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

truncated but possibility to go to the end?

Hi Pilou,

> truncated but possibility to go to the end?

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean.... The text will be truncated but you'll be able to see the eye controls for example. I'm not worried about getting this part nailed down right now that can come a bit later if the main design is working well.

- Michael

What append in this case? (I say component but that can be anything :)

Some more refinements - now the section names (Groups, Objects, Types, Styles) have a different visual style so they don't blend in so much with the items:



- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> How see the "component" 7 in the red window?

Your content you show there is bigger than the window, so there aren't a whole lot of choices - probably the method would be either making the window wider, or having a scroll bar. That's something that may not be handled with the initial versions.


> Other thing : moving "component 7" to "component 1"
> with the mouse inside the windows is possible?

No, not initially. At first there will probably be a "group editor" dialog box that has some up/down buttons on to handle arranging things.

Direct drag and drop type re-arranging likely won't happen until the future.


- Michael

Hi Michael,

The lines make things much better, plus the visual style for section names helps to separate the different items.


I do agree with Frenchy though. There seems to be a flaw in the basic design here if it won't accommodate deep nesting. I'm not in favour of a horizontal scroll bar either. I really want to see the structure of my model not have to keep scrolling left and right - seems very anti-MoI :-)

Perhaps you will re-consider putting this in a floating window? Then the window can be re-sized to fit the browser tree as required.

Hi Tony, I'll probably be making some method to adjust the panel size.

Floating windows (other than temporary ones) are something that I have just tried in general to avoid with MoI's overall UI since they tend to hang out overlapping the main work area, making it cluttered and obscuring your view of your model data.

I'm not particularly worried about such a deep nesting to start with though, I'm more concerned with whether the basic UI works well to start with on something with just 3 or 4 levels of nesting. Then I will look at how to handle deep nesting after that.

- Michael

Thanks for the reply Michael,

As you already know, I would really like the window solution so I can put it on my second monitor.

So I may just keep mentioning it every now and then ;-)

Cheers.