Isotropix Forums

Hi,

I find myself really struggling with the readability of the attribute editor, and I noticed a while ago that I was wasting a lot of time parsing its parameters.

I think this is mostly because there are (too) many icons between the name of the parameter and its value field.
Most softwares do not put anything in between parameter labels and their value, so that the eye can assimilate them the best possible.

So, I did a quick UI mockup on a point cloud node with the following tweaks, to see if that would help me reading the UI:
- the option icons (expression/animation...) are moved on the right side of the panel, after the value.
- the arrows are removed because they create an offset with the horizontal value position (It could be replaced by a middle mouse click&drag action)
- the line after the parameter names are removed because they create more a visual burden than a help.
- the preview of the color inputs are bigger so that they are more readable than the preview dot.

It appears, in my case, that the readability is way better after the mockup, and that would be even more true with a material node that has even more icons in the middle.

If other artists could share their feedback and thoughts so that we know if I am a minority, or if this is actually a feeling shared by many, so that a modification of this kind could be investigated by Isotropix UI team.

Best,
e

makes sense. much clearer to read.

would be great to have something like the value ladder from Houdini in the fields with arrows

ciao j

I thought about adding a couple modifications to simplify this editor even further:

- group the advanced options into a single icon that pops a submenu when clicked (a very low minority of the parameters ends up needing expression/animation/... so minimizing the UI space they take suits their use case better, and that just adds one click.)
- add a green dot on the modified parameters would allow users to find super fast what they where working on (It's something that I really like with Gaffer, and that is saving a lot of time on the long run).

That's it.

Welcome

Clarisse 5.0 will feature some improved UI parts..
not sure if your idea would be possible, but you can apply for a feature request to be able to modify the UI widgets layout in some way ..

Cheers
Kai

Indeed those tabs might help a bit.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will do a ticket it in the feature request tracker then.

The reason why the icons are not on the right is tablet users : you don't have any room left to click/drag to the right. There is other solutions (some softwares solve this by allowing draging up/down but this is less intuitive...), each one with pro/cons.