In the outliner, right click > view layer > set indirect only. This is
like clearing camera ray visibility on objects in the collection, and is
temporary until we have more general dynamic overrides.
In the outliner, right click > view layer > set holdout. This is
temporary until we have more general dynamic overrides, but helps
Spring production for now.
Expose search like in 2.7, we could make it pop on Ctrl+F to save space if needed.
Align Filter and the less used View menu to the right.
Based on mockups and feedback session with William
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/
Suggested by Pablo Vazquez (venomgfx).
The idea here is that it should be easy to work in the outliner by picking a
bunch of objects and adding them to a new collection.
Where is the new collection? In the same level as the "outliner active" object.
Note, since the outliner has no pure concept of an active object, I'm using
the highlight tag for this. Hopefully it works fine.
It should work in "Collections", "View Layer", and "Groups".
Only when collections are not filtered out.
When duplicating a layer collection directly linked to the view layer we copy
the collection and link it.
For all the not directly linked layer collectionns, we try to sync the layer
collection flags, overrides, ...
Also we make sure the new collection is right after the original collection.
We also expose this in RNA, via collection.duplicate().
This was introduced to the outliner when we had no User Preference
window back in 2.5x. Right now it makes no sense to keep this around.
But how about addon user preferences:
* They belong in the user preference window under the addon.
How about the user preferences themselves:
* You find them in the user preference window.
And templates?
* Why are they here in the first place?
After talking to Pablo Vazquez (who in turn poked Sergey Sharybin) we found
it reasonable to get rid of this. If it turns out that we were wrong we
revert this.
As for leaving this exposed as a debug option (as suggested on IRC) I would say
no, please. This end up polluting the code and never cleaned up in the end.
(this was specific talking about templates).
Technical note: I left the functions in outliner still hanging around.
While I used UNUSED_FUNCTION for one of them, for the other one I had to use:
`#if 0` because the function was calling itself, which would fail to build if
I used UNUSED_FUNCTION.
User notes:
The outliner so far was a great system to handle the object oriented workflow
we had in Blender prior to 2.8. However with the introduction of collections
the bloated ammount of data we were exposed at a given time was eventually
getting on the way of fully utilizing the outliner to manage collections and
their objects.
We hope that with this filtering system the user can put together the outliner
with whichever options he or she seem fit for a given task.
Features:
* Collection filter: In case users are only focused on objects.
* Object filter: Allow users to focus on collections only.
* (Object) content filter: Modifiers, mesh, contrainst, materials, ...
* (Object) children filter: Hide object children [1].
* Object State (visible, active, selected).
* Compact header: hide search options under a search toggle.
* Preserve scrolling position before/after filtering [2].
[1] - Note we still need to be able to tell if a children of an object is in a
collection, or if the parent object is the only one in the collection.
This in fact was one of the first motivations for this patch. But it is to
be addressed separately now that we can at least hide children away.
[2] - We look at the top-most collection in the outliner, and try to find it again
after the filtering and make sure it is in the same position as before.
This works nice now. But to work REALLY, REALLY nice we need to also store
the previous filter options to be sure the element we try to keep on top
was valid for both old and new filters. I would rather do this later though
since this smell a lot like feature creeping ;)
Remove no longer needed display options:
* Current Scene (replaced by View Layer/Collections)
* Visible (replaced by filter)
* Selected (same)
* Active (same)
* Same Type (same-ish)
How about All Scenes? I have a patch that will come next to replace the current
behaviour and focus only on compositing. So basically stop showing the objects
and show only view layers, their passes and collections, besides freestyle.
Also, while at this I'm also reorganizing the menu to keep View Layer and
Collections on top.
Developer notes:
* Unlike the per-object filtering, for collections we need to filter at tree
creation time, to prevent duplication of objects in the outliner.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks Pablo Vazquez for helping testing, thinking some design questions
together and pushing this to its final polished state as you see here.
Thanks Sergey Sharybin and Julian Eisel for code review. Julian couldn't do a
final review pass after I addressed his concerns. So blame is on me for any
issue I may be introducing here. Sergey was the author of the "preserve
scrolling position" idea. I'm happy with how it is working, thank you.
Reviewers: sergey, Severin, venomgfx
Subscribers: lichtwerk, duarteframos
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2992
This operator not only links a collection, but it creates a new one and then it
links it. Although the preferrable method for users to handle their collections
is when viewing the "Collections", let's explore this workflow for now.
Suggested by Pablo Vazquez, thank you.
Headers should not have operators as much as possible. The exception here is
for datablocks mode when you want to see the active keyset.
Edit menus on the other hand should be clearly distinct from the RMB context
menus. Edit menu options should be only the ones that apply to the entire
outliner, regardless of the selected element.
Context (rmb) menus should be related to the element you RMB on to invoke the
menu. I'm also taking this opportunity to start bringing the context menus
to Python. There is little reason not to, and it helps editing them (In this
case I'm doing it only for the Scene Collection one).
Although this wasn't so obvious since it
only showed up for factory settings and in the preferences window.
Panel display order depends on registration order,
Sorry for the noise. On the bright side we no longer need to move
classes around to re-arrange panels.
There were some issues with how we store outliner tree elements:
Apparently the only removable elements have been data-blocks so far.
When recreating the TreeElements, their TreeStoreElem instances were
mainly identified by their ID pointer. However non-data-blocks mostly
depend on an index. For collections, such an index isn't a reliable
measure though if we want to allow removing items. Depending on it for
identifying the TreeStoreElem instance would cause some quite noticeable
glitches (wrong highlights, two elements sharing highlight, etc).
For now I've solved that by actually removing the TreeStoreElem that
represents the removed element. A little limitation of this is that
after undoing the removal, some information might get lost, like
flags to store selection, or opened/closed state.
A better solution that would also fix this issue would be having a real
unique identifier for each non-data-block element, like an idname or even
its data-pointer. Not sure if we can get those to work reliable with
file read/write though, would have to investigate...
Also added a general Outliner tree traversal utility.
