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AHDD,

 

We are working on the crash. This appears to be a recent disturbance caused by some new optimizations. We expect to have a fix soon, WRT the UI of the  V-Ray viewport (VFB), we do not control this as it is integrated into V-Ray. We can pass along your suggestions. What would you like to see improved?

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  • 2 weeks later...
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what happened to the UI in the latest release build 9999? almost all palettes and dialogs show a space consuming larger layout. as if the whole UI had been scaled up? or is it only a local issue with my installation? OSX 10.12.x here...

post-89-0-66190200-1515535510_thumb.png

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What I personally would like to see is a UI that is similar to 3ds Max or any other major modeling program.  What I mean by that is I would like to do away with all the floating palettes that have to be open all the time.  Picture this: you have one decent monitor but to work on your project you have to have the modeling window as big as possible.  In order to use the palettes that I need I have to open the following: Lights, Layers, Materials, Views, Tool options, Material Parameters, Vray tools, Vray lights, Vray Settings, and a few floating palettes of the tools I use most like T-form, Attributes, Modify, and reshape.  Now if I have one screen I can no longer see my project window.  So now I buy a second monitor that is a lot larger to just hold all those floating palettes. Nuts!. Forget working on a laptop in a clients office.   Hasn't anyone studied how other programs deal with this situation or are they just inventing from scratch with no reference material?  I think I would be a lot less frustrated if I didn't have to constantly search for palettes totally or partially hidden all the time or if they actually displayed properly when I open a project. 

Now that I am done griping I must add that I am still in love with Form.z as a whole.  It could just be so much better and a lot more  user friendly to the new user trying to get up to speed.  As a long time user (over 30 years) I have a familiarity to the way things work and I know how to work around issues.  But that is exactly the problem.  If they want to attract new users and survive they need to develop a program that doesn't need to be a "work around" but a "work through" without the constant diagnosing and triage.  I realize there is no perfect program out there and I have crashed the best of them (photoshop) on occasion.  But adding more bells and whistles to a program that is inherently flawed reminds me of my current car:  Lots of new cool electronic gadgets to play with that will brake but no real difference in the way it drives.  There really needs to be a fundamental redesign of the core program.  Drop down Menus please!  Easier said than I am sure.

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I agree with Andrew. GUI is not the best part of formZ. It could be tidier, more precise and solid. There are odd flaws here and there. Basically everything works well, but the look and the feeling are not always at the same level as the rest of the software. Don't get me wrong I really like formZ a lot. It's my best tool since 1997. 

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I would love to see the palette dock turn into names with icons, ala Photoshop.  Or just icons with optional names, just like the tools.  Click once on the name and/or icon and the palette pops open.  Click once again and it contracts.  There is far too much double clicking & scrolling to use the current palette dock effectively.  It takes too much time & effort to one click on the little arrow to expand/contract the palette.  Therefore I also end up with tons of floating palettes.  At the office I have three screens so this isn't too much an issue.  On the laptop it is a mess. 

 

I should note I still like the flexibility of floating palettes.  I would hate to lose that functionality.  With an icon palette dock there should still be the option for tear away palettes.  

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Yes, the UI is really a bad and sad story. Since the first days Version 7 came out, I have reported again and again issues, bulky things and desolate designs of the UI to Autodessys, without understanding.

This is all the more pitiful, since the program actually offers great features and the versions up to v6 were so elegant…

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Echoing the UI commentary here. And don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate all the hard work going into the new features, stabilization of bugs, etc. But the UI issues really affect nearly every release. Realizing that no one will be completely satisfied with the UI but generally, it is a real problem, I would be so grateful a single release that doesn't just give a minor tweak to the UI making it a tiny bit better but instead looks at the UI concept and brings it into competition with other software. For Mac OS, my biggest issues (other than the new palette oversize bug in build #9999) are:

 

1.) TABS. Just look around, every software has adopted this, because, they work, and hey, if you don’t like using them, then cool, have your stuff floating around, but please, at least give us the option of a tabbed interface. Tabbed windows. Tabbed palettes. Tabbed tools, They tend to work. See Adobe. 

 

2.) Can we please just have ALL the palettes have consistent magnetic snapping to each other? And maybe snap them to a grid, having that grid be customizable would also be nice, but I’ll settle for just having consistent palette intercase snapping. Why the palette dock itself does not have that feature is just beyond me. I really just hate that palette, it's always floating about in the way somewhere, and then when I use it, it locates itself to a new location and then I have to move it back. The modeling tool palette, and the tool dock palette also have this non magnetic issue sometimes. Perhaps there's a setting I missed somewhere to turn that on (please enlighten me). Typically I just close that palette.

 

2.) based on the current concept for the UI, shouldn't the palette dock itself be more flexible/customizable? Like having different palettes that are related to each other be able to be docked side by side, or grouped together...(views, view and view parameters, materials, and material parameters for example) 

 

3.) Why is the tool dock called the tool dock if I can't dock modeling tools there? Again this one is also closed because it doesn’t function consistently. 

 

3.) I'm not a full 100% fan of Adobe's interface on photoshop, but I will say this, it works, and it works with ease. The  palette docking works, the tabs work, the fullscreen vs windowed document view works. And it's fluid. (Others may disagree)  But I can't say the same for FormZ. When I end up with a palette that I want out but it remains floating or has no alignment with other palettes, it results in a "jagged" interface, or obscures what I want to see, and  I want to just get rid of the palette. Some may say, just go to key commands or the favorites, but that doesn't work all the time. 

 

4.) did I mention TABS. Please, PLEASE give us a tabbed interface.

 

5.) The favorites overlay interface that pops up on a key press, I feel this was a step in the right direction. I use it constantly. And I wish I had more of those, particularly for layers, for snapping, or other groupings of modeling tools. The crux of that is that I want to see my work when I’m working on it, and I want to see my interface when I need to interface with it. 

 

6.) The one palette that tends to alway stay open unless I’m just navigating around  a model is the Tool Options palettes as it’s the one major dynamic interface element other than the input palette. At times I wish those two palettes could be integrated somehow. 

 

 

Again, echoing others, It’s time for this interface to evolve. All the above said, thanks to all of those at formZ for all the hard work.

 
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All,

 

Thanks for the reports. We are aware that here is something causing UI elements in #9999 to be improperly sized on OS X. We are actively working on this and we will post a new WIP as soon as it is fully resolved.

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