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Looks great Shadow. I am impressed by your determination. :)

I hope Andrew implements something very similar to what you have mocked up. Great job. :good:

PS- As a preference, I like the tabs, but options are great to have.

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I think one thing that has to be done with the interface update is... Come up with a name for the E Panel! :lol: "E Panel" no longer works if you want to change the keyboard shortcut. Then it's like "Alt+Shift+Q Panel" or whatever you change it to.

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I don't think a drop-down menu is such a good idea for tools, unless maybe if it could be made to float like the current menus. There are times when people may want to quickly jump between tools and the menu would only get in the way. Otherwise very nice!

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I don't think a drop-down menu is such a good idea for tools, unless maybe it could be made to float like the current menus. There are times when people may want to quickly jump between tools and the menu would only get in the way. Otherwise very nice!

Agreed. It would be troublesome at best.

The overall look and feel is great. :)

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Would it be possible to use shaders when in polygon mode? with a 'Painted' option added to the sphere list - as one of the choices to use texture layers (and eventually painted voxels :good: )

Seems like a good thing when in the classic 'sculpt' mode at least and it unifies the two scultping modes a bit more.

Also, I like the transform box in the bottom-right.

Adding absolute / relative boxes like in 3ds Max would be a useful exension though.

ie. 25% bigger vs. 25% scale; position += 100 units vs. position = 100 units, etc.

I like the idea of basic scene layout tools like this as it lets you paint objects within a context (in conjunction with my pervious suggestion that import should be additive).

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Glad to see progress on the voxel tools shadow.Your doing a great job on this interface.As others have indicated, quick access to the brush tools is important, and should probably be a separate panel that stays open when in use.Also please consider the edit shaders options when working on that area.This also should be a quick access panel that stays open when in use.

Creating this interface is quite a challenge but you are doing very good with it.I hope your also having fun.It seems like you are. :yahoo:

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Looks great Shadow. I am impressed by your determination. :)

I hope Andrew implements something very similar to what you have mocked up. Great job. :good:

PS- As a preference, I like the tabs, but options are great to have.

I love his color picker GUI design!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Blender 2.5's UI looks quite nice, maybe you could get some inspiration from it? :rolleyes:

I especially like the rounded corner button style.

NewButtons.jpg

RNA.jpg

The images above originally posted by galenb from luxology forum.

And here is an old paper: http://download.blender.org/documentation/...blenders_ui.pdf

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While the old interface is notorious for being difficult to work with (subjective) the new interface pictured above is supposed to move away from the old style and really does seem to be much cleaner and better laid out (the pdf document outlines their reasoning behind it quite well and talks quite well about UI design in general). The new blender interface and the Modo UI both exhibit excellent/more "artist friendly" UI design.

EDIT: Wanted to add, I love the look of the current final design :D

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It may look nice, but Blender is notorious for it's horrible UI. It's the main reason that keeps many people from using it.

I thought the same thing, but after trying to understand the philosophy of this software, I find the interface very good and I worked on many software.

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While the old interface is notorious for being difficult to work with (subjective) the new interface pictured above is supposed to move away from the old style and really does seem to be much cleaner and better laid out

Oh OK I thought that was the old interface. I've stayed away from it for so long due to that old UI that I don't quite remember it clearly. I'll have to download the latest, but I'm still skeptical.

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Oh OK I thought that was the old interface. I've stayed away from it for so long due to that old UI that I don't quite remember it clearly. I'll have to download the latest, but I'm still skeptical.

Blender 2.5 is not available for public download yet, the picture above is just a preview of it's coming new interface.

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There is first screenshot. Problem - I don't know what to do with 3 blobs (depth color specular). I don't want remove them (useful for new peoples and quick to use, familiar, etc) but they look not pretty. Now all windows are dockable. It was most complex task - change mechanics of dialogs system. Style is not tweaked well, no rooms still, but it are not first tasks on this stage.

post-1-1240047914_thumb.png

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Well I think the "blobs" are too big for one thing. One things that all of the "toy-like" interfaces that people complain about have in common is really large icons. Probably the worst I've seen is the new interface for Make Human. The old one was bad, now they made it worse.

http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php?post=s1209978431

Also I hate to say it but I think the bright colors might not be helping. I'm no design expert so I'm just guessing. How about if the blobs were made smaller and placed horizontally in line with the top sliders. Then the pop out window could appear underneath, instead of on the side. In the attached image I moved around some stuff in your screenshot to show what I mean. Now that I look at it again, I wonder if the E panel button could also be grouped with those 3. Maybe on the right side of them.

Also I wonder, will the tool bar be detachable? In Photoshop I usually have it floating. Still near the left, but floating so it's easier to access.

I don't see the VS icon anywhere. Are you planning a separate mode for VS work? One thing I've thought about is how many of the tools on the left are not used for anything during VS sculpting. It would make a cleaner interface if those could hide when you're not using them

post-466-1240051820_thumb.jpg

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There is first screenshot. Problem - I don't know what to do with 3 blobs (depth color specular). I don't want remove them (useful for new peoples and quick to use, familiar, etc) but they look not pretty. Now all windows are dockable. It was most complex task - change mechanics of dialogs system. Style is not tweaked well, no rooms still, but it are not first tasks on this stage.

How about this:

post-445-1240066406_thumb.jpg

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For my own amusement, I've made a mock up of three dockable windows for depth, colour and specular. I think this UI will be incredibly flexible if you can drop these panels on top of each other to make your own tab groups - as in modern versions of Photoshop. I'm very excited about the amount of polish that will be applied! :good2:

post-954-1240073256_thumb.png

(btw. I missed out the depth "lock" feature :unsure: , I couldn't really fit it well and didn't understand the feature well enough to place it nicely somewhere else)

As for the quick access buttons, I would do something like this:

post-954-1240074537_thumb.png

Just shrink the icons and arrange them in a row.

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What Phil and David Walters posted is what I got to thinking this morning. Small, horizontally aligned (much like it is on the top bar already), it makes sense, it's easy on the eyes, and it looks professional.

Phil, in response to the lack of VS:

Style is not tweaked well, no rooms still, but it are not first tasks on this stage.

Tabs/rooms will fill this void. Much like in Shadow's mock up.

Anyway, as for colors, I'm not sure. Phil is probably on to something though.

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Phil, in response to the lack of VS:

Tabs/rooms will fill this void. Much like in Shadow's mock up.

Anyway, as for colors, I'm not sure. Phil is probably on to something though.

Oh right, OK that makes sense. As for the colors, I was being careful with what I said there. I know Andrew likes that green and I also didn't want to suggest taking away something that is unique about 3DC.

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