>>>>The other thing is that a blank slot seems to stick out even more visually in a line of eyes rather than only a color shift, and it is good to have a high degree of differentiation here.
>>>>

Should there be some kind of indication that there is something there that is hidden?

If I sent you a file with a few things hidden, you would have to hunt a bit and investigate to find whats there and layed out, versus a visual indicator that there is something hidden in the "red style".


>>>>>Also it seems to be quite common for programs that do this to make the eye disappear, for example if you turn off a layer in Photoshop by clicking on the eye for it, the eye disappears there instead of turning gray.
>>>>>

But there is an indication left that the layer exists.

In the styles, the equivelent would be that nothing is listed there unless it is in use. Then this would be readable as it is in Photoshop. With all the styles listed by default, you wouldnt know what has data or not.

What is your take here?

hi Michael,
I have been working a bit with the new beta.

It would be nice if the styles menu would not be so modal.
Right now if I want to change a style color I have to:
-pick an object with that style
-in the attributes tab, go on the style,
-choose to modify the style
-go to edit
-change the color.

I think it would be better if you could double click on the style name to change its name, or on the colour to change its colour.
Also, it would be better if you could move styles up and down in their hierarchy without having to go in the pop-up menu.

Another approach would be to right-click on a style and get a menu for it, including:
-delete style
-edit style
-move up
-move down.
This would be even better if we could multi select several styles at once.

Hi Burr,

> <...>
> versus a visual indicator that there is something hidden in the "red style".

Actually there is something for that built in already - if there are no objects of a given slot (for example no objects with style=red), then the text for that style will be displayed in gray.

So if you see one that does not have gray text, and also does not have an eye, that combination indicates that there are hidden items of that style.

Here's an example to clarify - scan down the list of styles here. The ones that have objects on them have black text, ones with no objects have gray text:



You can see there that "Blue" has objects on it, but it does not have an eye. That means that there are hidden objects with Style=Blue, which can be displayed by clicking where the eye would go.

The other ones that are grayed out will have no effect if you click on their eye spots, because there are no objects of that type to display.


> With all the styles listed by default, you wouldnt know what has data or not.

But you do - that's what the text color is showing you...

- Michael

Thats it Michael, Thanks. Sorry, my "eye" for the detail is gone. But that is what I was asking about.

Burr

Hi okapi, yeah in the future I'm thinking of having a kind of drop-down menu on items, like maybe have an arrow that shows in the right-hand side of the text label when you move your mouse over top of that line.

Right-click won't really work because all the right-clicks are already taken on everything - right-click on an eye to do isolate, right-click on a swatch to set it as the active style, and right-click on the text to do an isolate selection.

So that's why there will probably be a drop-down arrow for that instead.

But that may take a while before I can get to that part.


Are you really changing your styles very frequently? I mean is it something that you go to mess with every few minutes?

It is generally not efficient to try and highly optimize operations that you don't need to do very frequently, in fact it can be kind of good to have those kind of non-optimized because it helps to leave the optimized spots for things that you may want to do several times a minute instead, like hide/show.

So it is not necessarily a priority to lower the number of steps for every single action.


However, having said all that, I would like to have a menu, that should work out pretty well I'm just not sure when I will be able to get it done.

Right now I think it is a higher priority to make things like styles work with mesh exports, rather than to optimize the styles editing tasks that are currently done with the modal dialog.

Although there definitely needs to be another entry point for that modal dialog, probably an "Edit" button that will show in the browser.

- Michael

Hi Burr, also one other detail - one reason why the list of styles does not get compacted to not show the "empty" ones is so that you can still use the shortcut of clicking on a style's swatch to assign selected objects to it, or right-click to set it as the active style that will be used for a newly drawn object.

If the styles list did not show styles with no objects on them, then those shortcuts would not be available to use on a style until you placed an object on it first.

However, in the future at some point I think it would make sense to have some kind of filtering mechanism that you could adjust to have some control over what was displayed there so you would have the option to only show occupied ones. But it will probably be a while before that happens.

- Michael

>>>>>I think it would be better if you could double click on the style name to change its name, or on the colour to change its colour.
>>>>

I just found that if you have a selected item and double click on a style, it will change that item to that style.

Part of what you asked I think.

[EDIT] Looks like Michael just posted that answer as well [EDIT]

Hi Burr,

> I just found that if you have a selected item and double
> click on a style, it will change that item to that style.

Yup, that is a shortcut way to assign a style to the selected objects.

You don't even have to double-click, just a single click will do it.

You can double click if you want though, it will just set it to that style twice in a row... ;)


But I think okapi was talking about something a bit different - about some quicker way to edit the style itself to have a different color than it currently has.

- Michael

>>>>You don't even have to double-click, just a single click will do it.

You can double click if you want though, it will just set it to that style twice in a row... ;)>>>>

All the time and effort you put in to keep the UI clean....And I just add clicks at will!!! Go figure.

Hi Michael,

I noticed that if you create a feature on an object, that feature takes on the current active style, e.g. if a cylinder has style=green and the active style is red and you apply a fillet to the cylinder the fillet takes on style=red, I would prefer that the fillet inherit the style of that cylinder no matter what colour is active, when working on an object I don't want to always check if I have the same colour active.

Cheers

///
From: Michael Gibson 16 Apr 7:33 (109 of 113)
....
Are you really changing your styles very frequently? I mean is it something that you go to mess with every few minutes?
It is generally not efficient to try and highly optimize operations that you don't need to do very frequently, in fact it can be kind of good to have those kind of non-optimized because it helps to leave the optimized spots for things that you may want to do several times a minute instead, like hide/show.
So it is not necessarily a priority to lower the number of steps for every single action.
.... ///


Hi Michael,
you are right, I don't think I will be changing styles very often, and I can work with the system as it is.
I think I am changing styles often now because it is a new feature and I am trying it out ! (please stop adding new features, it hurts the workflow ! just joking..)

I agree that it is much more important to get the exports etc... working properly.
However once you have a chance to improve it, it would be good to get a more streamlined way of editing styles as mentioned.
I think a drop down arrow would work well too.

Thanks for all your hard work!

""The ones that have objects on them have black text, ones with no objects have gray text""

That's the part that I didn't catch!



Marc

Hi Michael,

very good to hear that you will try the tabs without the legs - if that doesn't work, I guess the shorter version from Marcs screen would do well also.
I don't know about others, but somehow I don't see it as such a huge problem to be able to differenciate the tabs from the main browser label. Since your solution is so flexible, the heading is not so extremely important for me, each tab stands for himself in a way. I guess this is why I felt the current one to be a overly strong division - and as soon as the tabs are opened, the problem solves itself anyway, since the sub-stuff is indented much more.
Whatever you will come up with - I like it a lot.

And no, I wasn't talking about inside mode. I tried with about ~40 named objects and then in adjacent mode the browser was pretty full screen ;-)
On that large screen I can spare some space ;-) but inside is very slick for less objects.

Yeah, I also wasn't sure about automatic naming. I just realized how used to it I am from software like XSI etc.
I agree that it can be annoying at times and meaningless.

You do a perfect job of rethinking some of the so-called standards for us!

Thank you very much!

Thomas Helzle

Hi Michael,

When i copy/paste one object into rhino,
all the styles are pasted as well.

I prefer to copy only the style in which the
object belongs to.

Does it possible to "lock" something in the Browser?

Hi Pilou,

> Does it possible to "lock" something in the Browser?

Not yet.

- Michael

Does "transparency" is on the list?
for example
50% visibility of a group of objects for work on a new object

Hi Pilou,

> Does "transparency" is on the list? for example
> 50% visibility of a group of objects for work on a new object

That is something that I would like to add in the future, but I do not expect to have that for the v2 release though.

- Michael

Nice work Michael !

The AI import with files from Photoshop works great now. I've also been able to use the offset command in situations where it would have failed in previous versions. Really cool.

I like the way you've organized the browser. Just one question there : custom styles are saved in the project but if I start a new file, my custom styles are not available anymore. Is there any way to keep them so I can create a few styles that I like and reuse them in all my projects ?

Any chance to have variable fillets in V.2 (or at least on the top of the list when you will start to work on the V.3 beta) ?

Thanks a lot for this beta.

Edit : By the way, can you explain this (from the release notes) : "or by using the new typed-in command launcher." ?

- Schbeurd