objects.
Often in a very large nested hierarchies you hide something but later on you want only unhide a few of this objects. Because of the large nested hierarchy you can´t find the objects in the outliner anymore. Unhiding everything (alt+h) would ruin your overall configuration. So filtering only the hidden/invisible objects in the outliner would be really great! Maybe it isn´t a tought coding job?
All the best for your GSOC project!
This does have a use.
The “Camera.001” in your case is name of the Object Data block. You can have several camera objects use the same camera object data block, while using other data blocks for others. The same way you use the same material on different objects.
For example, I often use several cameras (let’s say 10) for different perspectives in the same scene. But I just use three different data blocks, not ten: “Camera_normal” is used by most of these cameras. And then I use a “Camera_panorama” data block for 360° panoramic shots, and a “Camera_wide_angle” for the places where I need to render a wider field of view. It’s not bad at all that I can see this information in the outliner.
I see, thanks for the clarification. But the unfolding is still unnecessary since you could click (double click) on it as I proposed to open the object data tab. If you want to see the name of it, then a tooltip would be enough.
I expect adding the icons for all the object and bone types should be simple enough, same with adding the toggles for constraints (I imagine it would be similar to modifiers)
Reordering from the outliner would be more difficult, but would be a nice touch. I’ve had a few ideas with drag and drop floating in my head these past few days that I’m going to write down and share for feedback, and this would fit in nicely.
For bones I didn’t know how to get to the correct bone index in which the constraints are stored, so it doesn’t work, but at least you’ll have the switch already written down.
A follow up regarding moving around modifiers. If you manage to get it to work, it would be even more awesome if you could make it so you can use copy, cut, and duplicate on modifiers that you can then transfer over to other objects that can use those modifiers, as well as moving them to other objects by dragging.
Also would be nice having the option to delete the entire stack of modifiers through the R click menu for the Modifiers group or using the basic shortcuts for it.
that is Max way and the right way to manage your modifiers. You have a mirror and subdivision modifiers applied to lets say a panel, then you model a bolt as a separate object and you position it into a hole on the half of the panel. You would then copy the panel modifiers and paste it to the bolt. It will automatically mirror that bold to the other panel perfectly in that hole.
Actually let me rephrase it: This would indeed be neat. Hopefully the current codebase allow this without much effort. It was too irresponsible of me to blindly claim this is easy/hard before giving it a go first
Another issue that came up in https://developer.blender.org/T65560, is the fact that it’s currently quite hard to add unlinked Collections into the scene.
If you created Collections by adding them to objects in Properties > Object > Collections, they won’t be added to the scene.
If you could right-click in the Outliner and pick ‘Link Collections’, which would spawn a list of unlinked Collections, that would at least make it much easier to do so.
One thing that has bothered me time and again is a missing synchronisation between visible and renderable objects.
Meaning I am working on a scene with many collection and many objects, I turn objects on and off, I have it set up the way I want, maybe do a quick check with viewport rendering. And then hit F12 for the high-res final render, and only notice afterwards that some objects were not rendered, or others that I had hidden were still rendered. So then I run through the outliner and visually try to locate the objects that have renderability toggles differently set than their visibility toggles and set them the same.
This problem has been worsened by the fact that the renderability toggles are not shown with the default 2.8 settings. I can imagine new users having a problem with this, not finding why some things render and some don’t.
Maybe there could be a “render visible” button, which would turn the renderability equal to the visibility.
I do not know however how this would deal with helper geomery that you never want rendered.