GSoC 2020: Outliner Discussion and Suggestions

Contributing to Blender Summer of Code
113

Hi all, I see there is some confusion regarding the first task of the project (Mode toggling & data activation). I’ve updated the design task with the rationale and current state of the project. I don’t want to duplicate this information in multiple places, so please read it if you are interested. https://developer.blender.org/T68498 You are welcome to reply here or on the task with feedback.

Many of my tasks for the summer involve the same thing: Outliner selection is confusing. A few examples to illustrate:

  • Selecting a collection will always activate it. If you want to select to reorder, nest, rename, etc, it gets activated.
  • Selecting mesh data enters edit mode, and armature bone/pose data will toggle the mode. This is helpful, but hidden
  • Selecting camera data always sets the active (scene) camera.
  • We show datablocks for most data types (modifiers, grease pencil, lights, etc.) but the icons don’t do anything useful when selected.

Also, it’s not always super clear what collection is active (the highlight isn’t the most visible). Last summer we planned a few tasks to clean up selection and activation.

This first task was planned last August. At the time we identified scenes, cameras, and collections as good candidates for this left “activation” column. I think the most important is collections, so perhaps scenes and camera could be removed. I do think at least camera activation is helpful.

The second part is to switch properties editor tabs when clicking object data. Like I mentioned above, we show light data (green) in the outliner, but selection does nothing! We want to make datablock selection useful by switching to the correct tab in the properties editor. If datablocks were still connected to setting the scene camera and mode toggling, this would again cause multiple actions on selection and be confusing.

I hope that clears things up! Thanks everyone for the wonderful feedback! I’ll be posting my weekly report in a few hours with some nice updates :slight_smile: Edit: posted here. Also, @Hadriscus feature requests are just fine here! Many ideas in my project this summer are feature requests from last summer.

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