Hi Marc,
re:
> Otherwise, positioning the plus sign conditionally on the right side might be an idea (like the yellow dot).
That's a cool idea since then items at the top level that don't have a + expander box wouldn't be "penalized" with extra space in front of them that they don't need but still have text aligned with items with expander boxes. Also it would have the interesting property that the expander boxes for every item would be in a consistent column down the right hand side. But I think it would be awfully unusual, also having the expander box nested inwards kind of reinforces some of the sense of hierarchy. It's just so heavily prevalent that hierarchy is displayed and controlled on the left side of things.
> Yet another option would be to use leaders, something like C4D :
Well it is using them just not for the top level things. I guess you mean putting them there too which looks like this:
That does seem better than just a kind of mysterious blank space. I guess that's how things should end up but I think I'll wait to do that until there are more types of hierarchy that can be created. For v4 I'll just have the text for Annotations misaligned for now, it doesn't really make sense to change the appearance of every other item just to accommodate that one single expandable item for now.
> Concerning object types filter, would it be a good idea to have them appear only
> when they exist in the file?
> This way you won't have a huge list as new features are implemented.
That's also an interesting idea as well but it would probably lead to some jittery feeling, like you have a model with all curves, then you extrude something and then 3 items for Solids, Edges and Faces would suddenly pop up and push "Styles" downwards 3 lines.
If it starts to get unwieldy in the future I think I'd rather use hierarchy to keep this section under control. For example if it was getting pretty long all of "Curves", "Surfaces", "Solids", "Edges", and "Faces" could go under something like a "NURBS objects" collapsible parent item.
It takes quite a lot of effort to make entirely new categories of objects, so it's not really something that is too likely to get out of control anytime soon. Probably the next one will be a "SubD" object.
> A very small thing : "Details" could make a simpler label than "More properties"
This is another good idea, but the simpler label kind of looks a little lonely in the wide button:
And in a short button the properties panel is kind of unbalanced feeling:
However there is an intertwined thing which is that I need to find a home in the UI for functions like "Rebuild" and some other stuff. One possibility is to stash them on the large "Object properties" dialog either as a bunch of buttons in a section of the dialog or as one button that pops out a menu. There will be a lot of space there. But that kind of puts them another step away and you'll have this big dialog still open probably when you launch them. So another way would be to have an "object specific tools" menu that could pop out from the properties panel and with a short "Details" text it could go like this:
There isn't much room there to squeeze in much text, I really want to call it something like "Curve tools", but if I can abandon that and just call it plain "Tools" that might be a good way. But maybe I'll stick with "More properties" for v4 since I think I'll only get the extended properties part of that done for v4.
Thanks very much for the great feedback!
- Michael
