UI - Contextual modifier description in the tooltips of the Add Modifier dialog window

Hello,

To add a new modifier onto an object we press the Add Modifier dropdown component and a dialog window with all the available modifiers pops. When we move the mouse cursor over each listed modifier a tooltip appears. Currently the text displayed in this tooltip is the same for each modifier and do not provide any clue on what the modifier does.


We suggest to introduce a real contextual message here that efficiently describe what the highlighted modifier does. This would greatly help new users to pick the item they need.
Ideally this tooltip would also have an hyperlink to the modifier documentation web page.

Thank you very much

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Here is an example of what the new tooltip could look like. It quickly provides an accurate and useful description of the highlighted modifier.

@sybren, @billrey, do you think such a development could be done on your side?

In the future the tooltip system could be improved even more with the addition of an hyperlink that would allow the user to jump directly to the modifier documentation page.

Thx

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The development part is very simple, just copy & paste the text in the right location. What needs to happen first, though, is that a description is written for every modifier. This thread could be used for that.

This would be very nice indeed, but also incur a maintenance cost. We’ll need someone who takes that burden and makes sure things stay up to date. It also would require a well thought-out approach so that translation files are properly handled, so I don’t think it’ll be that easy to implement.

Hi @sybren
Here is a file containing the description that could be used for each modifier.
The descriptions were taken from the documentation: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/modifiers/index.html

I am thinking about something: if you copy and paste those descriptions directly into the code they would be “hardcoded” and consequently if a modifier behavior is modified at some point in the future and its description has to be adjusted then one would have to also think about changing this code too.

Can you tell me how the documentation page of each modifier is generated? Does it come from a dump of the information stored into the modifier source file (like a Doxygen would do for example) or is it manually written?
What if each modifier file contained its own documentation? Then the tooltip would just have to ask for the “description headline” of the highlighted modifier item. It would also allow the tooltip to automatically work with user written modifiers without the need for these users to modify other code than their own.

2019-11-14_ModifiersDescription.xml (14.7 KB)

Thanks!

if you copy and paste those descriptions directly into the code they would be “hardcoded” and consequently if a modifier behavior is modified at some point in the future and its description has to be adjusted then one would have to also think about changing this code too.

That’s true. Then again, you also have to think about updating the manual, and to describe the changes clearly in the release notes.

Can you tell me how the documentation page of each modifier is generated?

The manual is all hand-written. Much of the Python API documentation is generated from the source.

What if each modifier file contained its own documentation? Then the tooltip would just have to ask for the “description headline” of the highlighted modifier item.

That sounds like a good approach, although I don’t know how much work it would entail specifically.

I submitted a patch for the UI team to review: https://developer.blender.org/D6352

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