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  • Published 25 Jul 2021

Add icon for nodes

nodes icon.png

nodes icon 2.png

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 43 Downvote 0
mahdi
25 Jul 2021

12 Comments

Draise

This is already done in Bforartists, a fork and an installable distributable you can use already, if you want - so you have options. They keep them up to date weekly and add new ones for any new node, even for the GN system.

I love opensource.

https://i.imgur.com/ILEcwkK.png

7
pablovazquez

A major issue with icons is that it will mean that every time a new node gets added (these days there's at least a couple new every week) someone has to design an icon for it.

For example, right now there is a modifier for Grease Pencil that is ready to go, except for the icon. We need an icon designer.

Edit: Just to be clear, I personally would love to have icons for more items in the UI, but it adds a lot of work and there's no one available for doing it at the moment.

6
costa

Can the community get involved in the icon design?

edit: If so can I get some guidance?

1
pablovazquez

Community contributions are very much welcome! The more people involved the better, as long as the design is consistent with previous icons.

Unfortunately there is very little documentation on the process. Last week I wrote a guide on how to add/edit icons wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Interface/Icons

But there is no guideline on style yet, so for the time being just following the style of previous icons is the best way to go.

1
XanzulsCG

Would like to see colored icons, the current flat icons are a bit too minimalistic in Blender considering it's a 3d software.

3
Draise

There is another independent build that has this. wink wink

1
eon

I have been asking that for so long. The community can come foreward if they give us some guidance. Would really love to see Blender become more colorful.

1
JayeAntony

i find it wrong that this doesent exist in geo nodes

1
ktdfly

Here I assume, that users need illustrations only to find an item in the menu for the first time when they do not know its name yet. Because after that they can easily find it only by name, by muscle memory and by word's shape (location of uPpeR and loWER cases, spaces, ascenders and descenders).

I'm not sure if tiny icons as in your illustration will do the work - the icons don't provide any help at guessing what the node is for. E.g. why a cog wheel is an icon for gamma? What does a triangle (the invert icon) mean in the context of color? Why hue/sat is illustrated with regulators, but bright/contrast is not? I understand that your example is just for illustration and actual icons can be made more descriptive. I think some nodes can't be illustrated at all: Fresnel, Bump, Displacement and Normal Map, Black body, Vector Math and so on. If you then decide to illustrate Shaders or Textures sub-menu, you'll find that the only reasonable option is to use an example of the shader or texture as an icon (which is bound to be small).

But that will be completely incomprehensible with you tiny icons. It would be much more descriptive to show big icons in the menu, organized in a grid, like an asset manager. The only problem is that it breaks the flow: some sub-menus contain small icons and text, others - grids of big icons.

1
mahdi Author
  1. I made these illustrations for example. I do not mean that you use my illustrations.
  2. Cinema4D uses icons for all tools (without exception). By doing this, they has made interaction with the software easier.

imgur.com/LHnms2r

  1. Probably The reason you are against this idea is because your native language is English or you are fluent in English. Many different languages are not supported in Blender and understandable language to all human is "signs".
  2. Having an icon for each tool makes the UI beautiful.

imgur.com/NFpHSYw

2
ktdfly
  1. I know.
  2. Not 100% sure - it actually needs some investigation. See p. 4.
  3. I'm not against your idea, bro. I want it to be even more meaningful and elaborated. English is not my first language, but I don't want tiny icons to look obscure like katakana and to just add visual noise. There's only a handful of easily understandable icons invented by humans. Icons in C4D are undecipherable mess - you'd never guess what they mean before reading the title.
  4. What would you choose - beautiful, or useful + fast? I'm not convinced enough that icons make everything better automatically. You wouldn't find icons in an airplane cockpit. Though, I agree, in some places icons are very required - like in Textures or Shaders sub-menus. Probably they also have to be big and descriptive, so users can see the pattern from the first glance and without using a microscope.
2
alexisb38
  1. I agree with mahdi1, looking at his example I already see how It can turn out : what was that node I used last week ? forgot the name... Where was it again ? Damn I'll have to google it, I can't try them all.

Instead we could have : "Oh right I see it, the one with circles around a point, Light Falloff, that's the one."

It's a recurrent issue with blender, having everything in dark menus, accessible via shortcut makes for a fast workflow when you are used it it. However when you're learning new things, little icons like this can help a lot.

  1. I like how this mockup uses icons that have the same color as the font and right about the same size. Even if the icons are not 100% understandable at first, they can act like a brand to the eye so long as they are different enough. and it doesn't take much space. Unlike the two references that are posted above, so it won't bother the long time users that work with muscle memory or name...
4