UI Grow Bar
I wish for a Universal Grow Bar to indicate when functions are running in Blender. This could be shown as a grow bar in the header.
I wish for a Universal Grow Bar to indicate when functions are running in Blender. This could be shown as a grow bar in the header.
11 Comments
thanks for all the feedback.
Yes A progress bar. Of course your processor and amount of RAM will effect this but. Put blender under a load, that is, make it calculate something hard. Sub-Def Mod on a sphere up to 6, then add an Array Mod. Each time you add a copy Blender hesitates with no feedback. No hourglass cursor or Progress Bar. The only Progress Bar I know of is in the Windows, Taskbar of the Blender program tab when you are rendering.
There's sometimes I need to launch Task Manager to see if blender is processing a request and I've got 64gb RAM and 12 cores.
* @othoap * There's another difficulty, though (beyond what I already wrote). Most operators in Blender don't have a polling mechanism to let Blender know their state... and even if they did, it'd be hard to actually track progress. Without that, you could have a progress bar, but it'll just show 0% or 100% done.
In order to add what you're looking for, every operator would need a polling mechanism and some means of reporting progress. Not only would that be a performance hit, but it'd also be an enormous amount of work. As a user, I'm not sure the benefit of that effort would be worth not spending time on other features.
* @Jason van Gumster * Though I think there's another good point:
Maybe that could be implemented, I think it's not that difficult and it's better than nothing. x)
* @-L0Lock- * Good point. I hadn't picked up on that.
There's just one difficulty. One of the aims of Blender's UI is to be non-blocking as much as possible. I often make changes to a scene while it's rendering or even sometimes while I'm doing animation playback in the 3D Viewport. Having the hourglass cursor might give the impression that the user can't do that.
Might be best if the arrow remained, but there was a mini icon overlay that indicates that there's some processing going on.
* @Jason van Gumster * Yes very good point
You want this for every single operation in Blender? I'm thinking that just prepping the draw space for this is going to be a performance hit... so while you might get progress bars for every single operation, that may make every single operation slower by some constant amount.
What is a grow bar? What functions? Please be more specific.
* @MizManFryingP * a "progress bar" I guess ? Like the one we already have for some operations like baking or rendering.
* @-L0Lock- * Blender already has a progress bar.
* @billrey * Yes, but not for every time-taking function I guess.