Industry Compatible Keymap Proposal - Feedback Requested

Feature & Design Feedback
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I will copy/paste from another thread of a reply I had given in regards to a discussion of selections.

W as a hotkey would be well suited for “Soft Selection” or in blender’s words “Proportional Editing”.
This hotkey would at least not require a user to move their hand across the keyboard, but would be able to rest their hand in one location with quick activate/deactivation. Same goes for Shift+W for the pie menu.

Right now “O” and “Shift+O” is a left-handed preference that sits in a right-handed workspace preference. I don’t like nor enjoy this one bit, and I am sure I speak for anyone who uses their left resting hand on their keyboard and their right hand navigating by mouse input.

In addition to this, “Falloff Selection” as a name would be much better suited & I doubt anyone would counter this in agreement to rename from “Proportional Editing”.

Another Hotkey I would ask to be reconsidered to the left-side of the keyboard for right-hand dominant users is reassigning the “L” key for active selections in edit mode elements to somewhere near W,A,S,D space.

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These are somewhat addressed already in the build.
B was already used for proportional editing.
Alt Double Click and Ctrl Alt Double Click are used to select/deselect connected meshes.

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I am not sure why I was tagged. AFAIK this effort wasn’t to fix ICK, but to just fix very small portion of it (sculpting and paint modes)…?

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Panning on MMB is quite typical behaviour for industry standards.
F = Center View to Mouse is a nice decision, we use it in object mode as well to navigate complex structures.

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@JulienKaspar
I was watching the recent Blender.Today with Pablo and noticed in the “Industry Standard Keymap” for Sculpt mode. You had assigned “Subdivide up” to “D.” Could you change this to “Ctrl + D” instead? & swap that hotkey set from “Voxel Remesh” to “D” or “Alt + D” if not in use?

Industry standard sculpt software(s) use these as standard hotkeys for the most important part of their sculpting software;
Ctrl + D (Increase subdivision level)
Shift + D (Decrease subdivision level)

I want to give you props for making great changes as you already have. I just want to ensure that you would be aware of what would be the best and most familiar approach for industry users who use this keymap. As it would be much easier to entice artists to try Sculpting in Blender at studios. If they know the keymap isn’t too different than what we are all used to using already.

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Seconded for Ctrl+D and Shift+D.

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@Doowah @SpookyDoom Thanks for the feedback!

Just for clarity the sculpting/painting shortcuts are mainly drawing inspiration from software like Zbrush.
The idea is to use D and Shift D to intuitively switch between existing multires levels. Ctrl D should be used for subdividing (creating new levels).

This isn’t possible at the moment but once a bug is fixed I’ll add a subdivide shortcut on Ctrl D and D will no longer be able to subdivide by itself (unless the behaviour is changed in the preferences).

If no multires modifier is used, Ctrl D will instead remesh the object (voxels or dyntopo)

My question would be:
Do you think it’s more useful to have the subdivide and level increase shortcut combined as one, or have them be separate shortcuts?
This will likely lead to many accidental subdivisions.

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That would be even better. :+1:
Also: I vote to have them Separate. If I run all the way up to the highest SubDiv I don’t want to have to count where I am but just hit the button until I reach the top. If I can now accidentally subdivide again by hitting the same button combination - that’s crash prone.
Definitely have Subdivide and Division Level as separate commands.

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30

Separate for sure. In the case with ZBrush, Ctrl + D is only to increase subdivisions, while D alone is to move upwards in (available) subdivision levels that are already, created. If the plan is to make it this way, while Shift + D is to always be able to reduce, & go down in subdivision. This would make the keymap in this regard, perfect!

Hope that helps. :slight_smile:

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Is there a reason or need, why the number key usage was reduced to 1-3 only for direct switching? I mean objectmode has exactly the same level of importance when working in blender as vert/edge/face modes. But this way this all needs multiple clicks or mouseinteraction. Same is true for direct switching between editmode, objectmode and sculptmode. Together with move rot scale these are pretty much THE corefeatures of the IC Keymap. I wouldnt change these.

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Not sure what you mean. 1-3 is now for changing the selection/mask mode. 4 is for getting the mode pie menu. No extra clicks are required.

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Hi Julien, prior to this change 4 was directly switching to object mode. It was a one click operation. Now its a menu. Even in the blender default map its a one click operation.

My question was if there’s something I dont see why everything from 5 on needs to be free.

The reasoning behind this is that the industry compatible keymap has some central aspects and william did great back then on identifying those, like the alt based camera controls and a handful of of shortcuts like the movement shortcuts and object and component selection modes, some selection modifier styles, I may have forgot something, but basically thats about it. Its for those of us who use alot other tools that more or less all work like that.

Putting a menu on 4 is like putting a menu on tab instead for the default keymap. Thats no longer direct and even more it hurts the underlying idea much more than deleting this or that other shortcut. And for the sculptmode it was just plain great to have it as a direct modeswitch aswell.

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I can go over the reason a bit.
Basically the previous bindings heavily favored edit & object mode. Which makes sense because the keymap was directly based on modeling keymaps from Maya & 3ds Max.

This created an issue with other modes and workflows. Any key past 5 is very hard to press intuitively and this made most other modes less accessible.
Grease Pencil even worked around this by assigning Draw Mode the key 1, which broke away from the edit mode assigned 1-3 keys. It was messy.

Blender is a multi-purpose software with more tasks than modeling. The pie menu is making sure to empower every mode to be accessible. Same for using 1-3 for the selection modes of the current mode instead of only edit mode.

The bottom line: I’ll make sure that the core decisions of the keymap in emulating other industry software are the same.
But Blender is a different software with many more uses and its own paradigms.
To make sure the entirety of Blender is properly supported some compromises have to be made.

But any suggestions are welcome!

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Thanks Julien, I hope you dont feel hurt. You asked for feedback and thats all I tried to give you. I am not here to make you set a shortcut for me personally, I could do that myself, I say it cause I believe that this change hurts alot of peoples workflows who use this keymap and wanted to make you aware of that.

I not against rethinking the approachability (or status quo) of eg the grease pencil. And I am really glad someone now looks for conflicts that spawned as blender developed but not the keymap.

But yeah such conflicts are expectable, you cant prevent it completely if you have more than one keymap. And there was no custom change for the IC keymap since william left.

Its not just those two tools, the list is quite longer, smaller and larger apps and DCCS, but yeah those two have quite a userbase and should make clear what its about, to align better to these tools is the whole point why this keymap exists in the first place.

Yeah but its not doing that. This is no beginner keymap. Its rather just an relative empty one to make personal tweakings easier and it mimicks some existing “norms” on the market.

So assuming that someone wants to change the mode by keys then it was formerly 1…8 and now

  • 4 and 4 for object mode
  • 4 and 6 for edit mode
  • 4 and 2 for sculpt mode
  • 4 and 7 for weightpaint
  • 4 and 8 for vertex paint
  • 4 and 9 for textue paint

Thats as widespread on the keyboard, but harder to do.

In my opinion 5-0 isnt harder to locate, on most keyboard theres some extra spacing above the number keys. Its much easier to locate than many other keys that exist in this keymap. Its just some more distance to travel than 1–4.

Based on the fact that these modes are grouped spatially in many other tools, I’d keep that, so I would revert their shortcuts, primarily for object mode and sculptmode. ( the pie could be put on 6 instead, there’s no need to judge on any existing mode as equally important, no matter if blender has more or less than another DCC.)

And as the number keys are haptically so exposed on a keyboard I would still find it preferrable to use these keys for the other modes aswell, they could be reordered based on a usage based importance criteria
or could be mapped to dbl -1 to dbl 4 for other modes to align with your concerns. I mean there’s quite some freedom on how to solve that. Its mainly that a piemenu is not the way to go here.

Still thanks for the work you put into this.

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No worries! Thank you for reaching out!

Just to clarify this: Pie menus are primarily meant to be used as a single gesture.
You hold the key, move the mouse cursor towards the desired item, and release the key.
If done fast, this is a single gesture with no extra clicks or key presses required.

But I can see the need for a dedicated object more key too.
Here’s what I’d propose:

  • Assign 4 to object mode and 5 to the pie menu
  • Assign 4 (Click, i.e Press & Release) to object mode and 4 (Hold & Drag) to the pie menu

Sculpt mode (or any other mode) shouldn’t get special treatment.

I don’t think I understand this sorry.

Also the IC keymap shouldn’t just be beginner friendly. While it is inherently slower to use than the default keymap, it can be highly customized like you said. Users who switch between DCC apps often should be able to use Blender with the IC keymap just as efficiently as the default keymap.

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I meant double click like here.

dbl
dbl1033×172 8.7 KB

Glad we see it the same way.

Both would be an improvement IMO, but I’d say the first option has more to it. Its an relative empty keymap, no need to make it slower right from the start. And btw yes, I knew about the pies drag click.

In the case of using dbl click you could realize all modes on 1…4 without any pie menu.
A modifier key could be an option instead, but its to some degree already in use.

And to me the sculpt mode really benefits from quick switches to object or edit mode in quite some situations. Thats why I’d keep 5 for sculpt aswell.

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As it might come in handy, I wonder if you’re aware of this great new Keymapper SpectralVectors is working on? Keymapper - Graphical Keymap Editor (WIP) - Released Scripts and Themes - Blender Artists Community

image
image1243×899 42.2 KB

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@tintwotin I’m aware. Off topic in this thread though.

@Debuk I assume with -1 you mean the Tilde key to the left of 1?
Overall I’d not go for dbl click assigned keys that also have a single click assigned. This will lead to behavior where the first click switches to one mode and the second to another :confused:

I wouldn’t say pie menus keybindings on Click are slower to work with. Assigning multiple operations to a single key actually makes them faster. But they can lead to rare unintended inputs.
I’ll make a patch to use 4 for object mode again.

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Oh thats my fault, no I just meant 1, the - was just used like in the screenshot posted meant as hyphen. I just saw that I missed the next one at the “dbl 4”.
So no, I just meant doubleclick 1 to doubleclick 4.
And yeah while I use dbl clicks here and there in my keymap they may indeed not be good for modeswitches as those can cause workload internally. (Btw. technically it wouldnt have to be that way that two operations are performed, its rather the way blender implemented the dbl click)

In my last post I meant that a drag and hold is slower, I didnt meant the pies there, but yeah personally I prefer pure keyboard shortcuts over pie menus.

Yeah ok, you know my different standpoint about the sculptmode, still thanks for listening and the fix.

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41

I’d like to highlight a problem with keymap industry compatibility; people coming from different softwares who want to approach Blender, the first hurdle for everyone is the navigation; even if you’re a bit acquainted with Blender’s preferences, you’ll have a hard time swapping all MMB and LMB for navigation and context menus, especially beacuse there’s no consistency in the naming of the menus, as Pratik Borhade confirmed in this thread

Besides, the feature (no longer availbable) which allow to change the the whole navigation from MMB to LMB with one click was essential to people coming from different softwares , especially not being able to share a “preferences setting” file.
I’m sure there was a reason for removing it, but I think this would make the difference (for instance, all my colleagues can’t transit to Blender because of navigation)