Hi Michael,

Asus N10, cool, I looked at that one, more powerful graphics, but went for the cheaper one 1000H :)

In regards to the pivot table idea, I did a quick search on the net which explains how to make one.
There are a lot of videos on youtube as well, but don`t know if these pages/videos explains the interaction that well.
That`s why I was thinking of making a screen capture to demonstrate thing that you could possbly use.

Basically pivot tables are table that queries a raw data sheet to generate a table which is interactiv and dynamic as
opposed to regular spreadsheets. It`s non destructive to your data, so you can mess around as much as you want
without damaging your data.
You can alter the layout all you want by drag/drop, reordering hedings etc.

I don`t know what you can pull out of this, but general mindset of alternative ways of organizing data/info.

I agree with you regarding new users and complex UI, remember that myself when I started learning 3d software.
Maya and Blender was the first one, and the first week I was really intimidated, and could not even make a box, that put me off.


- Eric

Hi Michael,

it all looks good so far, I find it hard to tell until I get to try it.

I find your options on the visibility confusing,

>If you left click on that eye, it will switch all the objects associated with that to be hidden and the eye will disappear.

>If you click on that area where the eye is not showing, it will show all the objects for that thing and the eye will then appear.

You now have an invisible, or a column of invisible buttons. Could we not have a closed eye, or a different colour say red ? I feel 'something' to click on is better than a space, I don't really mind what,

regards Tim.

Hi Michael,
good to hear about the import and export compatibility.

I am not sure if this has been mentioned somewhere else in the thread, but for visibilitiy,
it would be good to have three modes (instead of the Visible / Non-visible option):

Force-on (green or yellow)
Neutral (gray)
Force-off. (red)

This is how cinema4d does it, and I find it really good.
Basically, if neutral, then the object inherits the parent's properties (so it is visible if the parent group is visible etc...).
If the object is turned ON, it will alway be visible, regardless of the parent's properties,
if it is turned OFF, it will be invisible.

I find this system quite usefull for organizing large scenes.

Also, how will this interact with the current Hide and Isolate options?
I use these all the time when modelling, so it would be good to have maximum compatibility between this and the upcoming options.
(Maybe the hide options override the Goup attributes, this would maybe be the most logical way of doing it?)

About curves generators
Have they a special section?

Hi Tim,

> You now have an invisible, or a column of invisible buttons.
> Could we not have a closed eye, or a different colour say red ?
> I feel 'something' to click on is better than a space, I don't
> really mind what,

I thought about that a bit... But I noticed it seemed to be most common for other programs that used an eye icon to have the eye just be missing to indicate hidden, for example that is how Photoshop works.

There's also kind of an advantage to it being blank, that it will probably stick out in contrast in a line of differing states the most. A closed eye is probably going to be too similar in shape and make it a bit harder to differentiate at a glance.

I guess I could try to make a really faint eye, but that may have a kind of look of being something that was disabled.

I think there will be some kind of highlight when you mouse over that area which may help.... I guess we'll see when it is actually going how this works out.

- Michael

Hi Okapi, the way that I am planning on doing it is that there actually won't be a state that the group itself owns directly.

Instead the group will act as a way to operate on a batch of object properties all in one go.

Like for example if you hide a group what that will actually do is hide all the objects that are part of that group but the hidden state is actually a property of the objects.

This basically avoids the kind of special modes that you're talking about.

It also should make it possible to have objects belong to more than one group, which otherwise tends to create a problem of possibly having conflicting states.


> Also, how will this interact with the current Hide and Isolate options?

Well, that's the other thing that is good about having the state actually belong to objects, it is fully compatible with the regular Hide mechanism, it just becomes a way to operate on a particular batch of objects in one click.

It also lets me use other things like Styles and Object types as other ways to control visibility in addition to groups.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> About curves generators
> Have they a special section?

I think that they will be a kind of sub-entry underneath something like:

Objects
    All objects
        Curves

But I'm not completely sure about that part yet.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Re: lightbulbs

Actually , I though of lightbulbs because it would remind your logo!
I did not check on others initially but you're right, eye icons are the commonplace by far.
And yes, autocad and rhino has lightbulbs...

Been a long time since I've touch autocad, I'm very glad not having to use it anymore!
Moi workflow is far better, even in 2d.

Thanks

Marc

Hi Michael, what about a tab system, I think I've mentioned this before.
For me it's uncluttered, clean and the same space is used as many times as you want, IMHO flyouts seem bit obstructive.

The gif was quick and rough and I don't know if it's possible coding wise, is it ?
Just another thought I had, to throw into the thread.



-

Hi DannyT,

I support this suggestion all the way.
Then you could add a lot of new features without changing the overall UI.

This is how it works i Modo, and I love it, clean and fast with no overlapping windows.

- Eric

Hi Danny,

Looks like a good idea :)
Those likes "command manager" in another cad system.

Hi guys,

I think this is my first post here, I have been a long time lurker and a daily follower of the forum.

I think Michael you have to be careful of not trying to hard to be different just for the sake of being different. for an example the layer system, you always talk about the layer system in other system that objects can't be in different layers at the same time, why is that a bad thing? I know its not as flexible, but its a system that people know from Illustrator, Photoshop, Autocad and yes Rhino (which sometimes I feel you try too hard to be a little different).

My vote also goes with Danny, I think his idea is the best implementation of the ones I have seen in this thread.

And for the eye icon, from a designers perspective it bothers me a lot, I like the light bulb that you see in rhino and autocad, maybe the eye needs some fine tuning, its a bit too harsh on the eyes.)

Used to modo too, so I love this tab idea !
(and thanks Michael for all the replies ;))

@Danny Inclined text is perturbating, no easy readable, and you lost width screen surface :)

>> re: separate window - that's something that would be good to include but it may have to wait for a while, it is just hard for me to
>> manage too many options for this all in the initial go around. It's kind of a general problem that it would be nice to be able to tear
>> off chunks of UI and dock them into other montiors (on the same monitor you'll just be having a floating window that obscures
>> the modeling viewports as well) but it's a lot of work to make a whole system for that.

Thanks Michael - if I know it is coming then I can wait. Though just the browser would be enough, perhaps setup the same way the options is, with tabs down the side for groups, styles etc.



I kinda like Danny's idea of a tabbed area for the right hand panel too. I'm very used to this idea from modo and CorelDraw. Not sure how it would work out in practice but has the potential to reduce clutter in the side bar

@Pilou
Well you lost 20pix, and win lot of surface with every tab.
Vertical text is readable, only Modeling give some trouble, because the word contains many letters that work in both side I guess ... (M=W ?).

A bit off topic, but I think it would be nice to have some constancy in colors code, between what is selected, or not.
Like having the same color for selected suface/curve in the viewport, and selected/active tab (I still have the filling the actual desaturated blue is not eye catching enough ... I often miss click the tab I want to switch to ...)



(that's having said, I'm not sure about the object surface color :S)

Surer Super Cool Dunny...I love it, it's great for future expansion. I really hope it can make into MoI.

Indeed, tabs could solve a lot of screen estate concerns.

Would be nice to have the possibility to open 2 at once.

Marc

< Well you lost 20pix, and win lot of surface with every tab.
@PaQ
Maybe a cool trick will be satisfy all people ;)
The "Vertical slots" appear over "draw screen" as soon as the mouse arrives one the right Panel !
And disapear when the mouse return on the canvas!

So you have your lot of space for your tabs, and I have my "big screen" on my little latop for draw! :D

Hi Danny, vertical tabs was an idea that I considered very early on in MoI's development instead of the current tab system.

As you know, MoI actually does already has a tab system that re-uses areas of the side pane, these are tabs like "Draw curve", "Draw solid", "Edit", "View", "Construct", etc....

Those allow switching sections of the side pane into different palettes.

There are some down sides to switching though - if you need to frequently use stuff between 2 different tabs then that takes extra time and effort to switch the area back and forth between the different modes. The worst case is if you need to repeatedly ping-pong back and forth between 2 things on different tabs.

By having tabbed areas split up into some smaller chunks rather than as one really big thing, it can help to avoid this problem because it is possible to have more sections open at once, like for example in MoI you can have "Draw curve", "Edit", and "Construct" all open at the same time. Then if you need to go back and forth between these things there is no penalty at all, so that is an extremely significant gain.


Believe me, it is very tempting to re-use space, and a lot of MoI's current UI design is based on space re-use. For example having the xyz control work as a readout and input both, having tabbed palettes, and having the command options area do double duty as an object properties panel in selection mode and then provide options for commands while running a command.

But unfortunately too much really broad space re-use can just lead to too much switching. It would not be bad if it switched into some major different mode and you were planning on staying there for a while. But many of the tasks that you would want to use the scene browser for such as selecting objects does not fit into that kind of thing.


The other problem with vertical tabs that kept me away from them is that the text on them is not as naturally browsable or readable as normally oriented text. It gives a kind of jarring feeling looking over it. It is something that you can get used to over time, but I generally like to try and stay away from things that have a somewhat strange feeling like that.


If I wanted to do switch the entire side pane to a different mode, I would probably use normally oriented tabs at the bottom of the side pane, like where I have currently placed the button to open or close the browser:




But I think the browser is a tool that will be used frequently while modeling, so that makes it hard to have a "modeling" and "browser" mutually exclusive modes I think...

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

- Michael