@Campbell Barton (campbellbarton) Nothing about grease pencil or this is before Code quest?

Nice one Cambo, but is this list set in stone? I would say the tool settings/top bar/active tools system should be a very high priority, and would be good to do while everyone is together. This also fits into the manipulators design topic - can't really see how we can do one without the other? Same goes for the 101 project, which requires a tools system that works.
I put together a design for it that we could look at too, and I'm sure we can do a great job.

Here's the relevant 2.8 document, mainly outlining the tools design issues: {F2478607}

We can also take a closer look at these issues when we arrive. Here's a brief list of what I think we could add to the topic list:
-tool settings in top bar
-Workspace tabs along the top
-clean up tool settings flags so they are actually useable
-Remove header-hotkey weirdo tool settings
-fully implement active tools
-integrate the manipulators with active tools
-make tools consistent and beautiful to use

-tweak default Blender settings to be more sane
-re-implement View Modes, but more consistently compared to 2.79. Everything in the same menu.
-Update default theme to be cleaner, calmer and more modern
-Add consistent icons to all tools for all our modes
-Add ridiculous amounts of UI polish, to make it insanely great

Looking forward to doing lots of great work in A'dam! :)

Cheers

I'm not sure I can reply in this area, I saw lots ui idea in 2.8, it's make me crazy, even hate and angry, the Blender from amazing magical to normal and ordinary, lots style from photoshop, max, maya and modo, put them together and called it 101, lost itself for new users, WHY not make more tools tip for first open in blender, as far as I now, in photoshop 2018, unreal and 3d coat, they all have good tools tip to lets users to see it clear, for example, switch editor have hotkeys in blender, but less people know that, even lots old users. Actually not myself don't like the new ui design, include my friends, lots are old users, they are uses autodesk at before, and now blender start like autodesk in ui design. for photoshop, it's really not good in ux, tools bar in left, layer and property in left, move mouse left to right, right to left, the tools setting topbar more inconvenient, so in new photoshop version, more and more move in property panel, I have used photoshop in five years, almost less in topbar setting, yeah must be move your eye look for from left to right, the option panel is much more better. I really like blender, because it provided the different idea and operation than others, clear and light, very efficient in work. but now, more like autodesk with obese and awkward.

@Antonio Vazquez (antoniov): added grease pencil topic.

@William Reynish (billreynish): No this is not set in stone. Thanks for the UI planning info, I was aware we had bigger plans for the UI, (now noted under Interface).

More detailed planning can be done when we meet. I'm mostly interested to get a big picture overview on things we'll plan to work on for the code-quest.

@Leroy (Leroy): Blender 101 is something we try and not a new direction for all future development, further this design task is not a place to discuss pros and cons of each UI change.

@William Reynish (billreynish) , some points of your proposal are ignoring some aspects of toolsettings or manipulators.
I mostly agree with proposal but I may disagree with some examples and remarks mentionned to justify what is in proposal.
And some parts of proposal are outdated, not taking into account what has been done in 2.8 branches (Grease Pencil Object,EEVEE,workspace/collections...).
I had too many remarks to formulate. So, here, a separate file that groups them.

Do you have time to clean it and make it a little bit more up-to-date before codequest beginning ?

@William Reynish (billreynish) Most of your comments about grease pencil have been solved in greasepencil branch and now the tool is working as any other tool in Blender with modes, brushes, etc. We still have pending the use of grease pencil in 2D and the use as annotation tool.

Another important point is to create a template for 2D animators. The idea is to attract to Blender a new type of artists, and the interface for these 2D artists should be more oriented to them. We have been working on the design during this last year and @Daniel Martinez Lara (pepeland) and @Matias Mendiola (mendio) have an idea formed of the needs. You can contact with us for more information.

I would like to add two suggestions to Alembic:

1.- Make the spline workflow a bit more generic, this could facilitate the conversion in other packages of formats like DWG to be correctly imported in Blender, right now DXF is not working very well, and Alembic, being a more modern format could work better, also as a way to be able to import trajectories or splines modeled in other packages, wich right now is pretty hard to do, for example importing a spline from max is not possible AFAIK since FBX don´t support it and you will have to do different exports to use DXF, and again, it´s slow and not working very well for a bit complex scenes with splines.

2.- Include here the motion blur for deforming meshes with variable vertex count, since there is already a patch maybe this could be reviewed here and added, very useful to be able to cache fluid simulations and use it in production without the overhead of the simulator itself, we can do that right now, but Cycles motion blur won´t work on those imported meshes from Alembic.

I don´t knwo if those two are plausible or possible right now, but I wanted to remark them.

Cheers!

Cheers!

Commenting on F2478607 on William Reynish document:

1. Blender icon (without perspective) distortion should be default now. It is communicating clearly a PIVOT (edges around a center) .
2. On the startup screen. Right after bypassing splash screen, we should have a .png sequence to overlay the interface, showing what the RIGHT click button can do, 3 simple steps at the end tutorial asks: Which interaction mode would you like: RIGHT click or LEFT click? = Leave the choice to the user.
3. We need floating FOCUS windows. Not just ctrl+alt+U. What if I just want a (selected property) from the property object menu? F6 helps but it doesn´t combine, nor it can stay afloat. Let the user configure more space by "undocking" (floating) windows.
4. Page 23 makes total sense when using Blender as a 2D application. Finding grease pencil palettes in an object property *yet, there is not a clear view of it on the outliner (or it´s properties) seems confusing for first time users.
5. Sticky keys are a must (specifically with edit modes. I just want to press "G" and directly move vertices -as a toggle key-) entering edit mode and exiting is almost a 3 step process for every session on the day. Too many wasted clicks just to move a vertex.
6. We need right click context menu directly from the mouse and not from the bars or spacebar shortcuts.

Thanks for moving such great ideas into the ui design.

@Campbell Barton (campbellbarton)

• Texture Nodes. I use them in the Compositor primary for Procedural textures and Blends. So please redo. Btw, it would be nice if there was a texture input in Cycles too.
• Screen Capture (Alt F3). I literally found out about this feature few days ago. This is very useful if you want to record your Blender session.

I completely agree with William Reynish's design document. Working with active tools is more intuitive and unifies all the attributes, options and manipulators related to that tool.
The active tool system is better when you have to repeat an action several times, and although it is less direct, at any time you can call an action directly thanks to the use of Sticky Keys.
The use of Sticky Keys seems to break the current modal system, because it is uncomfortable to press more than one key at a time. I think that by pressing RMB during the execution of the tool, you can display a floating menu with all the options of the tool.
I leave a .gif showing the suggested option.

What about a system to prerender scene reflection and lighting probes to get decent performance out of eevee?

https://research.activision.com/t5/Publications/Precomputed-lighting-in-Call-Of-Duty-Infinite-Warfare/ba-p/10346417

Didn't really realise the doc would get picked up, but here's an update:

-Added concept of a tool menu, for when the toolbar is closed. Currently we don’t have a good solution for that scenario, and the toolbar takes up a lot of space. It'd be nice if it were easier to work with it closed
-Drivers UI ideas
-A few other bits and pieces

@William Reynish (billreynish) Radial menus are a designed, defined thing, with clear pros and cons. Throwing 30 things into a circle goes against the point.
A pie menu with north, northeast, southeast, east, southwest and northwest in it similarly isn't great. The cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) are the most important, they should be given preference.

Any extra slices after 8 are subject to diminishing returns

About adding some type of menu of selection area when tool is collapsed, we had this exact issue in grease pencil branch. When an artist is drawing, he needs the maximum drawing area, and the tools and menus are only annoying things.

As in grease pencil we need select colors, we decided to implement a color selector not depending of the toolbar (we want collapse it). This color picker can be activated from bottom bar or pressing P in the viewport.

Example calling from bottom bar:

Example calling using P key (here all tools are collapsed):

Antonio, I agree! Especially for repetitive tasks like color picking, it's a huge deal to have a popup happening under the cursor to reduce mouse travel.
https://youtu.be/QNixxQ6BVxQ Here is a materials popup I made for this purpose + a few convenience scripts. This also frees up a properties area for something else...before I found myself switching tabs there too often to get to materials.

I´m not sure where to put this, so I´ll put in this more generic thread, but please point me to the correct place if there is one.

This comment is related to the tool settings shown in the Top Bar, the options of Pop Overs is good, but it is rather limiting in some situations, please check this pictures.

The current design is great to hide all the clutter of the tool settings from the UI:

But the current design is also very limiting because it adds an additional click and mouse travel to fix a setting, something you may want to do a lot and very fast in some situations, so some people suggested to put a "pin" in the pop up to keep it visible at all times:

But this is not a solution either because the pop ups are bigger than their names so as soon as you have two pop ups together you get a pretty big overlap problem:

The solution I propose to this is pretty simple, to create a Tool Settings panel, in a similar fashion to the Properties panel, something that is not related to the viewport, it´s a full panel on it´s own, and it will have the same settings shown in the top bar, this could allow more freedom to develop different kinds of tools or addons, and this will give us the ability to rapidly iterate over settings and not loosing sight of them:

This could host also settings and options for more complex addons or tools like ArchiPack, where not everything is just a button activated tool, or for example the Asset Manager addon, where you may want to have all settings at hand at any time.

Hope this is useful in some way, cheers!

@Juan Gea (juang3d) What you worry about is exactly what I worry about too, in 2.7x, the tool panel is very friendly for addons setting, yeah, the icon in 2.8 is very beautiful, but not friendly for tools setting and look for tools, e.g. the brush, in 2.7x all in one grid list, but in 2.8, If you are not familiar with it, you must unfold everyone groups to look for, the tools setting too. for quick unfold groups, so I am highly recommended can use hot keys to do this, like when the cursor over the tools group, press A to unfold, and the tool groups can auto unfold when the cursor across over the tools. and best this worked for the top bar too, this very useful for quick work, please please please to add this hotkey. btw I find when the mouse cursor over the value domain will become double arrows, it's make me fill strange, like the old behavior much more. sorry my poor English