I fixed an annoying issue today with synced selection.
Before and after
An issue with synced selection’s first implementation was that it deselected parent objects. This caused issues with drivers and bones, so the parents were selected in the outliner to ensure the objects were selected in the 3D view.
But this caused many issues with the context menu and drag and drop.
Now the parent objects are still selected, but not in the outliner. This makes the context menu behave more predictably, and fixes a few other small issues.
Bones now can be sorted by name.
One sad thing though - for now I’ve decided to put manual bone sorting aside. The way bones are stored in Blender’s main database doesn’t allow this easily with the current sorting code. I may write an abstraction to translate between the outliner tree to the flat list of bones, but for now I’m focused on other things.
Thank you so much. I’d say manual bone sorting is less important. Name sorting is already effing great. I’ve been suffering from that for years. A mild suffering.
Could be an addon ? (or improuve the multiple windows click on windows when you need to have active windows to do something)
I don’t think floating windows whas the original blender ui paradigme (The 3 Rules : Non Overlapping, Non Blocking, Non Modal)
Now we have already lot of popovers, and menu inside menu. I found cool the way blender try to be industry standard but if it is to have same thing as 3DS max or fl studio. I don’t think this should be in vanilla (or as an option).
You can do floating windows, hold shift while dragging from the corner of an editor in Blender (as if you were splitting) and it will duplicate into a floating window.
I believe each OS has a solution for keeping floating windows on top.
The summer of code ends at the end of August. Around that time I will be merging my changes, probably one at a time. I would guess that most features will be in 2.91 and some in 2.92 if there are delays.
Yes, you can already do floating windows, but for example immagine you want to have a windows just for front view on left screen, and one for top view on right screen. If you want to pan, you would normally press alt+drag mmb
but the windows have to be active
so you need to click once somewhere in the windows to be active so the shortcut is understand by windows.
(btw it won’t understand the alt+mmb but it understand to move the cursor (with the lmb in my configuration)
Anyways, maby this is only on windows 10 and it work fine on linux. Maby i should open a bug report, but it’s more about a feature request that a bug as it is dependant on how os work.
@natecraddock: I had just trouble with the blender outliner and I thought maybe you can solve it.
It ist just a limitation that could be dessolved.
The select hierarchy operator only works on one selected group/empty not on multiple selections!
If I select more empties/groups and click on select hierarchy, only the first selected group/empty hierarchy is selected.
I have lots of hierarchies and want to assign materials to them, but I have to select them one by one!
I hope you understand what I mean?! Would be great if you can solve the limitation!
Thanks Marcus
Okay, you are meaning floating windows within Blender, not part of the OS. I don’t see this happening as it’s against the UI paradigms.
Yep! This should be simple to solve. I’m currently in the middle of rewriting most of the context menu, and fixing many of the operators. This is one of them, I’ll let you know when I fix it so you can test it in the build.
I don’t think dimming the collection checkboxes is a good idea. To me, it looks like it is locked, not just disabled.
It’s similar as to when the visibility icons of its contents are greyed out after you turn off the visibility of the parent collection. The objects’ icons are greyed out because even if you toggle them on/off, there’s no apparent change in the viewport up until you unhhide the collection itself.
Now, the one thing I do like is that they don’t stand out as much, and create less visual clutter. But I don’t think greying out is the way to go. Maybe the icon should be less prominent, like a single horizontal line
@natecraddock There’s a little thing that has been bothering me for some time in the outliner. I mentioned it in this thread somewhere above, could you maybe take a look at it?
Pressing “Numpad ,” jumps to the selected object in the outliner, which is great. Except if the object has a parent in another collection, and the parent’s collection is above the object’s collection in the outliner. Then “Numpad ,” jumps to the greyed out instance of the object. You however can’t do anything with this greyed out instance. It should jump to the real instance of the object.
This is actually so annoying, that I often have to switch off “show children” to be able to find objects in the outliner. But then I need to switch it back on, to properly see the parent/child relationships.
I’ve not looked to deeply, but this might be tricky to determine if an object is a child but not in a collection. I’m going to try, but what if . jumped to the next instance in the outliner? That way you could press . repeatedly to find all instances in the outliner? I think that may be a more useful behavior.
This is already solved and will be in 2.90 The objects were selected, but not activated. Now they will be selected and activated.
Hi Nate, I’ll keep haunting you with this one, but is there any chance on getting visual font differences in the outliner, in addition to toplevel link icons, like discussed in post 161 on the 18th of June?
Cheers, and I hope you get all the desired things in before the code lockdown at the end of August
While doing this tutorial, which includes the outliner, I realized dragging from the File Browser into the Outliner scenes, also could be useful(as well as the other things we have been corresponding about: drag from outliner into sequencer(movie, image, sound, cameras) and a scenes+medias-view).
Turns out there was a solid collection icon (unused) already. So I today I learned how to generate the icon and include it with Blender… had to fix some changed Inkscape args
There is still room for improvement, but it’s already better than the old line icon.
I’ve fixed a few bugs too. The daily builds stopped for a while, they are back now.
Not sure if there is room for anything, but I found something of interest. When you click on an armature then shift click on the mesh, you can enter into weight paint mode and see the influence of the bones. Specifically, you can ctrl+click on bones to see the influence of that particular bone. In the outliner, however, if you click on different bones in this state, they don’t update the corresponding vertex group. That might be pretty neat to have because in areas like hands it can get hairy clicking on the right bone.
The objects were selected, but not activated. Now they will be selected and activated.
