Hi,
I just spent two hours making this mockup of new, cleaner, more convenient and intuitive render settings layout. When i looked at most recent build this morning, i realized how horrific and chaotic render settings look and that if i was a new users, using Corona for a first time, i would probably get a heart attack.
Alpha v4 is coming and there is always some UI cleanup before any public alpha release, but it is usually followed by uncertain balance of development priorities.
The thing is both me and Keymaster have different list of priorities. Sometimes, things that might be working from programmer's point of view might not be completely working from artist's point of view.
In my opinion if UI has to perceived as clean and intuitive, it has to be iterated to the every last detail.
So, i am presenting you my concept of new render settings layout. It is based on to-the-pixel precise alignment and clean left to right - top to bottom flow (to which human brain is used due to the text reading).
(Left one is old, right one is new)Aside from layout changes, i also added and removed some things that i found unnecessary:
Removed # of threads setting - was implemented only to diagnose improper performance scaling on multiprocessor machines
Removed photon kernel dropdown menu - did not contain any settings
Added View/World dropdown menu to displacement settings - for more obvious and self-explanatory displacement mode change
Added Max. Subdivisions setting to displacement settings - This setting will be probably necessary for displacement to better control amount of geometric subdivision.
So, to wrap it up. If you like this concept, then i ask you to help us decide if we should invest more time in such things, and that you really want clean and comprehensive UI, not some half baked semi-okay UI. The reason i put it up here is that we discuss this internally a lot and do not always came to a simple conclusion.
Thank you in advance.