What do you guys think?

Which aspects of it do you mean?

Will C4D/Blender consider adopting a new, Houdini like UI?

protozoan
Will C4D/Blender consider adopting a new, Houdini like UI?

looks more like they already have

There's nothing wrong with the UI in its current state, is there? The only thing I'm not a fan of is how section headlines in the parameters window now take up way more vertical space than they did pre-H19.

You could enable Toggle Stowbars for the entire screen or certain windows. This helps with hiding elements of a UI or the entire UI. It makes life easier when you are on a laptop. You can also set it to a hotkey. You could also customize your UI to fit your needs.

GlenD
You could enable Toggle Stowbars for the entire screen or certain windows. This helps with hiding elements of a UI or the entire UI. It makes life easier when you are on a laptop. You can also set it to a hotkey. You could also customize your UI to fit your needs.

Stowing bars is very useful as well as getting rid of a lot of large UI items like shelves. It can make a massive difference on laptops. If I need to invoke a shelf tool, it's easy to do so using the viewport TAB menu. So I lose nothing but gain a lot of screen estate.

I want a floating shelf like photoshop.

At first Houdini's UI may look old and dated. But on daily use it reveals as some of the easiest and most comfortable and customizable UIs I have worked with. And I have worked with lots of apps in different sectors along the years...

God I hope not, the others UI gotta learn from Houdini, lol

Good lord what a request.

I want to request more scientific look.

timurproko
Atleast updating the icons, to make them more modern, simple and consistent would be nice.

Rejecting the regressive superflat hegemony does not make one less modern

Just follow best practices and adjust UI for yourself.

Digipiction
There's nothing wrong with the UI in its current state, is there?

There are few big issues actually. Both for UI and UX.

First two offenders that came up in my mind:
- Parameter Pane, for example, is plagued by alignment issues of the parms and poor customization, which often leads to a great waste of space. (space efficiency is very important for this particular pane, as it's one of the most used part of houdini by the artists)
- The experience of working with the Editor Operator Type window is very frustrating. Space for coding is very limited, for example.


I feel that the main goal should be to improve and fix every issue and bad design causing waste of space, pointless aiming&clicking and dragging&resizing windows around with mouse.
These issues might be tiny or might not scream for an immediate fix. But they add up to each other.

They also might be somewhat hidden: for example, one RFE for the Editor Operator Type window is to have a Tab Menu for adding new parameters, like you have a Tab Menu for adding digital asset into the Network Editor.
A TAB MENU for parms would allow to collapse (or get rid of) the "Create Parameter" area, leaving more screen estate for other stuff.

sometimes i can not see dropdown toggles because my column separator is too small, it's so basic and very much irritating
UX definitely needs work

Glad someone brings it up again, looks much better I think.

Because the current GUI leaves much to be improved in my opinion, not only visually, because it is hard to read, but it’s extremely clicky and lots of very obvious modern workflow improvements that would make life so much easier are missing in my opinion.

Just some annoying things that come to mind :

- For instance, it’s very hard to see what Tab is currently open in the Parameter panel. The selected one is just a tiny bit lighter. And the font on some Tabs seems to be Bold, but randomly not on others. Why ?

- Not only are some Icons extremely small ( Operator Tree filter for instance ) most are very hard to read. For instance the Icons for “modify” or “Guide Process” at the top bar. Without the text I couldn’t figure what they mean for most. Some look like tiny little oil paintings, or a brown splotch. You could just as easy drop the icon and only keep the text. It would save some space as well.

- No option to have the properties panel stick to the currently selected properties, but it always switches to the last one used. Which results in having to re-select parameters after selecting a new object node almost every time. In almost every other App the currently selected property stays active, which works much faster and is way less clicky

- Or no multi select in the Operator Tree, only in the List or Node view, why ??

- It would speed up workflow so much if it were possible to undock drop-down menus as is possible in XSI for instance.

- sliders should stick to the last manually entered value, and not switch back to the default value of 1 when manually sliding after entering a value greater or smaller then 1.

- And the Ladder is just horrible to use with a pen, especially when one has to slide to the right to increase a value on an input field, like the Z translation or rotation that’s near the edge of the tablet or monitor.

- The Transformer gizmo should obviously not disappear from view and be unselectable when the pivot of the currently selected object is out of view.

- The terms "Display" and "Render” are just arbitrarily used no matter if it actually affects Display, Render or both.
For instance; in the Render properties one can select Display settings that only affect the viewport.
But then RMB click on a node or object in the viewport, and un-flag "Display" and the object is hidden from both Display and Render. Just like the Display slider in the properties panel.

- But then on some nodes like Fur there is no way to hide just from view and not from render, other then hide from both by disabling Display on the node, and then force it in the render.
There’s a rudimentary RMB “view as” popup in the viewport that implies one can hide the hair or display it as a bounding box, but that’s just for show, it doesn’t work.

And so on…

That turned out a bit longer then expected ;-)

The RMB menu has many redundant items such as dive into /up and can't find useful thing easily.

toonafish
And the font on some Tabs seems to be Bold, but randomly not on others. Why ?

That's a feature that's been helpful to me on many occasions: bold parameters and tabs indicate that a parameter has been changed from its default value.

Maybe H20 is the perfect time to modernize Houdini interface and icons.