GSoC 2019: Outliner Improvements Ideas

But you can already use collections only as organisation folder, I believe this is even their primary purpose. Collections will have implication only if you make it so.

When you are in object mode you can modify the selection from Outliner, but in any other way it is blocked, I think it should not be like that.
Maybe it would be nice to indicate the mode of the objects, for now only Edit is indicated.
Edit mode for meshes and other object types is indicated in Outliner, but not for Grease Pencil.

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Sure, to a degree- I actually use collections for this function right now, but when was the last time you accidentally moved a file into two different folders? :slight_smile:

Posting here too

One thing I miss from 2.7x is that I had the chance to select objects inside parents even if their tree was collapsed.
Now in 2.80, say you have a collection for a table lamp. You may have a couple of mesh objects, a curve and a Light that are part of the whole 3d asset. If the collection is collapsed in the outliner, you’ll see two mesh 1 curve and 1 light icons, but you won’t be able to select any of them.
Annoying when you know what’s inside your collection and wish to just select without expanding the tree

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Another one: ctrl+click is for “solo” view, but then another ctrl+click should revert to previous state

Im an old XSI user and one of the biggest issues I have with transition to blender is trying to do scene assembly in outliner. Doing this in Blender usually gives me a negative feeling of frustration and as someone trying to learn Blender and coming from other software packages this is definitly an important area to be improved.
My first impression is that some of its functionalities are just half way implemented, other parts seem like patches for lack of a streamlined UI/UX or have an obscure implementation (rely too much on shortcuts).

So ill try to be more objective and just name 3 things I find lacking on outliner:

  1. Selection - There are plenty of suggestions regarding improvements on this, to me the most important I miss is a quick/intuitive hierarchy/branch selection (could be middle click on the parent to select everything) another is range selection using shift for range between a bunch of objects and CTRL to toggle select specific objects, this is kind of a standard everywhere else and shouldnt be done differently in Blender.

  2. Multiple selection - Should work properly for everything I can do with a single selection on the outliner like parenting, changing visibilities, etc.

2.1. Drag/Drop - This is kind of a issue with multiple selection, drag/drop works when parenting and unparenting a single selection but doesnt work with multiple selections, this is really annoying.

Thats it, thats my top 3 issues if they are dealt with I would be a much happier Blender/Outliner user.

Cheers

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Could you be more specific? Are you meaning each collection that has a selected object in it should be highlighted? If so, I’m already planning on it :slight_smile:

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No, this was not the idea, although it is also good.

It is about visually giving more category to collections in general. All modifications made to them affect its members. If you hide a category, the objects inside are hidden, this is visually indicated by fading the text and icons once the action is performed, but not before.

I think that the horizontal bands of the collections could be slightly different, to indicate their hierarchy.

Another subject.
It’s easy to unlink a collection of the scene, but not link it. If the file has different scenes, passing a collection from scene to scene is possible, but Outliner must be in scene mode, since from the View Layer mode you can not access the collections of the other scenes, as far as I know.
You should have an option to directly import collections from another scene.
Anyway, Outliner in Scene mode allows to move the collections from scene to scene, but not to instantiate them. When you drag the collection, leave the original scene.

While you can currently limit the Outliner to show only selected objects, it might be nice to have a “Find the current 3dview selection in the Outliner” command. Could also be called “Scroll to selection”.

Perhaps have two keys like F for find and N for next. When you hit F, it starts at the top of the outliner and looks for the first item that’s an element of the current 3dview selection, and scrolls the Outliner window to that point. Hitting N then continues from the last-found item and scrolls to the next item that is an element of the current 3dview selection.

It would give you a fast way to locate and view the positions in the selected items in the context of the full outline and would be a good way to locate all occurrences of an item in a complex outline with an object in multiple collections etc.

I would probably have it search in disabled collections, and if a match is found then stop on the disabled collection name (without expanding it). When you hit N from that point it would not search the disabled collection again so if you have multiple items from the selection or they exist more than once inside the disabled collection hierarchy then it just stops there once to say “yes, one or more of your selection exists in here one or more times”.

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Numpad . as it used to be in 2.7x

Cool, instant gratification then :slight_smile:

new to Blender, I wonder if this has being talked before or if its a bug : when you click some tags in the Outliner (or object data I think they are called) like a material, a modifier etc isnt naturally for Properties panel to update and switch to the relative tab ?

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I don’t think I would want that to happen in most cases, but I guess it could be useful in some ?

what else would you want to happen if you click on them then ? If I am checking the outliner I can,while Im there, to already opened the relative tabs in the Properties panel. Also if properly implemented this would spare me to firstly having to click and activate the object I wanted to work on in the Properties panel by directly activating the object with the corresponding tab in the property editor by simply clicking that tag, data icon in the outliner.

Its about making the outliner more interactive and working together with property editor and more than only a table with infos on it.

In every software I worked there is a live connection between the outliner (object manager etc) and the property editor (atribute manager call it how you want) and this is kinda the natural behavior you want to happen. Ofc there should be an option to turn this Off but I dont know why you would want that.

I see there is an option in the outliner now by right clicking for the modifiers and constraints data at least called Select but there is a warning message that is not yet implemented. Is this supposed to be the feature Im talking about ?

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Oh, I skipped that you were talking about object data, apologies. That does sound useful - right now the presence of modifiers/constraints within the outliner is only informative, there’s no such shortcut (that I know of).
Clicking the mesh data icon brings you to edit mode, would it activate the mesh data panel in addition to this ?

kinda stranger to terminology so I just use the term icons. Simply when you click on the modifier icon in the outliner or on the material icon, the respective tab in the Property editor should change accordingly to this to show the modifier stack tab or material tab.

For now I see when you click the triangle mesh data icon in the outliner bring you to edit mode. Dont know if I also want this for other icons. Some modifier worked also (only) in edit mode ? If so depending to what modifier icon you clicked should switch back and forth on edit and object mode I guess.

In addendum , for the modifier tab at least, If you click a specific modifier icon in the outliner, the modifier stack should autoclose the others non selected and expand only the one selected in the outliner.

here you go a similar proposal in the rightclick select forum https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/0Wcbbc/

Also can you check that "Not yet implemented "Select feature I was mentioning about !

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Yes, this does not exist yet, but is part of the synced selection. Synced selection will be the largest part of the summer of code project, with other improvements being added on the side.

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I would love to be able to collapse all in the outliner. I have multiple collections that I
collapse and each time I reopen a file, all the dropdowns are uncollapsed. Maybe
it can remember the position when you reopen a file.

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