GSoC 2019: Outliner Improvements Ideas

Possibility to allow collections to behave like groups in Maya (so they exist and can have their own transforms, etc)? Probably beyond the scope of the project though. But my recommendation is to look at Maya’s outliner and to just copy it :stuck_out_tongue:

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I would love to be able to freely rearrange objects in a hierarchy. By default Blender arranges the objects in a hierarchy in alphabetical order. You can turn it off, but you can’t rearrange them in the order you need them to be. I love this feature of Cinema 4D and would be happy to have it in Blender for better scene organization.

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It would be nice to easier see your selection…

It is such a small difference today, I would like to be able to change color of the selection background. Orange on a orange icon is really hard to see :confused:

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Devs are workin’ on this.
https://developer.blender.org/D4650/new/

Hi, and thanks for all the effort!

Put in short (Outliner improvements)

  1. loose multiple styles of highlighting of items (there are like 3 types now!! >>confusing) use just one!
  2. what you select in Outliner should match whats selected in 3dview and viceversa!
  3. use principles for selecting/deselecting like in standard OS file explorer (shift selection row of objects etc) never had issue in WIN and Linux like in b3d :slight_smile:
    4)just one interaction tool in Outliner (standard mouse clicking, region selecting, dragging)…why to use more tools (box select) when mouse interaction is capable of all of them!!

Thats all and I will be most satisfied person in the universe! :slight_smile:

Thx!!!

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Padlock icon on top of each column of Restriction/Visibility to lock in case you want to avoid accidental changes:
padlock

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Look for an alternative so that when you select Exclude/Disable from View layer, the contents of the collection will not disappear from Outliner. For better organization of the work, it is possible that the user needs to be able to continue seeing the contents of the collection in outliner and working on it, even if the user has configured to exclude it for View Layer. I think the most convenient thing is that grayed out text is reserved only for View Layer exclusion, and not for any of the other Restriction Toggles options. For the others they already have an icon that shows the status, and if necessary an even better status visualization for them, other kinds of indicators could be added, such as changing color in text or indicator marks.

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Hi,guys
outliner need tools in headline, like maya when selecting object click on tools and make collection with object
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and have option to add selected objects to collection

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Screen

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Please read carefully Nathan’s proposal, the circle highlight is going to disappear anyway (mixing the 2 types of selection highlight into only one).
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Zachman/GSoC2019/Proposal

Everybody here is probably going to want to string me up for just suggesting it- but I would like to see Folders in the outliner… just a way to visually organize things, nothing more. A folder that you can name something- it doesn’t need a transform or the ability to put modifiers on it. or any custom data- this is just a visual organization thing. If you’re familiar with folders in UE4 it’s basically the same concept. Behind the scenes, UE4 keeps all of its objects in a flat heirarchy for speed- folders (and nested folders) are just a UI ‘trick’ to help people keep their scenes managed.

collections, groups, and layers are great- but putting something in one of those things has implications. Sometimes you just want to clean up the mess.

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Wow! Thanks so much for all the feedback everyone, I hope more keeps on coming! Although I haven’t replied to everything, I am reading every post! I am compiling a list on the wiki with every suggestion I have received here and on Twitter. You can find that list here.

A few things I want to mention:
I have seen Aqib’s patches. He was another student applying for this project. It’s great that he put so much work into it already! I will be looking through his code and buliding off it. Though, as you all can see, there are many other improvements to add over the summer :grinning:

@Blendo I had never considered syncing selection with the properties editor! :sweat_smile: There are lots of variables (lots of possibilities for how things could go) but I would love at least a partial implementation. I think the synced selection with the 3D view is of the highest priority, but this is a great suggestion.

@justastatue I totally agree, the behavior when adding an object to hidden collections needs to be improved. Thanks for the ideas, I really like the idea to add the object to the collection that the active object is in (maybe the “active collection”)

Thanks again for all the input everyone!

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Hi all,
Would it be possible to add a “real” scroll bar?. Currently the scroll bar is kind of hidden and becomes visible when the cursor is on the left border which is not in harmony with the rest of the places that uses scroll bar.
Hope it make sense.

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Highlight the collections of the other elements, since their properties affect the content of this.
Collections

But you can already use collections only as organisation folder, I believe this is even their primary purpose. Collections will have implication only if you make it so.

When you are in object mode you can modify the selection from Outliner, but in any other way it is blocked, I think it should not be like that.
Maybe it would be nice to indicate the mode of the objects, for now only Edit is indicated.
Edit mode for meshes and other object types is indicated in Outliner, but not for Grease Pencil.

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Sure, to a degree- I actually use collections for this function right now, but when was the last time you accidentally moved a file into two different folders? :slight_smile:

Posting here too

One thing I miss from 2.7x is that I had the chance to select objects inside parents even if their tree was collapsed.
Now in 2.80, say you have a collection for a table lamp. You may have a couple of mesh objects, a curve and a Light that are part of the whole 3d asset. If the collection is collapsed in the outliner, you’ll see two mesh 1 curve and 1 light icons, but you won’t be able to select any of them.
Annoying when you know what’s inside your collection and wish to just select without expanding the tree

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Another one: ctrl+click is for “solo” view, but then another ctrl+click should revert to previous state

Im an old XSI user and one of the biggest issues I have with transition to blender is trying to do scene assembly in outliner. Doing this in Blender usually gives me a negative feeling of frustration and as someone trying to learn Blender and coming from other software packages this is definitly an important area to be improved.
My first impression is that some of its functionalities are just half way implemented, other parts seem like patches for lack of a streamlined UI/UX or have an obscure implementation (rely too much on shortcuts).

So ill try to be more objective and just name 3 things I find lacking on outliner:

  1. Selection - There are plenty of suggestions regarding improvements on this, to me the most important I miss is a quick/intuitive hierarchy/branch selection (could be middle click on the parent to select everything) another is range selection using shift for range between a bunch of objects and CTRL to toggle select specific objects, this is kind of a standard everywhere else and shouldnt be done differently in Blender.

  2. Multiple selection - Should work properly for everything I can do with a single selection on the outliner like parenting, changing visibilities, etc.

2.1. Drag/Drop - This is kind of a issue with multiple selection, drag/drop works when parenting and unparenting a single selection but doesnt work with multiple selections, this is really annoying.

Thats it, thats my top 3 issues if they are dealt with I would be a much happier Blender/Outliner user.

Cheers

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