Interface discussion

[philnolan3d]

If you could have the colour picker open at the IMG tab for example then you could constantly choose colors from a picture. That would be useful.

You can have the color picker open all the time, that's how I work. Just go to View > Popups > Color Picker

[efflux]

Just another point about sliders. For a slider to be effective it needs to be large at least to be able to effectively grab a slider control and drag it or you then need other key commands to make smaller incremental changes. In the view - popups menu we have some sliders that popup if you assign a keyboard command like one for radius. Those are quite effective and large sliders same as the ones presently at the top of the UI. Smaller ones in the brush editor panel would be less effective unless an actual larger slider appeared. This is my reason for not being keen on that idea.

[efflux]

philnolan3d.

I can have the color picker open but I can't change the colour of the brush without actually clicking OK or hitting enter. I'm not saying this is a huge deal but I have to keep opening and closing the colour picker. I'm on Linux here so for example if I open Gimp and use the colour picker then the colour of the brush simply updates instantly as I move around the colour picker making constant changes to the colour very quick and easy.

[efflux]

OK. Do I have a Linux issue here because I notice it's telling me I can choose primary and secondary colours with either LMB or RMB?

[philnolan3d]

You may have some kind of linux issue. I never close the picker I just click on it and the brush color changes. I click again the color changes again.

http://screencast.com/t/1C8kQfByMx

Edit: If you double click the color swatch, yes then you have to click OK or Enter to accept it, but if you open the one I mentioned above you don't have to.

[efflux]

OK thanks. Issue is solved. It all works as expected if I open but the colour picker popup from view menu. I was opening the colour picker from the colour boxes on the right.

[efflux]

So this begs the question as to why does it work this way? Anyone used to a 2D editing app is going to open a colour picker from the colour box on the right.

[philnolan3d]

I believe Andrew first designed it to work like Photoshop, which is the way you were using it. Then the other picker I mentioned was added to make things easier. The old way was just never removed so now you have both methods and can choose.

[2byts]

Just another point about sliders. For a slider to be effective it needs to be large at least to be able to effectively grab a slider control and drag it or you then need other key commands to make smaller incremental changes. In the view - popups menu we have some sliders that popup if you assign a keyboard command like one for radius. Those are quite effective and large sliders same as the ones presently at the top of the UI. Smaller ones in the brush editor panel would be less effective unless an actual larger slider appeared. This is my reason for not being keen on that idea.

Sliders have to be big...absolutely!

I am trying to point out that the screen space is the entire slider....ie: place cursor in text field...and just hold lmb down and drag acrossed the screen. No tiny slider is even needed to click on...

And dimming text is not an issue for any kind of custom UI colors.

[efflux]

OK but isn't what you are suggesting what is essentially described in the original idea that has no visual sliders.

Here is Blender's transform properties box. This just appears as a floating window anywhere you want it to be and gives you info on the selected object. The arrows on either side of the value increase or decrease it by 1 step. Clicking on the text highlights it for editing. If you click on the text and drag to the sides without declicking, it scrolls through values. If you drag vertical it scrolls through values but slower. To my mind this is exactly all that is needed. There are actually discussion going on about adding sliders to Blender but this would visually and functionally complicate the whole simplicity of the way every single value in Blender is edited.

[efflux]

I like the single sliders that can be called up at the mouse though. Just having visual feedback from that rather than reading numbers is good and then it just disappears after you move it so it can be big without getting in the way.

[efflux]

In this forum under feature requests I mentioned something else that I'm not keen on. It depends on what kind of editing you are doing but one thing I don't like, mainly when you are doing some detailed work, is the way at the mouse pointer you see a transparent preview of the brush shape which does disappear when you start painting but I'd rather not see that most of the time. It obscures and distracts. I would prefer that this could be turned off and I would also prefer that all the visual feedback disappears when you start a painting stroke but at present you still see the radius. Although some of those ideas are cool and give you more comprehensive info about the brush than other apps do, it can be too much. Best of all would be in you had full customizable control of these things.

[SonK]

I personally feel that Modo and Blender are not good examples of UI. One of the most elegant UIs i have seen is Nuke 5.1 (compositing app) which is why I am really passionate about my suggestions on this.

Please understand that I am not making aesthetic design suggestions.....i am making functionality suggestions that improve and speed up the workflow. The important factor with UI design, is that although it has to look good, it is not the priority. The priority is working fast and intuitively. To do that, one must minimilize to the point of making it a religion. The holy grail of UI design.....is no UI at all...and the easiest way we can achieve that is by eliminating as much as possible without sacrificing.

I think we could do without the visual representation of sliders as well.....but if you click and hold in the text field you activate the slider and can drag left or right (like channel box in Maya)

The checkbox is made redundant by simply highlighting the attribute name instead. The functionality is exactly the same -a dimmed text means it is checked off- but without the extra clutter in the Menu. This gives more space and a cleaner interface..

The problem with the previous design is it had 4 seperate hot areas (check box, left arrow, textfield, and right arrow) to click in a very small space...which is cramped. I am reducing it to 2 hot areas (name is the checkbox and textfield can be dynamically used as a slider, keyboard input, and arrows for incremental changes) and still maintain the functionality and design concept.

Well now that you explain it abit more, i can totally live with that and i kinda of like it more now.

OK but isn't what you are suggesting what is essentially described in the original idea that has no visual sliders.

Here is Blender's transform properties box. This just appears as a floating window anywhere you want it to be and gives you info on the selected object. The arrows on either side of the value increase or decrease it by 1 step. Clicking on the text highlights it for editing. If you click on the text and drag to the sides without declicking, it scrolls through values. If you drag vertical it scrolls through values but slower. To my mind this is exactly all that is needed. There are actually discussion going on about adding sliders to Blender but this would visually and functionally complicate the whole simplicity of the way every single value in Blender is edited.

boy that transform box looks ugly. the annoying thing about blender gui is everything has to be bevel corners. I hope to God Arkanis doesn't borrow alot from blender GUI, its probably one of the worse one i seen.

@Arkanis, i was wondering if you'll also be re-designing the 3D Coat logo also? I mean with the new GUI, i think we'll need a new 3D Coat logo, the current one won't work with the suggested GUI. Anymore update on the GUI? I like what you done so far!

[Roger_K]

That looks really nice, very silo esque but then i think thats down to wxwidgets or what ever lib they use

[philnolan3d]

@Arkanis, i was wondering if you'll also be re-designing the 3D Coat logo also? I mean with the new GUI, i think we'll need a new 3D Coat logo, the current one won't work with the suggested GUI. Anymore update on the GUI? I like what you done so far!

I don't see anything wrong with the logo unless the name changes at some point.

[efflux]

There is a different version of the Blender UI without the beveled corners but the beveled corners version is actually simpler on the eye. It doesn't have gradations.

If 3D Coat ends up more like Silo then that seems good to me. I don't use Silo because for other reasons I was not keen on it but it seems they have tried to keep the UI as minimal as possible.

[efflux]

As for Blender's UI, the only real issue with it is the fact that it allows you to have horizontal areas to contain various boxes similar to the one I posted a screen shot of. These small boxes all collapse to a bar as is indicated with the little arrow symbol. The trouble with this is that the boxes have to be of a fixed size to tidily fit horizontally. Whereas vertically they could be any height. Because these boxes are all the same size it means that there is a limited amount of space for related controls. This is messy since obviously some functions need more controls. There are some plans to possibly change this but Blenders UI is totally configurable by the user. It is so easy to configure that the way you work is to generally configure the UI as you work. Each project is just configured individually. I think that's the way most people work with it.

[jedwards]

Silo's GUI can be whatever you want it to be. You can make almost any command a button, nest it within a tab or float it onscreen. You can even make your own custom buttons so really as far as GUI goes Silo can look any way you want it to - even another app if you want to put the time in to customize it that far.

Silo's real UI strength has nothing to do with that however. One of the biggest reasons I use it (aside from being a great organic modeler) is that you have total control over your keyboard binds as well as your mouse. You can embed any command to a mouse click or combination of ctrl, alt, or shift plus a mouse button. This makes it unique over any other software. My default GUI is largely untouched - I turn the command buttons off though to free up screenspace since most of how I work has been reconfigured to use the mouse and those 3 modifier keys. I've completely reconfigured it to work how I prefer it to work. It behaves nothing like Maya or Max or XSI or LW/Modo, blender etc... imo those apps just pale in comparison when it comes to the workflow I created for myself in Silo. I rarely have to break focus from what I'm working on in the viewport. That to me is what good UI should be all about.

[buqa]

I thing that main reason why is Silo UI so great is that it was forethought.

In Max (for example, but its the same for Maya, XSI and most of others) you have lot of buttons like "Cut", "Knive", "Sliccing plane" etc. that make nearly the same. It obviusly should be one interactive tool switching its "mode" in dependence on ... something. For example - if you click on edge first, it will act like Cut, if you start in free space, it will act like Knife, if you click and drag, it will act like clipping plane.

With Silo you don't use "stupid buttons" but "smart tools", you can feel it.

And for me, its one of worst things in 3DC interface ... lot of rendundant and duplicated tools. In voxel mode is about 2/3 buttons useless (but I understaned its WIP stage), but this is in other modes as well.

So, UI should be "cleaned" a lot in the first place.

[efflux]

Apps like Maya, Max, XSI etc are very bad in my opinion. Buttons absolutely everywhere. So maybe you can customize a lot of these apps but how quick and easy is that anyway? Why on earth does an app need buttons to create primitives for example or any tools for that matter. I know what extrude does. I don't need an icon to tell me that. If it has any option then I can deal with that after calling the tool up via key command. Everything can be in menus with key commands added. Then you learn the command. It's very simple. I don't get all this ridiculous UI glut in apps.

[efflux]

I've been working in Blender for a few days. Just went to Modo. It's unbearable in comparison! No way does Modo have as good a UI as Blender. You can reconfigure Blender's UI as you work without thinking about it. Lux have tried with Modo. The trouble is they have tried to do everything. Tried to please everyone. This doesn't work. The developers must decide on a simple direction that is not going to please everyone. Silo, Wings 3D, Blender and 3D Coat (even although it's presently a bit of a work in progress) are examples of apps that all have simple systems of working that do not create UI traffic jams. Blender has some issues but it's a complex app so not so easy to solve those problems. Other similar full blown 3D apps apps have had nothing done to them to solve their UI mess. I have faith in what has been suggested for 3D coat. I think it will end up having a very clear and simple UI.

[philnolan3d]

Apps like Maya, Max, XSI etc are very bad in my opinion. Buttons absolutely everywhere. So maybe you can customize a lot of these apps but how quick and easy is that anyway? Why on earth does an app need buttons to create primitives for example or any tools for that matter. I know what extrude does. I don't need an icon to tell me that. If it has any option then I can deal with that after calling the tool up via key command. Everything can be in menus with key commands added. Then you learn the command. It's very simple. I don't get all this ridiculous UI glut in apps.

Not everybody loves using keyboard shortcuts. For example in LW there are a few tools that I don't even know where they are in the menus because I was taught the keyboard shortcut first, however many tools I prefer to use the menu buttons. Especially when I've set up a special "User" tab with all of my most used tools in it.

I've been working in Blender for a few days. Just went to Modo. It's unbearable in comparison! No way does Modo have as good a UI as Blender. You can reconfigure Blender's UI as you work without thinking about it. Lux have tried with Modo. The trouble is they have tried to do everything. Tried to please everyone. This doesn't work. The developers must decide on a simple direction that is not going to please everyone. Silo, Wings 3D, Blender and 3D Coat (even although it's presently a bit of a work in progress) are examples of apps that all have simple systems of working that do not create UI traffic jams. Blender has some issues but it's a complex app so not so easy to solve those problems. Other similar full blown 3D apps apps have had nothing done to them to solve their UI mess. I have faith in what has been suggested for 3D coat. I think it will end up having a very clear and simple UI.

You like the Blender UI?? That's the main reason I've never used it for more than a couple hours. I could even get anything done I was so frustrated by the UI that I just gave up on it. I've heard others say the same thing.

[SonK]

I've been working in Blender for a few days. Just went to Modo. It's unbearable in comparison! No way does Modo have as good a UI as Blender.

Please stop smoking that green stuff :P. Blender UI is god awful and so is it workflow IMO and it looks like they are going to address this in 1.5, looking torward Modo as an example. And phil is right i use very few hotkeys, in fact i usually use context mennus to access my tools, and hotkeys for changing viewport, selection type, stuff you do often.

[Arkanis]

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the long delay but as you all know my computer crashed, I had to pay 2500 to recover some non backuped projects that where on it, so I had some serious presure on me and I had to do some work to recover those Euros back.

Anyway, just to share it with you all here are the three spots for MTV for the international AIDS campaign. Just for the technical part, we where a small team (3 persons) with a very short deadline (2 weeks and a half). The team was composed by the AD, the animator (myself) and one musician for the sound effects and music.

It's going live today since it's the international day for the fight against AIDS, so I'm happy to share this with you all.

Hope you like them...

Youtube links :

The Hunting -

The Night -

The Disco -

Vimeo links :

The Hunting - http://vimeo.com/2395172

The Night - http://vimeo.com/2395217

The Disco - http://vimeo.com/2395235

More on the UI on the next days, I promise.

Ark.

[lc8b105]

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the long delay but as you all know my computer crashed, I had to pay 2500 to recover some non backuped projects that where on it, so I had some serious presure on me and I had to do some work to recover those Euros back.

Anyway, just to share it with you all here are the three spots for MTV for the international AIDS campaign. Just for the technical part, we where a small team (3 persons) with a very short deadline (2 weeks and a half). The team was composed by the AD, the animator (myself) and one musician for the sound effects and music.

It's going live today since it's the international day for the fight against AIDS, so I'm happy to share this with you all.

Hope you like them...

...

...

Ark.

Good creative. Watch the first MTV I didn't understand what it is, but when I watch the second one I understood, that it is. The third one even more easy to understand.

[philnolan3d]

Good animation, but they seem kinda creepy and almost sexist against men. It seems to imply that we're all purposely going out and killing women. I gave the Youtube vids all 5 star ratings for you anyway.

[paulrus]

Quick reply RE: Blender interface.

If 3DC is aimed at professionals (people who are willing to pay $ and buy many copies of 3DC) then stay away from anything like Blender's interface. Blender is totally non-standard. It may have some neat tools, but it's interface has completely relegated it to the sidelines. It's more important to appeal to people who use the major packages - making it as easy as possible to switch between them and 3DC as possible.

I'm not a Modo user, but it has a very impressive interface. So does Silo - and it's incredibly customizable. I'm an XSI user and a former LW user. A clean, text-based, straight-forward interface that has as many tools consolidated as possible would be great.

Basically, if 3DC's new interface is designed to increase sales in the professional market it needs to work the way someone who uses Maya, Max, XSI, LW or C4D expect it to work. I can jump to any of those packages and be up and running in a few minutes because they all work very similarly. 3DC needs to fit in that world.

PG

[Arkanis]

Phin :

Not exactly, but statisticly males spread more AIDS than women. Anyway, it's the male that has to use a condom, and if he is infected it's because a female infected him before. So the message goes both ways. He's the killer because he has been killed before by a women...

Bah, it was a very very short deadline and we did our best, lets hope people will like it

Now I must get back to work on this 3DC UI you know ? I will take time to answer also people posts here.

A.

[Crusoe]

Alpha 40/42

GL Performance regression:

Non-CUDA version is DRASTICALLY Slower. This is on a ATI video card.

Modeling Grid:

In the GL version, the grid always overlays the object being modeled instead of intersecting it. Also, when you zoom in, some of the grid lines go wonky. IE, spacing and perspective angles get messed up.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Alpha 40/42

GL Performance regression:

Non-CUDA version is DRASTICALLY Slower. This is on a ATI video card.

Modeling Grid:

In the GL version, the grid always overlays the object being modeled instead of intersecting it. Also, when you zoom in, some of the grid lines go wonky. IE, spacing and perspective angles get messed up.

Ok, I will check... But really strange because non-cuda version was almost unchanged... Where is bottleneck?

- overall FPS

- painting wit big radius

- painting with small radius

- smoothing

- some specific tool

?