Industry Compatible Keymap: Questions, suggestions and answers

Have you tried just activating the any button in the keymap entries. They are located in 3dview - 3dview(Global) - ZoomView. The two correct entries are the ones being mapped to Wheel In and Wheel Out.

No I haven’t. First because I didn’t know about it and also because I don’t think having to tweak in the Preferences all the time to compensate a point that can be seen as an issue is a good practice.

I didn’t want to say that this would be no good point to fix on blenders side, it indeed is a good idea to fix that. This was more meant as a quick fix for you until it hopefully gets included in the keymap.

This has been added now in master. Will be in the next build or in the final release of Blender 2.82.

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Thanks for the suggestion. This has been addressed in master now - will be in 2.82 or in the next nightly build.

Thanks a lot :slight_smile: It will really help!

@billrey: Hi William, thanks much. Also with a view to the upcoming fallback to to selectionmode if no tool is active, could we change the selection shortcut Q to have cycling activated. It’s a quite central feature, but fast cycling is impossible currently with this keymap or if you prefer to keep the org shortcut an additional cycling one on ctrl-q would also work.

(-> wm.tool_set_by_id ; id:builtin.select_box ; cycle checkbox true)

And I almost forgot about that. Could you also copy the remeshing shortuts from the blender keymap to the IC Keymap?

We could make the Q key cycle selection tools rather than always going to Box Select. Downside is that users might accidentally cycle selection tools then.

The Remesh shortcuts I’m not sure - I intentionally didn’t add hotkeys for every single operator, for which we don’t have enough keyboard keys anyway. But perhaps it’s needed for Remesh. Do other sculpting apps have shortcuts for this?

Yes, I am aware of that design goal. But that does not mean it should degenerate to a keymap just for noobs. I can agree on producing a keymap that lowers the barrier for users coming from other tools to blender and so I can agree that quite some shortcuts will be less neccessary if good alternatives exist like functionality cumulating popup menus, tool toggling shortcuts, good presented ui elements in fitting workspaces, good contextual menus, etc., alongside with a cleaner keymap that leaves more room for individual configuration. But we should not confuse new blender users with unexperienced users here.

That’s one of the reasons why I suggested ctrl+q ( I chose to propose ctrl over shift because shift+q seems included in the grease pencil workflow), even if I would not say that this is really a proplem, people get immediate visual feedback on screen with the icon toggling. An additonal modifier would have allowed to have both methods. I would love to see general advanced functionality for these stacked icons in iconpanel. In Photoshop these stacked tools all have the same shortcut and if you shift-click the shortcut you are able to toggle them through. That’s a nifty feature. It’s keeping the shortcut number low, people can visually remind where it’s located and quickly remind the shortcut. I also tried something similar for blender with dbl-key shortcut mapping on top of the single click shortcut(q). But it was reacting quirky. But you could give it a short try. Perhaps I did something wrong. It’s much better with shift + shortcut and would perhaps also be a better fit for the IC Keymaps idea.

Yes they do, for the remeshing, its need is heavily dependent on how the tool is designed. Dynamic geometry sculpting workflows like in Sculptris didn’t need that and the same is true for 3dCoat in Voxelmode, or Blenders Dyntopo. But eg for 3dCoat in surfacemode it’s a really neccessary tool. Compared with other tools, blenders new modeling workflow is most similar to the 3dCoats surfacemode mesh behaviour and workflow. And in that mode 3dCoat puts it even on the ENTER key because its that important here. With the toolset in blender for sculpting, especially in the the stage of roughing out shapes it’s just a few seconds before a remesh will be neccessary. It was sort of ok, when the remeshing was a directly acessible button, but now a shortcut for the Openvdb remesh is missing. So if you feel an urge to save shortcuts here, leave the quadriflow shortcut out, thats geared more a good quadrangular topology like ZRemesher, and with its performance it won’t find it’s way into refining the mesh in the main sculpting process. And/Or you could alternatively put a button for vdb remeshing in the sculpting context menu to have it triggered from there.

Ctrl-Q can’t be used for obvious reasons.

Could use something like Ctrl/Cmd-R for Remesh.

And how about Shift+Q, I’ve not really worked with the grease pencil yet. Do they really conflict?
It’s currently mapped to wm.context_toggle context: space_data.overlay.use_gpencil_edit_lines

I’d fully agree on that.

Shift could be used as a general modifier to cycle the tools. It’s best to be consistent.

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Fully agree on that. Sounds great. Is that cycling functionality already available for things like extrude?

Yes, in the sense that you can set it up in the keymap editor. But it’s not like that by default.

Thanks much. Didn’t know that. :+1:

@billrey: Hi William, I just tested out the new masking shortcuts. The masking is associated inverted to the shortcuts, hopefully not intentional. Ctrl+A is removing the mask while flood filling the mask is on Ctrl-Shift-A. Sure it can be seen both ways, due to the opposite nature of selections and freeze masks, but it would be more intuitive and inline with the blenders masking brush itself to have it the other way around. In the brush its also different to current floodfill shortcuts, as Add mode is painting/increasing the mask and subtract is removing parts of the mask. It’s also the other way around in tools like zbrush and 3dcoat.

It’s intentionally that way, because a mask is essentially a deselected area of the mesh. Select all = remove the mask. Deselect all = apply mask to everything.

Reversing it would mean that users would select all but then be unable to affect the mesh using the sculpting tools, which is the opposite of what is expected when you do a select all operation.

It can also be seen the other way, and I think it also should. You are arguing from what the result is about, but it could be argued from what the workflow is. Whether it’s selecting a set of faces or a mask, both are areas we define or mark. And we choose a tool to define that markings. Selection tool or mask tool. And so Ctrl A should apply the marking everywhere. Selected faces is also used for hiding, so what you marked gets hidden, quite similar to have a freezed result.

But my main argument is that the other major sculpting tools have it like that and this keymap is about being industry compatible. They all use Ctrl+A to maximize the masking are or at least use a Ctrl+D shortcut for deselecting the mask. So could you please rethink that decision.

Or perhaps a userpreference “Invert FloodFill Mask Behaviour” could be a compromize if that can be combined with keymap decisions somehow.

I’ve now made it so you can cycle tools when you press the same shortcut repeatedly, so for example you can press Q multiple times now to cycle selection tools or press Ctrl-E multiple times to cycle the different extrude tools.

I was not able to use Shift for this, since we already use it for setting keyframes a la Maya, and it also doesn’t work well in practice because the regular key (ie Q for Box Select) would switch away from the selection tool you would have picked. The only way to support cycling well at the moment is to use the same key for both enabling the tool and cycling.

  1. Hmm, ok yes I see, too bad. Not sure if it’s a good idea to activate it for all stacked icons then currently. It’s one thing for a selection because of its nondestructive nature but seems another thing for modeling commands. I already tested the selection-cycling for some time and think it’s a beneficial to have it turned on.
    Generally I like the idea of stacked tool switching, it’s a good way to reduce shortcuts and keep lots of functions accessible via keyboard, but as you suggested some changes have to be done to separate switching and activating, and and I fear without such a differentiation people will dislike it or find it too errorprone.
    I guess that the reseting part of builtin.select_box with cycle option turned off led also to the problems with coexisting single click and double click commands.

Next to the cycle checkbox should be another one with a “Just activate” option that just activates the last set tool in the icon stack and doesn’t change it, as you indicated.

If that would be in place then combining single clicks and double clicks could also be a solution to circumvent the Maya keyframe shortcut conflicts.

  1. Another thing concerning the Maya keyframe shortcuts. It would just conflict on Shift+R ( as translate and rotate have no stacked icons)
    But currently Shift+R is also mapped to scale cage. So it’s currently conflicting also at least in Object Mode. Are you aware of that?

  2. Another thing that should be improved is to display cycling shortcuts in the tooltips. Currently it’s not.

  3. What I have activated in my keymap currently is wm.toolbar as it introduces shortcut chains like the upcoming leaderkeys. Perhaps this could be a solution in the meantime.