Sculpt Brush Management UI/UX [Proposal]

[silex]

@Nubnubbud

[…] That about sums up my thoughts on the radial menus.

Oh, now I understand your point. Don’t get me wrong I like consistency, but the thing is that pie-menu can contain very different options, some of which are to be used very fast, and some require more time for making a decision. With that I think having pie-menus with slightly different behaviour is a good thing, but it is debatable.

@Nubnubbud

Limiting what a user sees also limits experimentation, curiosity, and mistakes, and therefore learning.

@Nubnubbud

The menus up top, though, are actually REALLY GOOD, all things considered. everything is accessible and you can see the setting section you’re looking for without using a single button.

I agree with you, and the topbar with all advanced options is still present in my proposal, thou I didn’t put much effort in showing it fully. Look at Fig.23 (pink color).
Also I don’t think that having more lean, optional interface element (pie-menu) with the most important settings that can be accessed with a shortcut is a bad thing here. With topbar present no one force you to use pie-menus. You can rely solely on Asset Browser and topbar for choosing a brush and changing its settings.

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Thanks for the feedback @jfmatheu !

@jfmatheu

I think the procedure should be like “destroying” everything, then think how it should be from scratch knowing that now we have way more features than in 2.80.

Agree on that.

@jfmatheu

Semi-automatic: you need to sculpt something before with the brush, then click the button and done. it generates an icon with custom properties (mesh color, bg color, label, etc).

That I think would work the best. The drawback from fully automatic options is not worth it imho.

@jfmatheu

I would say the ideal way of doing it is a custom interface.

That would be very nice, althou Blender should be shipped with some sane defaults.

@jfmatheu

I would place the name and value above the sliders header placement is better and users can see the value without the hand overlapping the value (except hardcore mouse sculptors) plus no matter left/right handed.

That is a very good point!

@jfmatheu

You added 2 buttons apart from each other for changing the context between brush and texture

I’m not sure I’m following you here. Inside pie-menu there is only one button (bottom texture glyph). Top one is only an indicator of default brush. Probably I should have made it clearer. I think that issue is moot thou, because of what Julien wrote about abandoning the concept of default brushes.

@jfmatheu

Tho that may be a personal thing I prefer gestures for those.

I prefer those too. I putted those settings in pie-menu mainly for beginners.

@jfmatheu

I was thinking more of gestures than having sliders in different directions which is strange.

You can discard that mockup, it is a design experiment. I even thought about another design with left and right handed versions tilted in different angles. Main point is that the most natural movement for a hand with pen and tablet is diagonal, not horizontal. So for left handed people the sliders could go from top left to bottom right, and vice-versa for right handed.
But I agree that pure gesture based solution is the best. The problem with it is that its harder to discover those functions. I think Blender should have some kind of quick helper with gestures and shortcuts layed out for specific workspaces.

@jfmatheu

I think that a brush tool should be there in the toolbar.

Now that I think of it, yes, that makes sense.

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@michaelknubben

-A radial menu becomes less functional with every entry above 8 that you add to it. In fig.7 I see 24!

I think that problem is going away, as Julien mentioned that there will be no distintion between default and custom brushes.
I also thought about rectangular design for brush changing, and it should be better in this example. On the other hand radial design gives you more flexibility with custom brush sets shown in Fig.3-4-5. I didn’t wanted to mix different layout shapes, so I went with circular for default brushes. Tho I agree that there are drawbacks for having too imuch items in a circle.

@michaelknubben

Why do the Brush Settings ‘pie’ menus have a big icon in the middle which splits the important parts (the settings) alongside it… making users travel further? What problem does this solve that a regular rectangular menu does not?

This isn’t only an icon. It can show you how the brush looks and behaves in real time. If you are working with more detailed brush having a big preview can be helpful. Cursor travel can be improved with moving the brush preview upwards and joining two settings parts together.

@michaelknubben

Not every brush can be adequately condensed into a thumbnail, so text is definitely useful to have. In the screenshots the sea of gray blobs makes it hard to see what’s what.

That’s why they are in Asset Browser brush section. If you have lets say 20 or 30 brushes in one brush set having text descriptions can make the pie-menu UI very crowded.

@michaelknubben

You’ve removed a lot of the discoverable locations that settings live in (the topbar most of all)

I didn’t removed the topbar!1

Look closely on Fig.23 (pink color). Hell, I explicitly included this functionality inside UX structure:

@silex

Intermediate - all the above, plus:

• Brush customization with topbar settings
• customization of Brush Set layout in pie-menu and importing brushes from Brush Section
• 2 additional pie-menus, one for Dyntopo+Remesh and second one for Masks+FaceSets

Pro - all the above, plus:

• tweaking advanced Brush settings in Properties tab
• making custom brushes and Brush Sets
• custom shortcuts for Brush Sets
• custom shortcuts for most used Sculpt/Paint operations

@michaelknubben

Fig.13 shows a radial menu that uses North, South (two cardinal directions), and then all the intercardinal directions. The most memorable/functional directions are the cardinals, so I’d always strive to use those first.

That can be solved with adding two more empty places for future dyntopo and remesh functions (8 instead of 6).

@michaelknubben

Fig.14 uses none of the intercardinal, and instead has cardinals and then odd subdivisions. In your (muscle) memory, it’s easy to remember ‘This tool is up, this tool is to the left’, but much harder to remember 'It’s kind of up and to the left, but not fully North-West)
The more entries and therefore the less space between them, the bigger the failure rate of muscle memory ‘flicks’.

Thats the problem with random and constantly changing number of functions. I went with what you see, which is dividing circle into the number of functions required. The other way which you are describing is to design layouts based on particular subdivisions. I say both have pros and cons. For example with the second approach how would you design a radial pie menu for any odd number of items or even number that is not 2, 4, 8.

@Branskugel

While all those mockups look nice and dandy they don’t seem quite usable.

Can you describe where exactly you see an issue?