Hi Rob, well the main way I figure is that adding in some extra functions with right-click does not suddenly make all the other functions in MoI that work well with a tablet stop working...

Basically those will be shortcut methods, there will still be several other ways of getting similar results like just selecting objects and then using the regular "Hide" command.

I do generally try to avoid relying on right-clicks for the most basic functions, but for shortcuts and generally more advanced functions it is not something that I worry about as much.

As time goes on and more advanced functions are added, it won't be that unusual for there to be some more stuff on right clicks.

Pretty much the main other choice would be to not have those particular functions in there at all, and it is hard to see how that is a better situation.


> I take it the styles pane will scroll when it reaches its screen limit?

Yup!

- Michael

Oh yeah i agree of course - im only messing!

Hi Michael,

So far it sounds and looks good, but until we have a play I can't comment, especially when you've been using the 256 layer system for years, it will be very interesting.
The system looks and sounds very straight forward, À la cad\graphics 'layer' system.

I was just going through in my mind on how I would use the system, maybe assign all curves used for construction as one style, construction surfaces as another and the rest for assembled solid bodies, I guess that will be it's most simplistic use.
In saying that, I'm trying visualise MoI with curves, surfaces and solids in colour, could you give us an actual screen shot of some of these objects together in colour, just to see the intensity you have planned for the colours, or haven't you got to that stage yet ? Like a trailer for an up and coming epic Movie :)

Cheers

Hi Michael,

It's evoluting really well.
Like Danny I was wondering about the colours of objects and have two questions:

- Will it be possible to temporarily turn style colours off to have a more uniform preview of the shapes ?
- And I like the active style square and the right click attribution process but, apart from looking at the shapes colours, is there a way to see what is the selected shape style while (still) seeing the "active" style that will be applied to the next shape ?

- Michel

+1 for the temporary disable colours.

I forgot to say im really impressed that we can apply styles to faces that is going to be a real time saver! On a related note will it be possible to apply a style to a profile that will be used for sweeping so that the profiles style will be used for the sweep object? Also will we be able to sweep several grouped profiles at once along a path? Say in the example here I have a profile for a wall which will be swept along a path. I have one style for brick material (yellow in this case) and another for plaster (black line/grey solid) can i group these and then do a sweep and the sweep object retains the colours/styles of the original profiles?












Cheers
Rob

Hi Danny,

> I was just going through in my mind on how I would use
> the system, maybe assign all curves used for construction
> as one style, construction surfaces as another and the rest
> for assembled solid bodies, I guess that will be it's most
> simplistic use.

Actually for such a basic thing you should be able to use the "Types" section of the browser for that, without needing to set up any styles.

When you expand out "Types", it has slots in there for things like "Curves", "Solids", etc... , which will let you do things like "hide all curves" by clicking on the eye on the Curves line.


> In saying that, I'm trying visualise MoI with curves, surfaces and
> solids in colour, could you give us an actual screen shot of some
> of these objects together in colour, just to see the intensity you
> have planned for the colours, or haven't you got to that stage yet ?

I haven't quite got that part finished yet, I've just done some experiments. It looks like I am going to need to adjust the lighting to handle colored objects better since they tend to be too dark with the regular matte type display that MoI currently uses.

- Michael

Hi Michel,

> - Will it be possible to temporarily turn style colours off to
> have a more uniform preview of the shapes ?

This is something that I want to add in, but it probably won't make it in until v3.

I'd like to put a "display mode" type dropdown under the View palette on the side pane, that would let you switch between some different modes like "Standard", "Shiny blue", "Zebra", etc... Also probably a checkbox to temporarily turn off the display of edges.


> - And I like the active style square and the right click
> attribution process but, apart from looking at the shapes
> colours, is there a way to see what is the selected shape style
> while (still) seeing the "active" style that will be applied to
> the next shape ?

Yeah, the style of the current selection is available in a different location - in the object properties panel here:



Also a style picker will pop out from there if you click on that line, so that gives a way to assign a style to selected objects even if the browser is closed. But if the browser is open probably you'll want to click on the swatch to do it instead.

Right now the browser does not have anything within it that changes due to object selection (it updates when objects are created or hidden/shown), instead the object properties panel is the thing that updates in response to selection, at least for now.

- Michael

> On a related note will it be possible to apply a
> style to a profile that will be used for sweeping so
> that the profiles style will be used for the sweep object?

At the moment it does not work like that - the sweep is considered to be a "new created object", and gets assigned to have the current active style for new objects.

I'm not so sure that it would be good to change that, it can actually be useful to have the ability to organize things by setting the active style before running a command that generates a new shape like that from curves, so that you control where the output goes to.

Things like booleans where you are slicing up an already existing surface are different, those do inherit the same style as the original surface it was cut from. But sweeping is quite a bit different than cutting.

Also it is possible to sweep using many profiles for different stations along the same sweep, like this for example:


Each of those curves could have a different style associated to it, so what should be the style assigned to the generated shape if that was the case?



> Also will we be able to sweep several grouped profiles at once along a path?

No, grouping does not change how any command will process shapes currently. That's something that I would like to try to add in the future but it will involve changes to each individual command to make it recognize that stuff so it may be a while before that can happen.

The current focus for these new tools are to give you a way to do object management tasks like hiding, showing, or selecting some predefined sets of objects, it isn't going to be about changing how individual commands work for now.

- Michael

That's no bother. I just thought having the sweep inherit the splines colours (1st group selected only) that it might save time so you wouldn't then have to then edit each instance of the swept object manually to apply more than one colour to it. Just a suggestion.

Cheers

Well, made some more progress on the scene browser. I've got the types section working now.

This will be the section that allows you to work with sets of objects based on their types, like "hide all curves", "isolate all solids", etc...




There are also 2 sub-sections within it, "Selected", and "Unselected", which allow you to target all objects of a specific type that are also currently selected or unselected.



That allows for some pretty detailed kinds of filtering involving the selection, things like "isolate only the curves from the current mixed selection".

In the future there can be some other sub-sections in here like "Locked" and "Unlocked", to enable things like "Hide all locked objects" really easily.

- Michael

Looking good Michael.

But, can I ask that the eye icons are indented to the same level, please? Like this:




Makes scanning the list much easier.

Cheers.

Hi Tony, I'll have to think about that, I don't really know how that would work with a higher level of nesting like groups will be able to have.

For example something like this:



I don't know if that would work to stick the eyes right in the middle of all that structure, I guess they would have to go over top of some of the tree connector spots, and they would kind of be sprinkled all over the place...

I think there is going to be an advantage to having the eye be all the way to the left, since it will make that kind of primary action of hide/show be the most accessible thing to hit with your mouse and in a more uniform spot.

It also seems to be really common in other hide/show control systems to have those kinds of visibility control be arranged in a single column, for example take a look at Photoshop with nested layers - the eyes don't nest there, they stay in one column even when there is a sub-structure that nests down.

Do you know of another program that puts the controls indented like you're showing there? If so could you show me a screenshot of how they handle it with more levels of nesting?

- Michael

Hi, Michael,

You raise a good point - I hadn't really scaled the thing up to include a lot of items. And I agree that other programs keep things in columns, so I withdraw that suggestion :-)

However, my main concern is that there is no visual connection between the icon and the item. Photoshop, Fireworks and Hexagon have a grid type visual system to keep things together. Modo and Silo use a highlight.

The icons in your browser are kind of floating in mid air, they don't really have a visual relationship with the item. This makes it hard to quickly identify which eye to click. With even more nesting and items the distance between the eye and the item will be even greater and compound the problem. If you add further controls, such as locking could make things worse.

I like the highlighting bar best, looks neater and less cluttered (you may already have thought of this, just not in the screen shots)



As an aside, I did notice that modo doesn't use the connector lines - and I can't say that I have missed them :-)

Hi Tony, yeah I'm going to be experimenting with a few things along those lines.

At the moment I have it set up so that the text is highlighted in blue for the row that your mouse is currently over.

I also tried darkening the whole row like you show there, but it felt a bit heavy handed. I think I'm going to try a kind of outline border around the row the mouse is over.

I'll also probably experiment to see if I can do a slightly different alternating color between rows which can help with this kind of alignment recognition.


> As an aside, I did notice that modo doesn't use the connector
> lines - and I can't say that I have missed them :-)

They're just basically the vertical equivalent of the same kind of horizontal alignment stuff that you are mentioning... They just help out a bit to more immediately see which things are siblings, even if there is a gap between them with child stuff popped out.

I don't want to draw a whole bunch of attention to them, so I made those dotted so they hopefully won't be too distracting.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
I do agree with Tony, it needs some sort of visual separation.
Outline border sounds Ok, I thought you would have kept with the same theme and action that you have for the main icons, meaning the whole row highlights with that cool graduated blue and outline, even if you left the organisation tree plain and mouse down with that highlighting method, it should work. I'm just visualising this as I'm mousing over the icons so I don't really know how it would feel over a bunch of columns.

---------

Hi Danny, yeah the part that is a little different in this situation from a regular button is that there are many different regions within the row that do some different things.

For example, the eye is one region, the +/- box another, on Styles the swatch is also another one, then clicking on the text I plan to do a select so that's another one yet and then in the future I think there may be a drop-down arrow at the far right to open up a menu.

If the whole row highlighted like a regular single button, it would kind of make it feel a lot like the whole row was just one single big button instead of made up of different regions that do different actions.

At any rate, here is what I have right at the moment - if you mouse over the eye, you get an outline around the eye region for an indication that clicking is going to do something there, and the text for the row is highlighted in blue when you are over any region within that row.



I'll be doing some other experiments, but that already does have a mechanism there to give an indication of which row you are working on since its text color changes.

- Michael

As I suspected, you already have ideas on this ;-)

Proof of this pudding will be in the eating, as usual :-)

I look forward to testing out the beta.

Hi Tony - this is what it looks like with some slightly different background colors for alternating rows. I think this will make it easy to see which eye belongs to a nested sub-item, whether you've got your mouse over anything or not.

Then I think I'm going to keep the border outline to be only an outline around the clickable sub-region of the row that you are currently on. But I'll also keep the text of the row that the mouse is over to highlight in blue.



- Michael

What append when there are some deep branches?
is it an horizontal scrolling or only this size of view by vertical developpment?

Hi Pilou, at the moment deep branches will just be truncated. In the future I will probably look at doing a scroll bar or something for that, but that may not be a part of v2.

- Michael