I’ve been using the add-on for awhile and I think the pies work pretty good for a relatively small set of options. With a lot of options I feel I’d have to play cat and mouse trying to locate things. I’d be willing to test if it’s the case, but for now I voted the first option.
Intelligence, not intellingence. :RocknRoll:
I always commit the mistake of projecting my intellingence upon others.
Do you often get the feeling that you are surrounded by stupid people…? :yes:
Left yourself open for that one, I’m afraid!
the tags are very far away from the center so you have to look away hunting for the small tag which shows the action, in a large circular search, with randomly missing items among the 8 possible directions (why waste time working when you can play hunt-the-small-tag game?)
This is a simple preference/interface setting (for anyone who is interested).
Agree about the number of items though, UI team seems to like an 8 direction pie, but I feel a max of 6 is less prone to error.
The pie menus are awesome. Memorizing swipe directions are nothing. In maya everyone on my team has made custom multi-nested swipe actions so commands for an entire workflow only needs one key. I think blender’s implementation is great so far as well!
Try to switch from rendered sahding to wireframe shading in a heavy preview render and you will delete pie menu.
Just to mention, AFAIK none of the developers is even considering Pie menus to replace the other menus. The goal of pie menus is to be user configurable ways to speed up workflow where needed and to provide faster access to tools without overloading the keymap. The current functionality is there so users can write and implement there own pies and evaluate the workflow. After 2.72 there will be efforts to make the configurability better, ideally without the user to have to fiddle around with python.
I have tested them for tracking by writing my own pies, and i love the workflow and speed enhancements the pies are offering.
So just to clear up a bit - I started this poll, to see the opinions of the community.
My opinion is, that Pie menus should replace ALL pop-up menus.
I consider them much faster and better to work with than standard menus.
I think it is very stupid to define the menus yourself, since that takes time and why should every user maintain his own UI with hundreds of options? I don’t have a week extra time everytime a new blender version comes out. This ‘everyone can do it himself’ attitude is something I consider really unpractical. - just show me WHO will do this for all those functions.
Also, having 2 systems in parallel is confusing and not practical. if ppl want column menus, they are still in the menus accessible from toolbar.
Of course, shortcuts are always faster than menus, but blender doesn’t have shortcuts defined for many often used functions, and also this discussion wasn’t supposed to discuss this, it is about classical vs pie menus.
Only reason why I didn’t express these opinions when I started the thread is, because I wanted the votes to be independent. But when there are people voting, who didn’t at least look into the principles or didn’t think before, I think it can not be of any use anyway.
sebastian_k: do you know are they finally so customizable that each pie section is allow to show many buttons (like panel) ?
Like this (Mesh tools panel).
JuhaW:
the point is, that under one shortcut, you can have I guess up to 20 options with good distinguishability. and, you can have more of these, so yes, they can absorb as much as these addons panels, and if you get used to them, they are much faster to use.
Just imagine the path your mouse has to travel, that is one factor.
The second factor is muscle memory versus eye search. Eye search generally takes longer. Blender’s panels can be zoomed, and even reordered, which largely adds to eye searching time of the needed button.
This is very much also about experience, I generally recommend people to use tablet with any 3d package, when I teach modelling or animation.
You can put multiple rows into one pie slot, but they wont have the spawning animation like a regular button then. I found it to be far from ideal for interaction as well, in practice i prefer the 8 slots of current pies.
There is more to come for 2.73 though, Liquidape will try to bring more of the functionality of his pie addon into the official version.
Sounds good multiple rows, and support different modes like vertex/edge/face modes could have different pie menus etc. It would be nice to see how pies works with modeling objects vs. static panel (like Icon tools).
