GSoC 2020: Outliner Discussion and Suggestions

Indentation is still there.
I made a mistake by adding hierarchy lines that are not there in master. Breaking it a little bit.
But you are right, without mistake, it is a little harder to read without colors because checkbox is bigger than triangle.

Here is a mock-up without inverting icons.

You are right. It should be usable.
But for same reason, colored or not, triangles of collections are less noticeable.
They are requiring thinner lines.
Checkbox is still the most noticeable element of row.
That would be weird to keep it white. And it is as weird to keep something white next to it.
So you end-up coloring the whole row (except activation dots and maybe toggles).

Collection toggles can not be animated. So, we could expect to color them.
But I am not sure this status will not evolve.
If it is the case, developers could still solve the problem by adding colored line at the right of row.

I will stop there with mock-ups. I think we pushed proposals far enough for them to pick a satisfying solution.

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It would be nice to have such an option !

@RonanDucluzeau I really dig both your mockup, and @wevon’s plus/minus icons for collections (as it used to be pre-2.8). Why not keep both ? they’re two completely different types of hierarchy, one being non-exclusive and centered on visibility, the other being the object parent/child relationship.
Maybe that would help new users, too : I find they often mistake collections for actual parent objects that you can move around - having a different look for the collection arrows may help differentiate them.

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Hi again everyone. I’ve just had a good chat with @billrey about collection colors and we decided on a plan to address collection colors, as well as making the hierarchy more clear. I’ll be working on this over the next few days. I’m excited to share the results :slight_smile:

Until then, let’s stay on topic here. The main goal of this thread is for feedback on my summer of code branch.

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I think what @alonabrany means is something like Maya layer color tags.

If you set a color for a layer and switch on wireframes for the object in the viewport those would inherit the corresponding layer color as well. Kind of like overriding the colors in the viewport display settings. It’s not changing colors in wireframe or edit mode though, that’d be annoying. Only the wireframe on shaded overlay for unselected objects.

It’s pretty handy if you’d want to see which object is in which layer just by looking at the viewport. Clumsy trackpad demo -

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Hey, Ronan! My earlier criticism was in one sense unfounded. I did not go back to Blender and I just assumed that the collection was left of its child objects, but it is vertically aligned with them…so my criticism actually turned out to be against the current version of the outliner. Well, egg on my face. My bad on that.

I love this last mockup that you did. I still think the vertical slivers of highlighting are great, and the slimmer colored vertical line seems easier on the eye. I also LOVE the colored eye toggle icons. Thank you for doing the mockup.

Well, time to wait and see what Bill Rey and Nate came up with. Thank you for work, Ronan. And @natecraddock, thank you for all the great work you have done for the Blender Outliner since your work in last year’s GSOC. The outliner is far better than it used to be because of you.

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I’ve pushed the changes for the first step of improving the collection colors. It is far from finished, and there are still a few bugs I have to solve. I believe it is a good compromise between all of the suggestions over the last week. It is very clear in marking colored collections, but it also indicates the hierarchy without drawing colors everywhere.

image

For this to work, we have also moved the collection exclude check (finally) which also has the benefit of making the hierarchy more clear. The collection icon is now drawn to the left of the contents! :slight_smile: (@eobet) Again, this is unfinished and it’s not clear if the left column is the final location for the checkbox. We are trying to make things more clear though! If you have any feedback on the current design, lets try to keep it focused on improvements rather than radically different ideas. (we already have many unique ideas).

Yes, I think a viewport collection color overlay would be a great long-term goal once collection color tagging is in master. It could even extend to selection operators (select by color tag…) and other parts of Blender.

Finally, I’m also working on all things drag+drop. That means parenting, collections, modifiers, custom object sorting, etc. It’s a big task where many things are related, so I’m doing that in a separate branch for now (i.e. no changes in the daily builds here).

One last thing: This is now part of 2.90! (autoscroll)
scroll

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Nice, works for me. :slight_smile: One thing I’d probably do is make those hierarchy lines just a tad thicker, they look a bit flimsy. Just a smidge.

Auto scrolling looks great as well! Really looking forward to custom object sorting as well.

Any news on the object highlighting for collapsed hierarchies?

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Great work on the collection coloring! It looks useful without becoming a visual eyesore. The drag and drop scrolling is also very welcome and long overdue.

Am really excited about the drag and drop changes that are coming to the outliner, as this will really make Blender feel like a much more modern app.

Is there any chance that that having to hold shift to parent objects will be done away with? It feels very unnecessary to me as you can nest/parent collections without shift, but not objects themselves. Especially since objects will soon be able to be manually sorted, the shift modifier will feel even more clumsy imo.

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I don’t have Photoshop at hand right now, and I can’t make a mock-up to judge myself. But indeed the doubt is “wouldn’t it be better if the exclude checkmark goes on right side along with the other restriction toggles?”

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Autoscroll is much welcome, thank you so much. It’ll make a difference in managing long lists of objects. Can you consider changing the collection arrows to a plus sign as in @wevon’s mockup, given they represent a different relationship than the arrows on objects ?

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I think I finally figured out one big thing why I dislike the checkboxes so much:

They’re LOUD!

This re-focuses the attention back to the collection icons:

image

Also, I agree with @dan2 that the bars should be thicker, plus the white in the icons themselves looked weird with the colored background, but removing it again diminished a bit of their focus… so I think @Hadriscus colored icons looks the most fitting (which I tried at the bottom).

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This definitely helps. Might me just me but I never use those checkboxes, I just disabled them.

The whole view layer system is a bit strange to me, I’d rather have some sort of visual editor/tab for them. They feel somehow disconnected from the UI, crammed into the upper right corner, almost like they have forgotten about them and had to come up with a place after the UI was already established.

Only my personal opinion though, not bashing anyone’s work. They just don’t feel visually accessible to me.

So ye, those checkboxes are definitely in the way and are messing with readability.

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I just remembered that checkboxes are on the left to be closed to collections icons.
You are activating/deactivating collections by using checkboxes and reordering collections by drag and rop.
So, that is more practical to avoid to have them far from collection icon.

@natecraddock , this is good. But can you also introduce a reminder of collection row on the right, next to toggles ?
reminder

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Hi @natecraddock,

With the colors like that, now -all- Collections, even Instanced ones start to look the same, but the color.
I hope we can have at least the link icon on the root icon of a Instance to make that difference.

Also, is there any plans for object differentiation with font types before the summer project is done?

cheers!

rob

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outlinerCollectionColorTest01

Thanks for all the good work on the outliner. I think filling with a small colored horizontal line inside the top of the colored collection box could give the amount of weight needed to be spotable and also vertical lines a little bit thickier.

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Those could then be the colored checkmarks, why introduce a new un-clickable element?

This looks pretty good, but 1px colored lines are gonna be barely perceptible at native resolution, maybe make them 3px wide? Love the rest of changes.

изображение

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this is a better compromise. The only thing Im wondered is if this checkbox design is consistent with other checkbox icons

UI test

This is my proposal, no lines, no mess.
By the way love the new checkbox and collection icon designs New icons for Blender 2.8x

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Auto Scrolling is a god send! Boy, scrolling with the mouse click down was awkward haha. I think that when you go vastly outside of the outliner area the scrolling should probably stop though, otherwise when dragging and dropping objects into other areas you lose your spot in the outliner every time:

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