Needs UI overhaul: Attachment editor

[ickby]

Hello,

in 0.17 DeepSoics attachment editor has seen introduction and brings lot of very usefull functionality. It is used in many places, especially PartDesign (Primitives and Datums). As it is that central for the whole workflow it should be intuitively usable. However, even thought DeepSoic has put in quite a lot of work, the UI is still not very accessible, user friendly or intuitive. It is hard to use. The problem arising here is the complexity of the task itself (many different possibilities for selections) and finding an intuitive way of handling it. the result consits of the order and amount of selections, thats hard to manage.
So if some of the UI experts here is searching for a coding area involving Qt design as well as 3D scene interaction this is a place to tackle. Just in case someone wants to work on this I will describe the problem a bitmore in detail.

Imagin: The user wants to create a datum line, and he knows there are a couple of ways, like a line between two points, or offseting an existing line etc. So he hits the line datum tool and sees this in the task view:

editor.JPG (46.2 KiB) Viewed 2670 times

It is overhelming in its complexity, and also unclear what options he really has. There are the Attachment modes, but they are plenty and one needs to look into each in detail to find out more. This is somewhat ok for lines, gets harder for planes and is close to impossible for Primitives (full 6dof attachment).

Also the 3D is not of much help

3D.JPG (38.51 KiB) Viewed 2670 times

You see the line created (yellow), but have not much indication what to do next. Also you have no indication which click would yield which result, all you can do is teting it and deleting the selection later if something unexpected happend. Maybe a hover preview could help? Don't know.

Annother thing is the SuperPlacement you see in the editor. it is also not intuitively accessible, as there i no reference of it in the 3d Maybe a transformation widget could be used to set this stuff, like the one for Part transformation (double click on Part)?


I have no solution for the thing, and no clear idea how it could be made better. But it must become more accessible and streamlined, currently it slows down the workflow instead of accelerating it. Thats why I put it here in the UI design forum. Maybe someone with experiance and dedication want to tackle that, it is definitely something worth the work, as it is central in the future workflow.

[agryson]

I have no solution for the thing, and no clear idea how it could be made better. But it must become more accessible and streamlined, currently it slows down the workflow instead of accelerating it. Thats why I put it here in the UI design forum. Maybe someone with experiance and dedication want to tackle that, it is definitely something worth the work, as it is central in the future workflow.

Thanks for this interesting problem!

If I understand correctly, this is a tool which allows one to position things (like part bodies) with respect to each other in a variety of ways?

Things that could help anyone hoping to tackle the problem (with or without coding skills):
Is there a short video of its use or maybe a tutorial or even just a few lines of a typical operation that could help get a handle on its use?

Ideally (for new people) what are the steps needed to get from the Start page to finishing a simple operation with this dialog?

[DeepSOIC]

Annother thing is the SuperPlacement you see in the editor. it is also not intuitively accessible, as there i no reference of it in the 3d Maybe a transformation widget could be used to set this stuff, like the one for Part transformation (double click on Part)?

I looked into Edit->Placement command for possibility of editing superPlacement. Although it is halfway supporting it, it looked like a serious rewrite was necessary to make it work with superPlacement.

Transform widget would be great. My only complaint about it is that it is incompatible with gesture navigation style , so I can't use it. Gesture nanigation requires fixes for that to work, and I think I may have another go at it.

[ickby]

Is there a short video of its use or maybe a tutorial or even just a few lines of a typical operation that could help get a handle on its use?

If one does not know how it works he can get a first hand experiance how accessible it is

It can be accessed like this in an current Development release:
1. New Document
2. Go to PartDesign
3. Create Body
4. Create Additive Primitive Box --> Opens the Attachment editor, pres Ok for default primitive
5. Either create a Substractive primitive, or a point / line / plane datum. All open an attachment editor

[agryson]

1. New Document
2. Go to PartDesign
3. Create Body
4. Create Additive Primitive Box --> Opens the Attachment editor, pres Ok for default primitive
5. Either create a Substractive primitive, or a point / line / plane datum. All open an attachment editor

Perfect, thank you.