Not too much news due to SIGGRAPH this week.
Current topics
- svn upgrade: this has been forwarded to the system admins.
- Gforge upgrade got stalled because of summer holidays...
- Devs want to have the 'resolution' tag as collumn back in the overview.
- Luca's keymap proposal got discussed, no conclusions sofar. Agreed is that we need hotkey access to menus back, and hotkeys to open menus.
GSoC
- Everyone survived midterm evaluations, time flies... the official end of the gsoc program is in 2 weeks!
- No meeting reports from students, see mailing list for full updates
Blender 2.5 beta release(s)
- Ton mentioned that (at siggraph) there's a lot of happy feedback, but some negative too, especially from experienced users. Main complaint is that new UI works slower, has worse screen estate for button regions, and misses essential options and hotkeys.
- Solutions for screen estate is to explore transparency, horizontal toolbars, and an option to put buttons in a floating panel again.
- Ton wants to devote the after-durian and pre-mango period to tackle such UI topics.
- Campbell will execute the rna api naming standardization in svn within the next 2 weeks.
- Meeting agrees on aiming for an end-of-august beta update release.
- Luca shows a cool kino3d.com idea, a forum based bug sprint, where people together verify bugs correctly before it gets submitted. Blenderartists.org should follow!
34 Comments
I don't agree w/ working slower, I find the workflow going much faster w/ the window system. but the window in the tool shell & property might need to be more flexible as for me, all the scope are good, but for instance I cannot duplicate it, or show the luma & RGB waveform at the same time.
I found a trick to duplicate the Image window for each of them an resize it so I only see the scope, but I guess it is not the best way to do it :p
"explore transparency, horizontal toolbars, and an option to put buttons in a floating panel again" - yay!
I like the new v2.5 UI very much, but I can find myself in floating panels because it will speedup your workflow just as before versions of BL. What I miss is a floating materials menu with more material previews in it. At last, the day that preview render is back it will be a SUPER DAY :).
I'm not sure about working slower either, and if there is any such option to use floating panels, I hope it will be optional (I'm sure it will, knowing Blenders UI).
The new GUI is much more intuitive. Its easy to find things and deduce what they are.
But... I find myself scrolling up and down often in the buttons window. I also keep dragging its header to go from one button group to another (there seems to be no shortcuts yet). That's a big slowdown for me. The best solution seems to be to make it wider but that would make it took too much space. Making it go horizontal don't work because everything ZOOMS and I can't make them small.
The material preview is also a mess I think. You can't see it if you scroll down and change properties. I hope it could be stuck on plain sight on the top (or other means of keeping it visible) while navigating.
Blender 2.53 also takes too much processing power that previous version.
"Main complaint is that new UI works slower, has worse screen estate for button regions, and misses essential options and hotkeys."
Yup.
The only thing I really miss is the F4-F10 hotkeys for quick access to certain menus. That reduces so much mouse usage, which in my opinion is an important thing, minimal movement of both hands.
Slower... nah.... perhaps some keyboard shortcuts missing? yes!
If pie menus finally arrive / proper mouse gesture support -> that will all change.
I'm very pleased I'm not the only one to have a few productivity problems with the new UI.
I've been using Blender for quite some time now, I started using it since 2.39, back in 2005 i guess.
And I TOTALLY agree about the points mentioned:
- screen estate loss, because of one single reason: there is TOO MUCH BLANK SPACE.
Fill those gaps between buttons, and don't use rounded corners
I know that a screen packed with buttons is scary and that a pretty UI is nice to attract newcomers, but it should remain blazing fast for experienced users.
It's such a pleasure to just have almost everything visible and accessible in one screen.
- NO SUPPORT FOR HORIZONTAL LAYOUT!
Why?
Vertical layout is definitely not for me.
- no shortcuts
- personal preference: I don't like dark themes, they're difficult to read
Of course, I appreciate and understand the efforts towards the design of the new UI, but it should be improved, in my opinion.
What is Mango?
The next Blender Foundation project :D
???
Great, horizontal button will be resurrected! Yay!
It must be said that the menu structure in Blender 2.49 was sometimes a wee bit too cramped (as well as cryptic), but the new structure is in some ways too open. I have to agree that the user interface now takes up more space than it used to do.
User 'ralmon' makes a good point about the scrolling. Especially when opening and closing tabs there doesn't seem to be any UI intelligence. Two examples of this would be as follows. When one opens a tab (in the Render area, for instance) the menu stack does not automatically scroll to bring the contents of the newly-opened tab into view, although this might seem logical. A second problem occurs when closing a tab in the menus structure. One would think that the menu structure should scroll to compensate for the closed tab by scrolling to bring the as many of the remaining items on the menu into view in an appropriate manner. This is not the case. Especially when one closes a tab at the bottom of the menu structure, the tab simply closes, leaving lots of unused screen real estate showing below, but not (automatically) scrolling the other menu items from above back into view.
The size of the screen fonts is adjustable. One would think that this would easily allow one to slim down some of he menus to give more screen space. Unfortunately, we have one or two show-stoppers here as well. The biggest problem is actually the horizontally-aligned menu icon selector. You can grab the side of the entire menu area and move it to the right to try to give more screen space, but those pesky icons do not re-stack (into multiple rows or such). No, they simply slide off-screen to the right, leaving no way at all to access them. ):-(
Another example is found in the MESH EDIT menu. The 'operator' area on the lower right of the 3-D screen would probably be better served as a pop-up menu. Those functions are strongly linked to an action which has just occurred (thus temporary) and it is a definite pain to try to scroll through to find what is possible. Additionally, by making the 'operator' functions happen in a pop-up one could reclaim that space for first-level mesh edit commands.
Another way to save space would be to allow the user a preference to eliminate the scroll sliders in the menus. It is perfectly possible to scroll up and down using the middle mouse button. This would theoretically save us a lot of horizontal screen space, especially in the default 3-D view.
A final point really needs to be addressed. When one duplicates the 3D window in the default view one also duplicates all open menus for that window. Now THAT is really a silly. There is absolutely no need for ever duplicating clearly visible menu structure. The problem is that the menu structure is window-bound. Perhaps a better answer would be that the tools menu (shortcut T) always occupies the right side of the screen and is NEVER duplicated. Additionally, it should never be divided when one duplicates a window horizontally. The same rules should apply to the Transform menu (shortcut N) on the other side of the 3D window. It should simply stick to the main function menus on the right side of the screen.
I can even say that the duplication of the header menu strip with each new window also represents a waste of screen space with an attendant useless duplication of controls.
Well, I think I'll stop here, but I'm sure you get the idea.
Please put back the ability to tab windows. This was present in early alpha builds of 2.5 and of course in the old pre 2.5 interface.
Almost every other app out there uses tabbed windows for a reason...it works! There is no better way to make maximum use of screen estate. Currently in the 2.5 interface there are essentially tabbed windows in the form of the header menu strip. There needs to be more.
If , for instance, the render properties panel was arranged in a tabbed form such as:
(render/laters/dimensions/anti-aliasing/fsmb) on one row and
(shading/ouptut/performance/post/stamp/bake) tabbed below it
imagine all the endless scrolling it would save :)
I miss skin faces like a lot of modelers who are still using 2.49 for this fast option.
Surface Sketch is slower and not appropriate to connect two holes of different mesh parts.
You can find a connect tool in every 3D modeler.
I can model without a knife completely restored but I can’t without a skin faces tool.
I hope it will come back before Bmesh.
I agree with other users who think that scrolling is a waste of time and clicking on tab to open them, too.
It is why we are trying to zoom out in Properties Editor and are stuck with anti-aliased fonts.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=172961
And it is also why we love to put some horizontal editors on the screen.
We can create our own set up with UI scripts like User Pref Window but the UI loss its flexibility for multiple screens.
So like Piichan, I wish the same kind of support for horizontal layout.
Maybe, it could be possible to create an horizontal condition example script to let the panel shape be different in horizontal and vertical editors.
It could be great to have Last Operator in an horizontal toolbar.
I too have wondered why there are about 25 "wasted pixels" worth of space on the RIGHT side of every vertical properties panel, makes no sense. I could use that space for a more "snug" set of panels and buttons.
Please bring back panels that can be docked in multiples(like in 2.49), as Jamez suggested. Perhaps not as a requirement, but as an option for where and when the users want to do so.
Thanks for all the hard work from all the Blender Devs!!!
Oh ! I forgot it.
But everybody wants vertical headers.
If you think about horizontal toolbars, you should think about vertical headers, too.
@Ignatz - Hover over icons and middle mouse button scrolls icons left and right?
"Ton mentioned that (at siggraph) there’s a lot of happy feedback, but some negative too, especially from experienced users. "
YEAH! :)
Dorro,
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that was possible. So, I stand corrected on that point. Still seems a bit odd, though.
Maybe you could use some of the techniques used in phone UI to maximize screen real estate.
Jamez mentioned tabs but I think something like cards (Palm Pre) would have a nicer look and work better in cramped areas.
When folders in the iPhone are opened everything on the screen is pushed away to see what's in the folder and then returned when the folder is closed.
ibooks has an abc scroll bar to make scrolling faster. You could make a scroll bar with blender markers to make finding spots easier.
Make things small and increase there size when hovering over them.
what is "mango"???
I'd also would vote for a right-click context menu. It seems like Blender uses the right-click for something else. But to be GUI-compliant, we must have that right-click to be more useful.
MANGO?
search for the word mango http://durian.blender.org/news/durian-project-announcement/
;)
I agree with everyone about screen estate.
In pre 2.5x there were quite a lot of buttons everywhere that I did not know their purpose. And yet, I found myself scrolling a lot less. Even the buttons window, containing buttons like x-sort and the likes (I still don't know what is it good for) I had everything on the screen at the same time.
The new design is more shiny, and has lots of pros, but I really liked that tabbed displays in places like the materials panel, where I could put things in tab groups, or split them.
And as said before - cut the empty spaces!
We can handle adjacent buttons, we can handle toggle buttons instead of a checkbox.
Also, there is no need for the UI to stretch indefinitely when I drag a window wider. On the other hand, I would like to have the option of scaling things down back. Also, having the middle letters of words cut out instead of the endings (when buttons are too small) would be nice, too.
Thanks devs!!!
“Ton mentioned that (at siggraph) there’s a lot of happy feedback, but some negative too, especially from experienced users. ”
+++++++
I wish there was a possibility to get the 2.49b UI along of the 2.5, at least as an optional UI for those that found the 2.49b one much more convenient.
The 2.5 UI looks visually nicer and more polished there's no contest, but i see a decrease in the usability.
For me in term of workflow the 2.5 UI works much slower, several features and options that were immediately and clearly accessible in the 2.49b UI for what i am doing with Blender are now buried inside all those 2.5 side panel so i need to drag, develop etc... to access them, close them to re-access the other ones etc... that's really a slowing down in the workflow considering they were all there in just 1 click in 2.49b.
Wow. There is a lot of UI complaints. I quite agree with all of them.
Still I hope the developers could still keep the pros of 2.5 UI. It still has a lot of good stuff.
The UI does work slower. In one of my school's computer labs, I had Blender installed, and 2.49 ran perfectly smooth, but when I tried running 2.5 on them, even just rotating the default cube, the frame rate was somewhere around 3 frames per second. That's not a typo, it was a single-digit, countable with the naked eye number.
"...has worse screen estate for button regions,..."
True. I have to use every bit of my second monitor entirely for five vertical panels of buttons, and even then I have to keep selecting a different panel to see the buttons I want - the correct panel never seems to be on show. That didn't happen in 2.4x. It also needs to be more multi-monitor friendly - so it remembers where you last positioned the Blender window on start-up (like 2.4x) - surely an *incredibly* simple thing to add?
Otherwise, the 2.5 interface is a massive (and public-pleasing) improvement over 2.4x, and lets not forget the *huge* recoding effort that hides behind the window-dressing!
Thanks Blender foundation! 2.48 looked old and scary, 2.5 looks modern and inviting.
I never understood the reason why (in Blender 2.5)>
1)They've replaced the simple fast and efficient windows "Split system" of 2.4x with those tiny and hard-to-spot "action zones" (or something...)...really a drawback...
2)Why they introduced that "only for English speakers" "key word" search box for a tool instead of a (much more intuitive IMO) "icon based",customizable "Tool Shelf"
3)most of the "Tool tips" pop ups are written in a way that reminds kinda of a "geeky" need for "technobubbles" and unnecessary complexity..could this be the only way for a "pro looking" GUI maybe?...
4)why they just don't try to develop a decent enough internal renderer (the eternal Blender's "con" IMO) or at least to fill the gap that separates it from the "state of the art" commercial alternatives by focusing on writing a proper Yafaray (or Luxrender) export script...(compositing is a good thing and habit but even if you bring the compositor to its limits...well...it will never stop to be a "after effects" "trick" you know...)
5)What is that "bad joke" there with the "bevel weight" modifier really?...not the most brilliant idea on the planet allow me to say...a simple "bevel" or "chamfer" tool would do the job just fine without the need of yet another "add on"...
..if anyone knows,I would frankly appreciate if he could explain to me in plain English...thank you...
PS > Sorry for my bad English
ah...not to forget...the "RMB + LMB" comb for accepting the "loopcut-in-the-middle" function in the place of the old and tried "MMB" fast,intuitive method...isn't this also a "kuel"-instead-of-"cool" kind of an unnecessary work turnaround?...(not to speak for the "Knife tool" and the lack of a "face fill" function...)
I'm in agreement on this.
Frankly, I'd say the best thing to do is right now is focus on nothing but the UI. Until it can be perfected, don't move on. I'd rather Blender 2.6 take an additional year to complete than come out with an unfinished UI system. This will be likely the only time for a long while that the UI will get any serious development, gotta finish it this time or it might be years before it's tackled again.
It'd be better to get this right before moving on to bigger things wouldn't it? After all, the UI is the most, or at least one of the most, important parts of any program. And is still to this day the main compliant from non-Blender users, who have tried to learn Blender but failed.
As for what needs to be changed:
- I think there was a lot of elements of the Blender 2.49 UI that really did work well, and I would love to see them come back. As well as a lot of new ideas which could be tried before we set the new UI in stone. Horizontal alignment of the menu options is a must-fix issue, as it is right now, it's down right glitchy and unusable. (I know it's still a beta, and that's the idea, but still).
- Also, someone mentioned it and I must agree, the 'Tooltips' are .. terrible. PLEASE fix them. Make them actually a description of what the feature or option is or does. Some strange info about how it fits into the python programming is useless to the designers who are making something, especially if they aren't programmers. And it's worse than useless to people who are trying to learn how to use the program. Either fix them or remove them, either way, they got to go.
I love the Blender devs, they have done an amazing job already. Please keep up the amazing work and make this the best Blender release ever!
i used to feel the iu was slower until i realized how well the scroll wheel integrated … it scrolls panels up an down, and the panels left and right, once i realized a few things about it, i feel it's much faster
"The material preview is also a mess I think. You can’t see it if you scroll down and change properties. I hope it could be stuck on plain sight on the top (or other means of keeping it visible) while navigating."
this is when the sheer speed an ease of splitting window areas comes n VERY handy…
also i think some people might not have understood the efficacy of creating custom layouts…