From BlenderWiki

While trying to improve the sculpt interface - I realised that part of the problem in designing a good sculpt interface is that there are still some significant issues with the current blender interface.

UI Design Tools are exposed globally always

• Problem - typical usage of a 3D application involves redesigning your user interface less than 1% of your total user time (for the majority of users they NEVER redesign the UI). However a significant amount of the user interface is dedicated to exposing UI redesign related tools and options - in particular each editor space has an editor type selector that is always exposed; and the corners of each editor space have a window splitting hotspot. This provides a huge amount of visual noise as well as taking up significant space in the UI.

• Solution - I would recommend a readily accessible toggle to make the UI editable/not editable which would then reveal the UI editing tools for editor selection and editor splitting and merging. Perhaps in the upper right hand corner of the UI. This would provide rapid access to editing the UI when needed, but would eliminate the visual noise when not needed. In the future the UI editable could be expanded to include things like designing tabbable layouts; panel layouts; panel seperatorss; tool and icon layouts etc.

Preset UIs exist for only a supset of common tasks

• Problem - Here is a list of the common discrete tasks (a discrete task is a task that can be done without interacting with any other blender functionality - (ie usage in a typical 3d pipeline for a large studio an artist would only be assigned one of these tasks) that an artist is likely to do in blender - Sculpting; Texture Painting; Shader Design; Modelling; Retopologize; UV Unwrap; Bake textures/normals/lighting; Rigging and Constraints; Animate; Lighting; Simulation (Cloth, Fluids; Smoke; Hard Physics; Soft Physics; Particles/Hair); Scene Layout; Rendering; Compositing; Video Editing; Scripting; Game Logic programming. Of these we have preset UIs for Animation; Compositing; Game Logic; Scripting; UV Editing; and Video Editing. We also have 'Default' which isn't really well suited for any of the above tasks - its closest parallel is 'Scene Layout'. Also the order of the presets in the 'Screen Selector' is alphabetical so there is no logical progression between tasks. An additional task might be Critique and Feedback (via grease pencil notes and text editor notes).

• Solution - add additional layout presets for the above tasks; have them organized by workflow order not alphabetically. I'd like us to consider that instead of selecting from a menu we go with the widespread convention of a tab interface (See Modo 501 http://www.solidsmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/modo_501_RayGL_sample_002.jpg ; 3D Coat http://www.maxunderground.com/articles/2011/3d-coat_review_files/20110513_3dcoat_interface.jpg) For Critique and Feedback - this might be a toggle in the upper right hand corner similar to the editor toggle in the previous proposal.

Assets are difficult to manage and the available presets are lacking

• Problem - presets and asset reuse seem almost anathema in Blender - in most 3D applications there are a rich set of brushes; textures; materials; models; lighting and rendering presets; complex compositing node setups; common effects and simulation setups - and ready access to a public asset repository for sharing assets and assets can be easily imported and managed as a group. In Blender loading and sharing of assets is extremely cumbersome - there is not a rich set of quality assets that are included by default; nor is there any easy way to incorporate assets from 3rd parties or to share assets.

• Solution - allow referencing of assets outside of blends more easily; including asset groups. Have an interface to the web for easy external asset browsing and download. Do a call to artists to help create a good set of default assets - also have as part of a fruit project the development of a good common asset subset (materials; models; lighting setups; brush textures and brush presets). Have assets that are generic from previous fruit projects released under a CC0 license (since attribution when using materials or a basic asset are not feasible in many contexts) Have folder drag and drop and multiple item drag and drop for all asset areas (textures; scene) that can accept them. Have a screen type that is better dedicated to asset navigation and management. (Ie the image browser is quite close to what is needed and the method Cambo demonstrated for the Apricot project is also close to what is needed for asset usage in a 'Scene Layout' editor).

Help menu is poorly organized and links to unrelated and unuseful content

• Problem - Help and Learning - The Help system - the Manual linked to in 'help' is for 2.49b which has a drastically different UI. Most of the items under help are targeted at helping developers and have little or nothing to do with helping users; and many items are not help related at all.

• Solution - place developer related help under a submenu for developers. Put bug related help similarly in a debugging related submenu. Consider adding a link to the commonly used free training materials ie Help>Free Video Training> Blender Foundation Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderFoundation ; Blender Course http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html ; Blender Cookie http://www.blendercookie.com/  ; Also considering having a 'quick help' overlay on 3d view that gives beginner help similar to that used in Sculptris - http://screenshots.en.softonic.com/en/scrn/96000/96940/sculptris-18.png - it can be per screen and should be enabled by default so new users can quickly learn blender without having to do video training or manuals if they don't want or need to go beyond basic functionality.

Layout engine expects a huge screen and has poor space usage

• Problem - Layout engine, layout and space usage - the UI is designed to fit on a screen size that is larger than 70-80% of users have (only 20% of users have screens with 1680x1050 or higher resolution which is the minimum resolution to fit blender http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp ). The layout of tools often is extremely inefficient in terms of space usage per tool without a gain in terms of clarity.

• Solution - at a minimum blender should detect the screen size and adjust it so that the important UI elements are visible. We should look at more space efficient layout methods for tools - a massive text button with large amounts of space to make them fill the tool panel is extremely inefficient. I'd recommend looking at Modo; ZBrush; and Scultpris tool panel layouts as highly efficient and compact methods.

Navigation and tool usage with pen tablets is poor

6) Navigation and tool usage with pen tablet - tool sets that are intended to work with tablets still require substantial keyboard and mouse usage. Without preexisting knowledge of how to navigate and select in blender - discovery of how to navigate and select in blender has an extremely steep learning curve.

Irrelevant UI exposed in many modes

7) irrelevant UI stuff in many modes - the 'info header' contains the 'Add Menu'; 'Render Menu' Vertex/Edge/Face count; Renderer type selection; and other information that are completely irrelevant for the majority of tasks. Similarly 90% of the stuff in properties is not relevant to whatever task you are currently doing; much of the stuff in the 3d view header is irrelevant to many tasks in the 3d view. Most of the stuff in the NKey panel is not relevant to the task at hand with large amount of UI real estate dedicated to infrequently used actions/options.

8) huge amount of UI scrolling - the irrelevant UI stuff compounds the issue by resulting in large amounts of scrolling through irrelevant task.