= Toolbar Design
This document will serve as an overview of the toolbar design we want to implement for Blender 2.8.
=== Goals:
- Should be consistent across all our modes
- Should be clear which tool is active
- Should clearly separate Active Tools from Commands
- Blender should still be useable, even when toolbar is closed
== Scope
As outlined in T54582, we are going to split apart some of the functionality we currently have in the toolbar in Blender 2.79. Specifically, Operator 'redo' functionality goes to the Top Bar command section. Second, all tool settings go in the main top bar. That means that sculpt & paint brush settings will no longer reside in the toolbar.
Instead, the toolbar will become a simple list of tools, one of which is active.
== Re-ordering tools
Currently, Blender sorts sculpt & paint tools alphabetically. Clearly, that's not very useful. Users might want to keep their most often used tools at the top, while keeping seldom use ones at the bottom.
For this reason, users will need a way to re-order items in the toolbar. We plan to solve this by detecting the difference between a drag and a click. Dragging will let users re-order items.
== Icons
A big part of making the toolbar work is to have good, readable tool icons. So far, we've worked with icon designer Aslam Cader on this. The icons themselves are a seperate topic, here: T54662.
== Tabs
While the tabs in Blender 2.79 and earlier allowed is a way to group items in the toolbar, they also made it wider, taking up more screen space. We want to support an icon-only view for the toolbar, and to having large tabs makes that impractical. The tabs take up almost as much space as the icons themselves.
For this reason, we will replace the tabs with a menu at the top of the toolbar instead.
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== Edit Mode
For Edit Mode, we show a list of tools, one of which is active. For all active tools, we will require an icon.
{F2726808}
In order to save space, users can make the toolbar narrower. This will snap to the correct size to fit with the icons. As users move the cursor over the icons, we display an instant tooltip on rollover, so users can be certain they've picked the correct tool.
{F2727000}
We support nesting, so that similar tools can be grouped. This makes it possible to give the toolbar a manageable length.
{F2727005}
==== Commands
Each mode has an array of Commands too. As described in T54582, Commands are entirely separate from Active Tools. For this reason, we don't want to mix them in the UI. However, we can still support having commands in the toolbar - we will simply provide an additional 'tab', like so:
{F2727280}
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== Sculpt Mode
Wide:
{F2727404}
Narrow:
{F2727411}
// Note: We would like to re-design the icons here, by unifying the icon language so that Sculpt, Texture Paint, Draw, Vertex Paint modes all have a consistent visual language and style. //
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== Texture Paint Mode
Wide:
{F2727424}
Narrow:
{F2727427}
// Note: We probably would want more icons here for various Brush presets. //
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== Hair Mode
Wide:
{F2727486}
Narrow:
{F2727518}
== Pending
- Draw Mode
- Grease Pencil
- Vertex Paint
- Sculpt Mode
- Pose Mode (with Pose Sculpting)
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//Description will be updated to represent current state of the design.//