Icons are great for people comfortable with the application, not that much
for everyone else. A perfect example of an elegant solution would be what
the sidefx dev team did when doing their own version of "the shelf". They
added 3 modes for displaying it: icons, text and icons with text
underneath. The shelf in maya, has always been icons only. Yes you can
hover the mouse over the icons and it will show you what that icon
represents, but it's pretty annoying to have to do that all the time, or
learn the shapes of the icons. Yes, you can also hack it, by building your
own custom color square, and use that for every single shelf button, and
then add a custom label for each, taking into account that you can't use
more than 6 or 7 letters for each square, thus reducing things like "rigid
link" to "rgdlnk"...and this is exactly the point - this is the maya
way...hacking your way through with a mental machete, instead of just
having things layed out elegantly in front of you.
The truly great thing about text is that it is usually consistent
throughout all 3d applications.
A sphere, an extrude, a cut, a material, a vertex etc, are all usually the
same in all apps, or similar concepts very easy to translate mentally.
While a square cut in 4 sides with one side greenish and arrow pointing at
it (component selection icon), or a set of bowling pins with a large circle
around them (rigid body from selection) is only in maya. If i am a max,
lightwave, c4d, houdini, xsi etc user, and i see a set of bowling pins, how
does that make me think of rigid bodies from selection? i could think of
nurbs or game engine tools or shading or who knows what. Each of us
understands an image differently, but a "rigid body from selection" is the
same to everyone working in 3d.
Does this make sense?
Cheers,
Octav
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:56 PM, Andy Goehler
<lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Would you want to ged rid of that massive arrow in the MCP too? :-)
>
> Icons have their place, they need to communicate well and be used with
> care. The Nuke toolbar icons work great IMHO.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andy
>
> > On 25.03.2014, at 17:40, Paul Griswold <
> pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com> wrote:
> >
> > 1. Text based everything - I hate the shelf in Softimage as well as the
> UV editor. Get rid of icons entirely.
>
>
--
Octavian Ureche
+40 732 774 313 (GMT+2)
CG & VFX
www.okto.ro
