Hi Marc,

> Maybe tiny lightbulbs icons to indicate visibility would be in context!

I thought about that. But there are some problems with that.

The biggest one is that I think it would be easy to confuse with "selected" - a yellow lit up bulb looks kind of similar to the selection color and I think could possibly be misinterpreted when just glancing on it to mean selected/unselected rather than hide/show.

I think the lightbulb comes from AutoCAD's layer browser?

It actually seems to be a lot more common in general for programs to use an Eye icon to show "show/hide", in 2D illustration that has been the case for a long time with layers in photoshop. I had checked through a few 2D illustration / photo apps and I didn't find any that used the lightbulb for that, most use an eye and a couple use a checkbox.

The other problem with a lightbulb is that MoI's program icon is also a lightbulb, possibly leading to some confusion there as well.

Another idea was to maybe show a shaded sphere to mean "show", but I'm actually pretty happy with how the eye has turned out.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

In the previous thread there, ash made a response that would mirror mine here:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2127.49

(I post this just so your clear on what I was leaning on)

I dont want you to get bogged down with this as I think we already discussed it and I know its something that you have already considered. It's just a workflow that a few others may be used to (My same reference to Corel and Carrara as ash) with the "Hotpoint" addition as a property, but you have pointed out that the Move command does this too.

I suppose I was hoping for an "OUTCRY" of the masses to get what I want and force you to do something that you decided not to do!!! :O Ha!


(On second thought, I'm sure I couldnt push you around!:))

Burr

Hi Schbeurd,

> I think I have a few questions very similar to the ones PaQ asked previousely.

I think I answered these with the previous reply to PaQ, but just a quick one here...


> Will it be possible to hide/unhide a group.

Yup, sorry I didn't explain this more, but the idea is that groups will look pretty much the same as what you see there with Styles, with an entry for each group with an eye icon to the left for hide/unhide.

The only difference will probably be that a group entry can have a +/- expand/contract thing to the left of its name.


> Will we be able to select objects by groups or by styles or both ?

Either one that you want, if you want to set up groups then you'll go to the groups section and click on those entries to do actions to them (hide, select, etc..) on the other hand if you want to use styles as the main way to organize things and then do something like "Select all things with Style:Red", then you can use the Styles section to work on objects that way.

Styles will basically amount to materials at export time.


> Can we assign a style (a color) to a part of a polysurface without
> separating the object ?

Yes - you just make a sub-object selection like select an edge or a face then you can apply a style to just those sub-objects.

Some data exports may not deal with that kind of sub-object assignment though, like Rhino can't have sub-objects of a single polysurface on different layers.

But for mesh exports it should work well for material assignments for different faces within a solid.

- Michael

Hi Burr - re: "hotpoint" - yeah that is kind of the problem, especially since the "hotpoint" would be one of a few set choices that probably don't have much meaning except when they are applied to a box...

The good part about the Move command is that it does not limit you to just something like the corners and midpoints of a bounding box, you can snap on to any point as the base point to move, that means you can pick one that is relevant to your particular object like the center point of a cylinder cap that is hanging off to one side that you want to align to a specific point.

The "hotpoint" type system with a limited number of choices would not help for that kind of situation.


What you would probably need to make this work more easily would be a kind of "local axis" reference point that was attached to every object. That would then give a kind of reference point that was bundled along with every object that could be more naturally labeled as its "position". But that bring along a log of baggage, additional UI to control placement of the "local origin" separate from the object, more clutter on the screen, etc... so it is something that I've resisted so far, particularly when the Move command already does that kind of a job.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> And what are really words under colors?
> Word of the color or other things?

It is the name of that style.


> Are they necessary inside this panel?

Yes, it's pretty much necessary to have those because of one way that styles can be used to organize material assignments.

Someone who is planning on rendering a model may wish to set up different styles that do not yet have different colors assigned to them, they will only get different colors when they bring it into their rendering program later on to edit the materials.

So for instance it may not be unusual for someone to want to have 3 styles: "Spaceship hull #1", "Spaceship hull #2", and "Spaceship hull #3", and assign different faces to belong to these different styles but while in MoI they are all set up to have a simple color of white, since they don't want to mess with the colors until they are in their rendering program and have all the texturing and other material editing tools available to them.

If there were no text labels in there, it would force people to have to use only colors to identify which style they are picking.


> Because there is a very small place for other languages
> and for following colors' name after 7! ;)

The name will wrap to several lines if necessary, for example:




The user can enter whatever names they want for the styles, but it is a good idea to keep it somewhat compact so that it doesn't make for a huge label in the picker, but that is up to them.

- Michael

OK so 10 letters(spaces) by lines :)

What make exactly the button "Match" ?

>>>A couple of issues - on a lower res screen the bottom toolbar is nearly full so there are situations where there is not enough room to put the "Browser" on the bottom command bar rather than at the bottom of the side pane, that's the main reason why I have located it to the right of the help button at the bottom of the side pane instead.

My bad, I was following current beta layout...

>>>Also that is an interesting idea to have a small menu to switch between Adjacent and Inside modes, but do you really expect to be moving back and forth between these different modes often? Right now I am expecting for that to be something that is set once to set up your overall UI configuration and then will not need to be adjusted after that. Settings like this which are only set once I prefer to put inside of the Options dialog and keep them a bit more out of the way.<<<

the browse bottom hidden in the options panel works best for me (Less Is More), I think I Know how big the project is gonna be from start but having the ability to switch between Adjacent and Inside modes will be a bonus. Or perhaps an extend/Pop Up panel?. if not possible it wound be nice to have the option to choose left or right side of the side pane.>>>RE: Objects and styles in one panel - it looks like your version there though would be missing the function of doing a "Hide all red objects" for example.

I want to be able to have the function available for hiding/showing/selecting/etc... all objects of a certain style as well as different groups.

This is the reason why I want to have different sections in the browser for "Groups" and "Styles".

If you don't want to work by selecting styles, it won't really be a problem, just hit the - sign on the Styles part of the browser and it collapses to a single line to stay out of your way.

That's a TOUGH ONE...

>>>>a log of baggage>>>>

Your right there. A small move from my "old ways" for a greater good.

I've joined the resistence!!! Viva la MoI!!!

Thanks again.

Hi Yannada, that looks interesting but I guess what you are showing there is that if you wanted to show or hide all Red objects you would first need to search through the groups to find a red one and then push those buttons?

But what if you have a lot of groups? It seems like it may take some extra time to need to search through them all to find one with the style that you want to select...

I'd also worry that people might not understand that the "show all/hide all" in that particular button was meant to apply to the styles, if I was just glancing at that UI I might think it was for showing or hiding all sub objects or something else like that.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> What make exactly the button "Match" ?

That will let you select another object, then apply that newly selected object's style as the one to assign.

That lets you change some objects to "match" the style of another one without needing to know exactly which style the other one is using.

- Michael

Hi Tony,

> For example: I might set up two groups, control panel bottom
> and control panel top. In these groups I can have sub groups
> for the lights, switches, buttons etc.. But then I can style
> things differently too. So all lights can be green regardless
> of which group they are in. So I could hide all the lights with
> one click (see next comment).

Hi Tony, yup you've got the right idea!

Also separately from making the lights green in order to hide them, the styles assignment will also control material assignments when you export to a mesh format.

So it is good to have that as a separate thing so that you are able to apply the same material to different things regardless of what group it is in.


Basically the styles are something that you need to be able to set as an object property in order to set up material assignments.

Once there is some common property between objects, it is nice if there is a standard way to select them, hide them, etc... by targeting all objects that have that property in common, that's all that styles section is for.


I've been thinking recently that I will probably be able to make some similar entries in the scene browser for hiding all objects of a certain type, like hiding all curves. This could be another "built in" group that lets you apply some common actions (hide, show, select, etc...) that have a common attribute.


re: selection
> Yes, I think this is a great idea!! Please don't put it in a flyout.

It's actually not really that horrible to have it on a flyout, you would be able to do something like click down and drag over to the flyout that pops out and release the mouse over a button to make it do that thing, that is actually pretty fast.

But yeah it would be good if selection could be on top if possible... I have been thinking of making a click on the right-side zone of the name could possibly work for that. There could be a kind of selection button that only shows up over there when you have moved your mouse over top of the item, that would keep it from cluttering things up too much.


> Maybe should there be a select by colour command too? I'm
> maybe muddying the waters here I think :-)

Not at all - in fact the idea of having that Styles section is to allow for all the same kinds of operations on colors (styles) as groups, like hide, show, select...


>> Also I think that right-click on the eye will turn off
>> all the other objects and only keep just those ones visible
> Another good one - please keep this in. How would you
> will bring them all back, though?

Another right-click on the same one - one right click would make it the only visible one and turn off all other ones, but if you right click on one that was already the only visible one it will turn them all on.

This is actually how the Object Snap menu (the menu that pops up from the little arrow that appears over the Object Snap button on the lower toolbar when you move your mouse there) works currently to manage applying check marks to all items in that list, if you want to try it out there.

Also you'll still be able to use the regular Hide command to hide and show objects as well.


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 very much for the feedback!

- Michael

Hi yannada,

> I think I Know how big the project is gonna be from start
> but having the ability to switch between Adjacent and Inside
> modes will be a bonus. Or perhaps an extend/Pop Up panel?.

Yup, I definitely want to have a switch between Adjacent and Inside modes, right now I have located it in the Options dialog.

You can go to the Options dialog at any time you want, just push the Options button! :)

But I think it will be more likely that you'll probably get used to a certain configuration and want to leave it that way for most of the time.

If for some reason you want a faster way to switch than that then it will be possible to set up a keyboard shortcut if you really want...

- Michael

Hi Eric, thanks very much for the feedback!

> As a long time user of Adobe Illustrator I`ve taken some
> features from there.
> It has a lot of good organize functions that could be
> implemented in Moi although it is a 2D program.

Yeah I'm not at all against having 2D type functions incorporated into MoI!

One of the biggest constraints that I have though is to try and pack the UI into the narrow confines of the side pane.

That makes it really hard to have something like a 3 column table like you're showing there, I just don't think it would fit where I would want it to fit...

One function that I'm not quite sure about in the UI that you show there is how to hide/show objects? Would that be another image like an eye next to the select button?

What you show there definitely looks powerful but it is getting quite complex as well. I kind of want to go more in a direction of really focusing on only a couple of the highest priority actions (like hide/show and maybe selection) in the top-level UI and then put additional functions in a flyout menu so that they don't add so much complexity all right at once.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Yeah, I know that my example was starting to get complex.
It was not ment to illustrate UI, just to give you som ideas to use if you can fit it in.
Maybe it`s just me wanting to cram as much as possible in one place.

> One of the biggest constraints that I have though is to try and pack the UI into the narrow confines of the side pane.

I see that one, I just bought a netbook (Asus 1000H, which by the way work great with Moi) and there is
not much room left for additional UI. It took a little while to get used to coming from 1900x1200 times two workspace, but
it`s a joy lay down on the couch and model with this litte thing.

In my current and previous job I make and manage a lot of huge and complex speadheets and
need total control, maybe thats why. So I could be more accustomed to read and navigate what other
people may consider cluttered and complex.

After reading all the feedback from you and the other users I now understand more how it works,
and think you are on the right track.

> One function that I'm not quite sure about in the UI that you show there is how to hide/show objects? Would that be another image like an eye next to the select button?

Yes, just forgot to put in there.


One tip though, if you are familiar with Excel`s Pivot table function then I suggest that you look at some of the functions there
for organizing a lot of data (think architectural scenes). The interaction with the tables are really good, from selections too reorganizing, filtering etc.
This may be a odd place to get ideas for a 3d program, but one thing that I`ve learned is that you have to keep an open mind.
Maybe I could demonstrate it in a screencapture video if I lear how to use one :)

In general though, I feel that flyouts and popups are more distracting and a slowdown than a bigger UI.
(my personal opinion).

This is a tough on (object browser)....
I`ve used quite a few and all have their strength and weaknesses.
Modo and Silo has some good elements but lack in other areas.

Can`t wait to try out this for the next beta, really looking forward to it!


- Eric

Hi Eric,

> I see that one, I just bought a netbook (Asus 1000H, which by the
> way work great with Moi) and there is
> not much room left for additional UI.

I also just recently got a netbook as well (Asus N10), it is cool how MoI can work well on a small screen!


I'm not really familiar with Excel's Pivot tables, but I'll try to take a look. Do you maybe know of any existing tutorials or overviews of it online that I could check out? I'm not sure how far I will get just with directly messing around with it.


> In general though, I feel that flyouts and popups are more
> distracting and a slowdown than a bigger UI.
> (my personal opinion).

They're definitely a compromise, and certainly tastes are always going to vary.

The thing that they do tend to do well with is to provide a smaller initial surface of stuff to a beginning user. It is really a common problem for beginning users to get easily lost when presented with too dense of a UI initially.

Also prioritizing things can help a lot - if something is not needed too often then it doesn't do much actual harm if it takes you an extra second to do it. For example something that takes an extra second to do but only happens once every hour just does not add up to very much wasted time overall.

But it can be tricky to get the priorities right, and sometimes it may even be impossible because they can vary between different kinds of projects.

- Michael

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