What a great UI! Has anyone seen this?
Realtime
Posts: 95
New proposed UI for Blender. Maybe a game changer.
Check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk
Post edited by Realtime on
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It looks very good, but this is one and a half years ago. I don't see any further progress on his site, either, so I suspect this is not going to materialize.
There have been steady UI improvements since this, but I suspect the core developers are not going to go for a total remake of this kind. As well as developers, there are a significant number of users who have been using Blender for so long that they have forgotten what it's like to learn Blender's quirky UI from scratch, think it's fine, and actively do not want radical changes.
Blender Guru isn't the only one who's proposed large changes, and at least one person has actually done something about it (not as radical as BG's though). Blender Sensei has created "Sensei Format" and "Zero Brush" with UI and workflow improvements in mind. It's not very easy to find out exactly what Format does from the site, but he has quite a few videos on it on his YouTube channel. The improvement to the UV painting mode of Blender look particularly exciting. The default UV paint tools I find very tricky to use, do not always work as expected, and I think may even have been partly broken at some stage—Zero Brush is intended to make this mode actually work and in a way the user would expect it to work.
Don't hold your breath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw
The result of Andrew's proposals and the conference is that a team to simplify the UI has been reactivated and is very hard at work, with several big changes made recently and more in the pipeline.
A real innovation is the pie menus. One of the frustrating things about learning Blender is the number of hotkey combinations needed to change modes. With the pie menus, you can do any number of things, such as navigate or change modes with a simple mouse gesture towards the appropriate item, or a single click on the item.
Many more changes are in the pipeline, but Blender will always have a "one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard" UI philosophy.
Carrara users keep asking for more hotkeys and a more customisable UI, but have a down on Blender for having exactly that - go figure :)
To be honest with glacial rate of change in UI so far, and knowing how pig headed developers can be, I think the best approach would be for Andrew and others to simply create a new fork of the project and let the propeller heads be.
Having worked previously with Open Source people, you will find they love to rapidly adopt the latest thing, but are not so keen on "finishing" stuff. Worse case scenario is you get the latest new algorithms wrapped in some C++ code and linked into blender; this is what the devs call a "release". End result is laughable fields set to float when the parameters are integers, no units on any fields, meaning you have to trial and error your way to find out what the parameter ranges and metrics are - this is the kind of thing you expect to see in a high school project.
People need to stop putting developers on a pedestal - particularly when simply problems that have been pointed out over a decade ago remain unfixed. Either change the people running the project, or like I said create a new fork.
For a moment there I thought you were discussing the last five years of Carrara history :)
Personally, I think it's helpful to hear about the warts. Some folks here go on about this feature or that feature that Blender has and Carrara does not. It's nice to know that there are issues that are as old as some Carrara issues.
;-)