ruffemotion
hMonkey
menubar, layout of the buttons and the nodes are all wrong.
Way ahead of you, I'm already working on a V2. I've made V1 essentially in a vacuum and came here for some feedback, just so I can understand where I was wrong.
In your opinion, what's wrong with the menubar?
Here's the rundown...
1. Don't mess with high frequency of use buttons' position, you'll just annoy a lot of people
2. Single row panel, customizable on the fly throught ui or made dynamic, with adjustable size.
3. Don't omit stuff just for the sake of ui looking pretty
4. Contextual toolbar could be better utilised as a dockable panel, also the viewport could use a menubar...
5. Menubar is not expandable enough. Also what's in the menubar makes no sense (in the actual houdini)
6. Hiding a customisable menubar and chucking it into a burger is bad...
7. There's no need for inactive states to be shown, it just adds noise
8. Consider better auto layout and useful node info on the side, node's the centre but bounds of the node including the text should be considered in auto-layout...
9. There might be a better way to have those displayed, as well as having nodes a bit shaper, but that just might be me preferring the old nodes
10. Burger menu would better serve to reorder the panels on the fly, dock undock etc
11. Should be customisable, currently in houdini those are useless (lights if you need to reconfigure something) and could be better accessed if they were a part of viewport menubar, but then again there's the D options panel which is also unorganised and crowded...
12. Cache options need to be part of the network view bar, on all network bars. cpu and ram are nice additions but they would occupy less space in the main menubar or titlebar or in the network view as a toggle overlay on the bottom including the status bar, or completely removing the status bar and keeping the viewport status bar that works...
13. Not really sure the font scaling is correct, especially working long hours, 2k and 5k is much better ie 5k as hdpi 2k or 5120x1440, currently houdini uses 85dpi as base which is nether here nor there when it comes to scaling, it's ok on 1080p monitor but who uses those!?
14. There's no need for takes, mantra workflow is dead (or close to), rebasing the houdini to solaris as the main view and then diving in to sops from there would make more sense, with complete removal of contexts ie mat/shop/sop as root level contexts, you would still have the ability to navigate, bookmark and pin contexts, they would just be solaris centric, perhaps explore that.
15. The playbar is a bit crowded, perhaps made dynamic according to task, some input fields are too far apart especially on ultra-wide. The bottom left viewport gizmo just needs to be an orientation gizmo and not a view-cube, remove the viewport tool as that needs to be always active and not a tool, there are a lot of issues that the ui redesign needs to address. param panel although nice the input fields are small for scripting, perhaps a popup input field when there's an expression or a dedicated input field editor dockable in the ui and dynamic according to the input field?
anyway just a few thoughts...