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  • Published 5 Mar 2024

Half-Pie menu

As the blender progressing, number of tools and functions are increasing but we have limited keyboard letters. Blender team added node tools menu which opens new door of possibilities so i suggested why not expand pie menu functionality as well.

Here is the designed menu in the form of Half-pie, please upvote if you like the idea slightly, rest decision is upon Blender team.

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 3 Downvote 0
kalpit
5 Mar 2024

2 Comments

Lauloque

It's not impossible to do, some addon devs already have all the fun of the world making powerful pie menus.

One to name a few: Pitiwazou's Better Pie Menus

The issue is more that the BF's current stance on GUI guidelines is to keep things really simple in a limited way:

Pie Menus

Pie menus should generally be limited to 8 items. Sometimes it's hard to avoid more items. If in such cases the quick gesture based selection is an significant time saver (compared to regular menus), a pie menu may still be acceptable.

Pie menus should not contain menus, popovers, radio buttons, etc. Besides displaying operators, pie menus can be an alternative way to display an enumeration, or to toggle simple options. But avoid complex interactions. The idea of pies is that you can use them with quick gestures.

The same item should always appear at the same position. Don't confuse users by having items be in different places based on context. Muscle memory is key to an efficient usage of pie menus.

Things to Avoid

Do not do this : Spacial layouts to communicate meaning.

Do not use "fancy" spacial layouts to communicate meaning. While such layouts arguably help users understand the purpose of options, they just don't integrate well with surrounding UI patterns. It's not just a visual, but also a practical issue (for example, it needs special handling for properties searching). The Blender layout and widget system isn't designed for such cases and doesn't handle them too well, not living up to our quality demands. If things can be improved so that such layouts become more appealing and practical, they could become a common pattern.

Do not use complex pie menus . As mentioned above, pie menus should be limited to 8 items. For add-ons it's common to have more complex pies, that is fine. But not for pie menus implemented as core user interfaces.

Source: Layouts - Blender Developer Documentation

zuorion

Half Pie's are already possible. eg.