* Main windows show a topbar and statusbar, and select a workspace and
scene. They are created with Window > New Main Window.
* Child windows do not show a topbar or statusbar. These follow the
workspace and scene of their parent main window. Created with Window >
New Window or View > Duplicate Area into New Window.
* The purpose of this change is to support multi monitor setups where you
just want to put more editors on the other monitors. Without multiple
topbars and statusbars, working within a single workspace and scene.
Creating multiple main windows is intended to be a concious choice to
do different tasks in different workspaces and scenes.
* Note these changes do not currently affect how the operating system
treats the windows.
* When changing the workspace, the layout in all child windows changes.
This makes sense if we consider child windows to be just a way to
extend the main window across more monitors. In some case it may be
useful to keep the same layout though, we can add an option for this
depending on user feedback.
This allows key bindings: link/append and user-preferences
to be accessed via keys - without having to assign keys to each action.
- F1: Context sensitive help.
- F2: File Context Menu.
- F3: Search.
- F4: Window Context Menu.
Other keys F5..10, remain free,
ideally they can be kept for user actions.
Key shortcuts and explanation about how to use the tool should go to the
status bar, but other info can in the header so it's near where the user
is working. This distinction has not been made yet for all operators.
After testing in the studio and extending the event system for
drag events, we've agreed on adjustments to the new keymap,
see: T55162
- Tab: Edit-mode toggle.
- Tab + Cursor Drag: mode switching pie menu.
- Accent/Grave: for 3D view pie menu.
- F3: Search
- 1..3, Shift-1..3: Edit mesh vertex/edge/face toggle.
Other minor changes were made, however they aren't part of the design.
- Ctrl-Shift-S: Image editor Save-As (was F3)
- Ctrl-Alt-R: Repeat history (was F3)
- Use Tab key for search.
- Number keys switch modes.
- The number of the current mode can open a submode menu
(currently only works for edit-mode)
- Ctrl-Tab, Ctrl-Shift-Tab - cycle workspaces.
- This allows quick, consistent toolbar access
w/o conflicting w/ the keymap.
Where pressing space before a key activates that operator as a tool
instead of running immediately.
- Search can still be accessed by pressing spacebar again.
- When there is no toolbar for a space, operator search still opens.
OVERVIEW
* In 2.7 terminology, all layers and groups are now collection datablocks.
* These collections are nestable, linkable, instanceable, overrideable, ..
which opens up new ways to set up scenes and link + override data.
* Viewport/render visibility and selectability are now a part of the collection
and shared across all view layers and linkable.
* View layers define which subset of the scene collection hierarchy is excluded
for each. For many workflows one view layer can be used, these are more of an
advanced feature now.
OUTLINER
* The outliner now has a "View Layer" display mode instead of "Collections",
which can display the collections and/or objects in the view layer.
* In this display mode, collections can be excluded with the right click menu.
These will then be greyed out and their objects will be excluded.
* To view collections not linked to any scene, the "Blender File" display mode
can be used, with the new filtering option to just see Colleciton datablocks.
* The outliner right click menus for collections and objects were reorganized.
* Drag and drop still needs to be improved. Like before, dragging the icon or
text gives different results, we'll unify this later.
LINKING AND OVERRIDES
* Collections can now be linked into the scene without creating an instance,
with the link/append operator or from the collections view in the outliner.
* Collections can get static overrides with the right click menu in the outliner,
but this is rather unreliable and not clearly communicated at the moment.
* We still need to improve the make override operator to turn collection instances
into collections with overrides directly in the scene.
PERFORMANCE
* We tried to make performance not worse than before and improve it in some
cases. The main thing that's still a bit slower is multiple scenes, we have to
change the layer syncing to only updated affected scenes.
* Collections keep a list of their parent collections for faster incremental
updates in syncing and caching.
* View layer bases are now in a object -> base hash to avoid quadratic time
lookups internally and in API functions like visible_get().
VERSIONING
* Compatibility with 2.7 files should be improved due to the new visibility
controls. Of course users may not want to set up their scenes differently
now to avoid having separate layers and groups.
* Compatibility with 2.8 is mostly there, and was tested on Eevee demo and Hero
files. There's a few things which are know to be not quite compatible, like
nested layer collections inside groups.
* The versioning code for 2.8 files is quite complicated, and isolated behind
#ifdef so it can be removed at the end of the release cycle.
KNOWN ISSUES
* The G-key group operators in the 3D viewport were left mostly as is, they
need to be modified still to fit better.
* Same for the groups panel in the object properties. This needs to be updated
still, or perhaps replaced by something better.
* Collections must all have a unique name. Less restrictive namespacing is to
be done later, we'll have to see how important this is as all objects within
the collections must also have a unique name anyway.
* Full scene copy and delete scene are exactly doing the right thing yet.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3383https://code.blender.org/2018/05/collections-and-groups/
