Pie Menus
A complicated thing to navigate as a blender new user is the amount of pie menus that exist, and how to access them.
Those menus are super useful but their discoverability is quite limited, hidden behind a shortcut that is hard to find in the settings even when you know what you're looking for.
Maybe there could be a "pie menu" section in the user settings that would be a sort of list of available pie menus, with shortcut, context and customisation options?
I think this would be a great way to get new people up to speed when they start with blender and also allow them to customise their experience in an intuitive way.
Would you like to see this kind of thing? Do you have other ideas for features related to pie menus?
4 Comments
It's kind of what you get it you search for "PIE" in the keymap preferences:
The issue is that all the entries are named "Call Pie Menu" instead of displaying any describing info about said pie menu.
So, IMHO, the feature request should be to actually display a meaningfull title for those pies.
* @-L0Lock- * That's not quite what I mean, having the name isn't really enough, we also need a list of available functions so we know what to look for.
I will say it's a nice trick indeed though, and it definitely makes it a bit better, but again, completely unlikely to occur to a newcomer.
As for the names in the keymap window, completely agree. I think it should be easy enough to append to the function name some of its parameters (like the actual name of the pie menu called as a parameter) for clarity. I hope the devs put their mind to the keymap window someday soon.
There's an Addon on Blender Market for 16$ that enables you to create menues on your own much more dynamic and easily. blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor
I also think that this kind of thing should be integrated into Blender as a default package but until then (or if ever) this addon is a really good thing to have. (And you support the createor, of course.)
I've started to discover how great it is to be able to customize programs easily myself waaay too late.
What is that hidden shortcut you are talking about, BTW?
* @motionblur.of.doom * By hidden shortcut I mean that if you look at the screenshot below, some pie menus appear with shift S, others with shift O, some even with Tab...
Ultimately it makes them hard to discover without a tutorial. Nothing about the interface hints at their presence.
There are addons for everything for sure, but I think this is a pretty important part of blender and should exist in the software itself!