UI-rework for blender around the corner?

I ran across a promising proposal for an evolutionary rework of blender’s UI on BlenderNation. No one other than William Reynish, a former team-member of the Peach/BigBuckBunny-project, seems to have put a lot of effort into making this paper. He is addressing sore spots in blender’s current UI and workflow and also provides suggestions (in the form of mockups) how widgets should be redesigned to make blender’s UI-element clearer and less ambiguous. It’s worth a read if you are interested in this application.

10 Responses to “UI-rework for blender around the corner?”

  1. Dread Knight Says:

    Yeah, i think it’s great. Other people are working on 3d GUI and 2 hand ‘3d’ interaction as well xD The future is bright for blender.

    Anyway, have a few suggestions about blender’s GUI as well i should post on a wiki page or something…

  2. ethana2 Says:

    Oh wait, other people have blogs on this site too, nevermind. *sigh*

    aahah confusing buttons with words I can’t see…

  3. ethana2 Says:

    Ok, the big one is ’submit’
    I just suggested that thepimp.net could be used to host the gnu Professional Image Manipulation Program, ’cause pimp is already a verb and not even a negative one anymore… yeah.. and the only way the GIMP folks are going to change their project name is if everyone else does it for them, they seem to lack marketing skills..

    wow, these captchas are getting HARD..

  4. Kevin Lange Says:

    Damn.
    That is a promising proposal.
    Blender actually looking like a usable and powerful application (instead of just being the latter)? Inconceivable!
    I also love the design behind the controls (very Mac-like, but that works well with Blender).
    Any idea when we may see this actually shipped? Maybe I can finally get my team off of their pirated copies of 3ds Max and into the world of moral fiber after all.

    - Alright, I think I’m having problem posting comments…

  5. Jakub Steiner Says:

    He gave an excellent talk about it too — http://river-valley.tv/conferences/blender_conference_2008/

  6. gordallott Says:

    Its been \\\’around the corner\\\’ for a long time now, until i see any actual code i am staying sceptical, recently been playing with clutter and something like that (but not so gobject based) would be great for blender.

  7. dreblen Says:

    @gordallott - There is "actual code" for the 2.5 project, see here:
    https://projects.blender.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/branches/blender2.5/blender/?root=bf-blender
    You may need to be logged in for that link, but this one will work no matter what:
    https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches/blender2.5/blender/

  8. nick Says:

    perhaps you should fix the tags for this post?

  9. nick Says:

    It looks good to me as a blender user, but it will probably not make blender significantly more approachable for new users.

    here’s a video of it: (53mb) [ from http://www.virtualrealm.com.au/blogs/blender-2-50-demo-video/ ]
    http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=a33e5f2c63015114d2db6fb9a8902bda

  10. maninalift Says:

    One aspect of Blender that I truely hope never changes is its speed. It starts up in an instant, probably faster than any other app on my desktop. And it\’s a full-featured piece of media software. Compare that to Cubase on my Windows machine: I launch it and go and make a cup of tea :)

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