NO NO NO all! None of this shaded, cool looking, anti-aliased (excuse my spelling) "nice looking" interface! SCREW IT ALLL!!!! I just want blender to work REALLY nicely. Then we can worry about interfaces. But even then I say NO!!!! If you do all this shaded poo and stuff, it is just going to be slower. NO SLOWNESS! SPEED!!!!!

Hahaha! I couldn't agree more! I'd personally do away with 3d-style user-interfaces in favour of the simplist possible, flat, no-nonsense xerox-parc smalltalk-80 style. When I work with Blender I hide everything I can about the interface and do everything with keys. I want to look at my work, not lots of shiney buttons.

The most senseble thing I read on this site in months.
O, and the new planned feature: "Render faster then realtime"

-Joeri

About the AA-fonts. Why not just turn them off?

Working on the visual presentation of an interface is just fun work to do. Don't blame the (new) coders for trying first to hack that part in the code.
If you really check some of the proposals closely, you'll see it's not only about eye-candy, but also research in how to improve usability itself.

The specs for Blender, which make it fast, are from 1995. Based at a smooth operating Irix environment, so some speed issues had to be solved when porting to PC.
Nevertheless, it's 8 year old now. At that time it was newly designed as well, never meant to become a convention forever.

The "Interface Conservatives" are an influential party here... so new proposals will get a critical evaluation. Which is good, we should not throw away what makes Blender unique and working fast. But we also shouldn't be blind for actual improvements, and GUI presentations that will make it all look more contemporal and easier to use or learn.

About speed: among coders there's consensis to restrict to usage of fast OpenGL drawing commands. No textures or special calls that are not supported by OpenGL 1.2.

Proposals will get a review in the Functionality Board (and here). We strive for consensus on the topic. If needed, by making certain 'enhancements' a user option.

Last thing: compare Blender 1.8 with 2.0. Also a redesign. You should see Blender's predecessors...

Well what I think that should be done is that the interface reorganisation/improvements should come with Blender 3, to present a completely new product.

Like Ton said : keep what makes blender fast, but improve usuability and consistensy. Broken and a few others like Landis have done some work in this way with mock up pics. But this should only come with B3, and in the mean time, clean up (rewrite? is this feasible?) the code and kill the bugs

Well! that's it, enough blabla

Ciao
Dani

I personally LOVE the current Blender interface. I have never really liked shaded and shiny eye-candy. In fact, the default skin for XP home has ALWAYS made me sick. BUT, I really like Ton's idea for making the visual enhancements 'user defined.' If the development team can change the interface to make it more user-friendly easier to use, then have at it. But I am strongly against making Blender look like another Maya.

And speaking of Blender 3, does anyone know what the planned features and bug fixes are going to be? I'm pushing for better booleans, and user defineable hot keys (or just cleaner, bugless code )

dante

This sounds interesting, I wished I could code, but I am no coder too bad, have tried it during a course/program I went on, it is not my thing it seems

But about Blender 3.* I dont think there's any start on it yet, I think Ton said it should not be until next year that it is time to think about it, start coding that is, or any white papers or something...am I right?

yours

I feel that the interface is fine the way it is. It looks like what it is. Which is what it should look like. It is not a spaceship, or a pinball machine, or jukebox. Personally, I can't stand all those 'slick' looking interfaces. And, the biggest reason I can think of for not changing it, is that, an artist needs to start with a blank canvas. If you add a bunch of flashing lights, or whatever, you are detracting from that blank canvas. I would not go to a discoteque were I in the process of composing a poem about funerals. Speaking of funerals, my hard drive crashed, and all my data was compromised. A total loss. I guess I won't be providing any of those meshes any time soon. Or anything. Nonetheless, I intend to get back to work on Blender as soon as I download it, which I am going to do right now. So I'll actually have them before you know it. Anyway, I like the interface in its current rather generic configuration. Plus, my friends are impressed by the rows and rows of tiny buttons with no immediately obvious function.

I left some stuff about a bug here, until I realized the proper routing for such reports was through the 'bug tracker', so I left a report, and am now editing out the previous, irrelevant contents of this post. hehe don't be mad, i am just a noob!

well i personally WANT the nice gui braphics.

i mean honestly i only use about let me see 5% of my CPU when using the blender interface.

and for rendering if you want speed (the only time it actually matters anyway LOL) then just your BFR2 or a comand line LOL

com-on the interface could be much better layed out for functionality as well as looks.


Alltaken

Functionality, ok. Slick looking skins? bleh! no!

nobody is seriously considering "slick looking skins", i'm sure.

what people are doing is designing different was to create the interface using OpenGL calls, in the same way that blender already creates it's interface.

these "skins" will increase the processor load by a miniscule amount, while at the same time improving the visibility and usabilty of blender, opening it up to a wider variety of tastes, and therefore improving blender's popularity.

more popularity = more users = more active coding community = better blender

Blender has a very strong user interface paradigm, which has unfortunately been rather poorly implemented. The ultimate goal is to implement the interface that way it should be.

The best of these "skin" projects appears to have the capability of presenting the UI entirely unchanged. So what is there to complain about?

later
BEAT

This is nothing perosnal, but the ability to "skin" applications can be nice, but _most_ people doing skins have _no taste whatsoever_. 99.9% of the skins for the various Linux flavors and apps look like shit. Apple's Aqua is only tuned a bit more, but can still be improved, but letting everyone do skins for an application will only result in trouble.

Also, while Apple's "Aqua" interface is skinable, Apple doesn't like to see it for a very good reason - user support. You can't say "look for the green button with 'rot' on it" if someone is running a pink theme.

I think a "slick" skin can make sense, but has to be very well tought out and people shouldn't be able to modify it easily.

I like the new default graphic that 2.8 opens with,...I suppose change is not a bad thing. Here's a thought....how about giving it a customizable menu for say the colors a mesh takes on when selected, or the color of the grid lines or grid background. certain people might for instace find it hard to see the difference between light pink and dark pink easily. or the default black of unselected meshes.