Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

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This is great!

As a slighty OT aside, I really hope blender's UI changes sloooow down. I've been using it for 16 years. 2.8 versus 2.7 is so different, It almost feels like they're making changes for change sake.

I've been trying to use their various 2.8 RC's so I don't have to say I don't know how to use blender anymore when it pops.

They made the following things toggleable at launch, but man these are some muscle memory breaking changes that are now the default.

- Changed selecting objects from right to left click - Space bar no longer opens up the function search. The search is like 50% of my workflow, so this one hit me in the gut until I changed the setting.

Then there's some other things that feel renamed for no discernible reason.

- I can't search for 'remove doubles' anymore. There are certain geometries that I've come to build by snapping to axis, extruding, snapping to vertices, remove doubles. Now it's buried in a menu at mesh->clean up->'merge by distance'. It also makes a GUI element pop with the distance argument, and there's no obvious way to "apply". So weird. - Ambient occlusion in the view appears to have been renamed 'cavity'. - The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling. - The view/selection/snap/etc settings bar has moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Why? - Properties tabs moved to the side from the top. I can see why. - I can't make objects unselectable but visible in the outliner. Why?! - Layers are gone, they're now "collections" but they don't do the same thing at all!

This is the stuff I've hit in a about 2 hours of messing. I'm willing to acclimate to about 90% of these changes. So far it's just the layers / merge doubles thing that really sucks. Eevee is really pretty, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Pretty sure you can change a lot of this no?

Tbh the UI being terrible was one of the main reasons I stayed away from Blender. The fact they changed it makes me have hope I can start using it seriously.

Some ways to merge vertices by distance (aka "remove doubles"), in edit mode:

1) Mesh > Clean Up > Merge by Distance

2) F3 operator search. Start typing "mer..." and hit Enter.

3) Ctrl-V to show vertex menu, then Merge Vertices > By Distance

4) The quickest: Alt-M + B (show vertex merge menu, B to select "By Distance")

I scratched my head a bit first too, but frankly "merge vertices by distance" is far more descriptive than "remove doubles".

The UI that pops up is just the operator parameters that used to appear when you hit F6 (eg try adding a Circle, see the parameters that pop up) It's better this is visible to users, rather than hidden behind some secret hotkey. As with previous Blender versions, operators are "applied" by default - you can change the parameters via the UI until you like the result. Once you switch operator, move on, or change mode, the UI will disappear and the operation becomes undoable.

To make objects visible/selectable/renderable etc... open the filter menu on the Outliner (top right, looks like a funnel). This lets you add more toggles to the items.

To move the view/selection/snap settings to the bottom just right click, Header > Flip to Bottom/Top.

Collections replace layers and groups (eg you can instance a Collection), though I haven't completely got my head round them yet. But they look quite powerful.

"The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling."

One more thing on this - hit Shift-Space to show the available tool icons with labels as a context menu.

If you prefer this (I do), you can then hide the icons on the left via View > Toolbar (or equivalently, toggle via the T key).

Right/left-click to select and the spacebar action can both be set on the first run of 2.8, or in the Keymap tab of the preferences.

Remove doubles can be done with Alt-M -> tap 'B'.

The 3D header (and any header in Blender) can be moved to the top or bottom: right-click the header, select "Flip to Top" or "Flip to Bottom".

In the Outliner, you can enable the "toggle selectable" button in the Filters popup. Click on the "Filter" icon, then click on the mouse cursor to enable the button. Now, you can click the cursor next to any object to make it unselectable, and it will remain visible in the outliner.

Collections can do everything Layers could do, and many more things besides.

Yes, I understand your frustration, and it has options to use the legacy UI (IN PART).

I'll get over everything (i've complained about so far) except how collections work and how merge doubles is gone. If the devs don't sort it out by release, I'll solve it with addons.

Just engaging in the time honored tradition of hand wringing.

"Merge doubles" is renamed "Merge vertices" (alt-m) > "by distance"... in the "Vertex" menu. (Though the change makes sense to me, I wish they kept an alias so people can still find it.)

The remove doubles operator is now called "Merge by Distance". You can find it in Mesh > Clean Up. That's actually the first thing I added to the new quick favorites menu which you can access with the q key.

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