I commented once before about using color tags to filter collections, but I didn’t get attention, so I did a quick mockup.
Color tags are very useful for visually organizing your scene. By adding an option to use them as filters they become even more powerful functional tool (sort of isolate view based on the custom colors)
In short here is my idea images from left to right.
collections with custom color tags (not the final design, but close enough)
Popover menu with added “sort by color” and an entry for the color tags in the filter menu
Some of the color tags are disabled, and the outliner tree reflects the change
filtered collections and their respective content.
elements added to the interface:
added toggle for the filter button. This way you have a visual feedback that there is a filter active that restricts the elements the outliner is showing. Added benefit you can quickly toggle filters on and off
added an option in the filter popover menu for selecting which color tag is shown in the outlines. The color squares are toggles and can easily be toggled in bulk by holding shift and dragging (standard Blender behavior) or the checkbox above them.
added an option in the filter popover menu for sorting by color tag. This is more of a invitation for discussion. Is it important for users and how will it work.
One thing I want to point out. There is a corner case when a collection is shown in the outlines, but its parent collection is filtered out. (eg. image 4, collection 4). My reasoning in here is that we should show the nesting levels somehow. To do this I added a second checkbox to indicate the “ghost collection”. This has an added benefit of being able to toggle the parent collection off if needed.
Filtering by color sounds like a neat idea. I’m also interested in the ghost collection proposal. Indicating if there is a nested collection and maybe it’s color tag seems tempting, can’t properly visualize it though.
I don’t see how the sort by color could/should work. I’d just use custom sorting, it’s not like colors would have an objective meaning, they’d vary from user to user. For example, I always put all the junk I don’t need in a red collection and put it right on top.
If you can change the color of the tag in preferences then the labels in context menu are rather redundant. Since the color tags are limited to those few, then a better approach would be to ditch the submenu and place those colors in one row menu entry if possible. It would take the same amount of space in the main context menu but it would be easier accessible…
The noise is because of the white arrows and check boxes imho.
I really hope you do. Those small things make a difference. And personally would appreciate them more then the color tags.
Looks fantastic!
The one thing that weird - customizable colors have names?..
Why not just put them in one row?
There is already similar thing in gpencil:
I don’t think those are “small issues”. They’re the missing bricks in the foundation that threatens to collapse the entire building if too many pieces are put on top of it before they’re completed…
(Here’s another example of a small brick… I wish there would be a GSoC to handle foundation building, but I guess that’s not sexy enough.) (Btw, this is not a critique of @natecraddock.)
Hey, @natecraddock! I am not sure how to quote what you wrote earlier, but Ronan seems to have done it here. I agree with what much of what Ronan says here. You are right. Alternating colored lines can help with finding a right-side toggle, but whether it helps enough is a different question.
Ronan’s proposal allows one to just throw one’s eye over to the right and immediately spot the correct line because of the tiny splash of color. Those splashes of color are also irregular and variably spaced, which makes the color landmarks very easy to spot as there is no small pattern unit. Compare that to the alternating lines, which are both faint (as to not be overbearing) and repetitive (every two set of two lines is identical visually to the two lines preceding it and after it). The result of this is that I feel that, with just alternating lines, I would slow down and track the faint line over to the right-toggle area if I want to be sure of selecting the correct toggle. With Ronan’s proposal I can just immediately look right and be sure that I found the right one, which is an increase in usability and speed.
In light of that, I would love it if Ronan’s proposal or something similar were available, even if it were not default and had to be activated in the preferences area.
There are lots of great ideas that go with collection colors: Viewport overlay, select by collection color, outliner filters, etc. My goal for the summer is to get the basics working. That means purely visual in the outliner. If we can make that perfect, adding more will be easy because we don’t have to deal with a broken/changing system.
I think 31 is too many because it’s hard to distinguish that many different colors at a glance. 6 is too few though, around 10 - 12 would be perfect.
@Bobo_The_Imp I think we will leave the 1:1 alignment in the outliner for now.
I agree. The more I use my branch, the more I think a filled collection icon would be better than shading behind the icon.
@APEC that operator (select hierarchy) should work as you expect. After I finish working on drag+drop, I want to finally clean up that context menu and make the operators behave more intuitively.
I agree. Don’t know if it’s possible but it would be nice.
Thanks for everyone’s consistent input as we add collection color tagging. I’m reading everything still,
Sorry if you have heard this before, but I had a small back and forth with Hans Goudey about the outliner:
I was saying that it might be nice in the future if we could click on the modifiers in the outliner and have the modifier tab open and close all modifiers except the selected one. Hans thought it would be cool if it would auto scroll to the selected modifier.
I realize this is closer to properties syncing which is already finished, but I wondered if this could be a consideration? I know the to-do list is already pretty big, just curious.
I’ll put this on the list for next week. I would prefer if we can avoid another shortcut key, what if the new collection button calls a menu with the option to create a new collection, or create from selected.
We also have the C shortcut to add a new collection. We could use a modifier key here, like ctrl to add the selected objects to a new collection
Sounds good! I asked a couple people (all VFX at various companies, so I’m not sure about Gaming, CAD, etc.) from layout, previz and lighting and the consent was that 10-12 would be plenty.
I thought especially lighters would need more, but it seems they would use them mostly to visually distinguish hero/non hero characters and sets. For my everyday work it could work as well, if manual sorting is out.
The visual clutter on the modifier tab has always driven me crazy. Unless we’d have either what you proposed or some sort of highlighting or alternating backgrounds for them it’s pretty clunky to use. Like many others I’m using the modifier list addon which makes life heaps easier. With the modifier layouts being worked on anyhow it’d be great to see some improvement to the usability as it comes by default.
Yea if you have a look at that thread I proposed using a super small highlight as well.
This is basically why I hope the outliner can do that. It’s similar ish behavior if it closes all modfiers except one, and you can see them all easily from the outliner. Plus it makes sense anyways for properties syncing to have that anyways.
It’d be handy for sure, and maybe it would just make things look more connected.
From a usability aspect, if one could apply them or toggle their visibility in the outliner I’d probably open that modifiers tab way less often. If it just expands/collapses based on the selection, one would have to expand the hierarchy inside the outliner all the way down to the modifiers, select one, and travel way down south to the modifiers tab to continue. On the other hand it could consolidate for multiple modifiers with the selection thing, I’d probably like that as sometimes they are used in conjunction with one-another.
Drag&drop and auto-scroll … life savers! Thank you so much for your great work, I’m very grateful for these! And if you will find time this summer to tackle also the vertex group selection, this would be already a huge boost of productivity for me.
Regarding the colors, here are my 2c:
Somehow I feel that the colored lines disconnected from the triangles + the background color under the collections’ icons added a lot of visual clutter. In that “ocean” of icons, lines, text, check-boxes, numbers, etc., adding more separated elements only brings noise. Sure, I can adapt and survive with this solution, but I was secretly hoping to have an option for the dimmed colors of the entire row.
regarding the new available color customization for the Collections in the Prefferences: How hard would be to make the outliner color customization separate for the rest of the UI that is Properties Tabs icons. Pretty much how it was before. I for one dont see such a necessitiy to have the multicolored icons for the properties tabs and the past monochrome icons gave Blender a kinda flawless look regarding GUI style. Now its to possible to alter this without affecting the coloring in the outliner as well (where its indeed necessary). There should be:
distinct customization for Properties tabs and Outliner icons or/and
one click switch to monochrome icons for the properties tabs
@xan2622 I’m thinking a menu like this would be useful so we can support multiple options:
in hindsight better entry names would be “Empty”, “Move Selection”, and “Link Selection”…
This isn’t a major task, but I want to make sure it is done well. Currently the selected collection is used as the parent for the new collection, or the Scene Collection if no selected exists. I think a more consistent approach is to always make the new collection a child of the active collection.
I would indeed prefer: “Empty”, “Move Selection” and “Link Selection”.
I agree. If a collection is already selected, then the new ones should be a child of the active one.
If no collection is selected, then (imo) the new collection should be created after the other ones in the outliner (without hierarchy).
Correctly if I’m wrong, this menu would appear every time we click on the new collection icon? In this case, I don’t know if I like the idea of having more clicks even just for creating a new collection, with the proposal of @xan2622 all those tree functionalities can be achieved just based on the selection and/or with a modifier key.
Maybe the menu could be activated with a shortcut?
(Btw, this is not a critique of 
Thank you so much for your great work, I’m very grateful for these! And if you will find time this summer to tackle also the vertex group selection, this would be already a huge boost of productivity for me.
