Draggable Panels in Workspaces
Workspaces have completely changed the way we work with Blender layouts, but the way we build and reconfigure them is still unintuitive and clumsy. And the reality is that we are constantly retouching them to suit each individual task at hand.
That's why I propose that areas can be dragged and dropped, using visual guides to preview the results. ATTENTION: this has nothing to do with "floating panels" , panels only float while you drag them :)
The behaviors would be the following:
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The areas of the layout can be reorganized by clicking on the icon of the head of the panel and dragging it over another area.
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When dragging the panel to a new area, a previewing gizmo will appear where the new panel will be placed.
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Each host area will have 5 anchor points (or containers) to drop other panels: Top, bottom, left, right and center.
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By dropping the panel over the center of the host area, they will exchange their positions in the layout.
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When dropping the panel over any of the edge container, the host area will be split in two to fit the new panel, with a 1:3 ratio (new area will take 33% of the space)
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The free space left by the dragged panel will be taken by the directly adjacent area.
Hope you like the idea :)
12 Comments
Something like this, -and- floating panels would make Blender a more enjoyable work environment. It's sometimes the small things ;)
* @rob * I have to totally disagree with any floating window ideas. Floating panels would break the whole non-overlapping GUI paradigm that eliminated getting lost in piles of child windows like the old days. Many of the major softwares (in all disciplines, not just CAD) have adopted this approach. You can either deal with lateral crowding as now or vertical crowding (layers). IMHO Tabs give the closest approximation of an overlapping approach without getting lost.
* @shadowphile * I agree with you, floating panels is not the solution, and that's why I clearly state in the post that it had nothing to do with it. Tabs is definetly a better approach.
+1 Exactly how Unreal works, but also with handy tabs system. I suggest it long time ago . Maybe without tabs system it will be implemented, still better than nothing. IMO - I dont see any reasons to implement draggable panels system but not implement such tab system.
* @IIIFGIII * tabs are often a better solution and we never see this in Blender. even menu could have tabs. e.g in the new rename menu you could chose at the top normal or advanced
This would be very, very useful.
This suggestion is quite close to my following area docking experimental patches: developer.blender.org/D16648 and developer.blender.org/D14173
I hope it would also be possible for the important widgets/tooltips inside the viewport. Not everyone has the same preference or liking when it comes to how blender will look like, this also is true with how/where the widgets/tooltips are being placed. It would be very great if we can have this kind of flexibility within the software.
* @johnpdelacruz26 * I think that was a small part of the idea behin the Blender 101 project, which I think is not moving forward at all. I agree with you there is a lot of stuff that is defined in odd places, I think Blender 2.8x is still looking for its mojo (as an example, toolbar is now in the hidden tools settings header, in the N panel, and in another tan inside properties, is madness!). It would be good to be able to reorganize all of this
This feature has been implemented in the version 4.3. Extremely happy with the result. Good job!
Anything that allows me to customize the interface more would be great, but the developers have been overwhelmed by the infamous battles about the user interface since the early days of Blender and generally have to pick and choose as they see fit. One not unreasonable argument is too much loss of GUI consistency could make tutorials hard to follow and Blender thrives on tutorials. (although there could be pressure to use a provided Tutorial template as one solution.)
* @shadowphile * I've no doubt that Blender will become an industry standard and taking a big portion of the cake among 3D artist in no time. This is thanks to version 2.8 that comes with a bunch of new functionalities, including a whole revamp of the UI. Some feature proposals may seem a bit superficial, but should not understimate the power of a good UX and how that improves the adoption rate (a famous battle between Unreal and Unity for example). I've been working with large groups of artits in game studios and all they are talking is how cool EEVEE looks and how the UI has improved. I think devs needs to do some facil, easy to do an standard behaviours to keep improving this aspects.