wanglifu
What do you guys think?

why? that interface is UGLY! please NO!

I think that right now the H interface in terms of functionality is one of the best out there.
I do not have to fly from one menu window to another like other apps.
Everything is compact and navigation is cool.

I know that sidefx opened many position for the development of a better viewport, in terms of functions a stability, can't ask for more.

Maybe some love for COPs would be really welcome

How about making op: as accessible as picking obj paths?
eg. shift click file button and instead you get a path picker, or whatever it's called, and auto composed `op:/img/whatever` with "rename tracking"

or is that too much work to implement?

Digipiction
There's nothing wrong with the UI in its current state

Lots.

animatrix_
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.

Always a crude patch.

So the to translate the op's question...

Everybody seems to be hiding the shelf? Why? Because it's horrible, and everybody keeps bashing c4d, granted it's a toy compared to houdini, however c4d's ui mechanics and consequently ux (prior to R25) were second to none.

Don't tell me that no one here would not welcome a customizable "pallete" that can host buttons and from that buttons dropdowns and that is also dockable anywhere, which would mean that you could customize eg. the shelf to take up less space while also being readable, or remove it completely, with the ability to bring it back without going to the prefs folder, you could also customize the right and left sidebars so that for example the flipbook button would actually use a better offscreen opengl renderer, sure you can make your own, but why is that button there then, it's quite stupid.

Panels could and should be "dragable" drag to undock/dock or move to a new location instead of static hit and miss current one, while you pray to whatever deity you believe in for houdini not to crash.

No one here would welcome a neatly padded parm panel that does not make fields go out of bounds, with improved readability, or thought out spline ramp, c4d's ramp editor is light years ahead in every way, or the ability to define color fields to default to HSV instead of RGB or whatever other mode suits the user since rarely would you input the exact rgb value.

Or how bout a better ladder or better yet complete removal of it, since it's more trouble than it's worth (unless all you have is npoints(0)<1), or a button next to vector values to lock them to uniform instead of constantly referencing and deleting, or better mechanics of saving and organizing vex snippets, or the not so finicky transform gizmos, or the auto near/far clipping planes that work always, or spline drawing tools that are actually useful and easy to use, and by easy I mean less time consuming (which is what most people mean when they say easy in context of DCCs, or attribute selectors that add and remove values, or better, by default, ui centric, save, autosave, backup and versioning that guarantees no scene corruption, detecting and loading of scene files from backup, better organized and more useful right click menu (by default)...

Well this got out of hand quickly...

Or maybe he did really just mean the ui visually!?

I referred only to the UI visually. UX can be improved for sure in places, and I agree with a few of your points, e.g. better ramp controls or sliders that expand their range when you type a value outside the range.

Despite UX,UI really needs more love.

gotta love those sub 100 post people demanding UI rewrites cause they used to their previous package.
could we not just ignore those?

Digipiction
I referred only to the UI visually. UX can be improved for sure in places, and I agree with a few of your points, e.g. better ramp controls or sliders that expand their range when you type a value outside the range.

dont they do that already?

wanglifu
Despite UX,UI really needs more love.

All you need is AXSC Dark Theme from Alex, optionally raise UI gamma to your liking.
You can grab it here: https://axelschoterman.com/resources [axelschoterman.com]
Or perhaps I'll actually finish mine and post that, which is quite similar

What Houdini really needs is a better definition of parameters, individually, things like dropdowns, "multi-state button" selectors, redefining of input fields which don't take up much space, but have cursor tracking so that the input field view always follows the cursor with padding/space after the last character, for the basic exp., and an popover expression/full blown text editor (3rd party opensource?), and no locking up Houdini for an external text editor is a patch and not a long term solution, cursor tracking for the tabs, so that you can, say drag a material to an object material tab directly, drag to viewport is fine up to a certain point, flat dop network on sop level much like foreach group (yes technically dop and sop are "different", visually, or rather how they are presented to the user they need not be), dot/pin node should be a visual element that does not recalculate the tree when added same goes for nulls, vex ramps that so that you don't have to hop up and down just to edit them or open up a new pane. Display options sidebar right click popup should stay visible when selecting parameters and should disappear when you click off of it, otherwise it's just taking up space.

sekow
gotta love those sub 100 post people demanding UI rewrites cause they used to their previous package.
could we not just ignore those?

Sure you can, but it has nothing to do with previous packages, all the things mentioned a are high frequency of use areas that are, to use the technical term, wonky as hell.

Nobody's demanding anything, it's just a discussion, that hopefully sesi ui and ux team will find informative for the future releases.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

hMonkey

wanglifu
Despite UX,UI really needs more love.

All you need is AXSC Dark Theme from Alex, optionally raise UI gamma to your liking.
You can grab it here: https://axelschoterman.com/resources [axelschoterman.com]
Or perhaps I'll actually finish mine and post that, which is quite similar

Also, there is a flat theme shipped with Qlib [qlab.github.io]

Faitel
Also, there is a flat theme shipped with Qlib

True, but it's still overly skeuomorphic.
Alex's theme is flat, improves readability, unclutters the space (to some extent) and improves the contrast between the elements, or rather the "white space", sort of... it's still limited to what is actually defined in the houdini, eg. a combo box drop down, as defined everywhere else is a single element, but in houdini it's actually defined as a two buttons, a pane popup, and the colors are linked to the global button colors, actually three separate values control the color of a combo box, or two I can't remember which.


The areas marked in red could loose the skeuomorphic approach and go for the minimalist iconography, with proper alignment and improved readability, instead of gradients full color accents if user so chooses, and flat clean buttons, Alex's theme uses "visual trickery" to remove the outlines and that approach is limited and can only take you so far.

sekow
dont they do that already?

I meant regular parameter values that have sliders. It's one little thing that annoys me quite frequently: when you add a new float parameter through VEX, its value range is 0 to 1. Sometimes that's fine, but most often I need a wider or a finer range than that.

I would want parameters to expand their slider range. For example, if I type 5, and the current range is 0 to 1, I'd expect the range to expand itself to 0 to 10 or something like that. Right now, I either have to change the range in the parameter definition panel or use the value ladder, which is more annoying to use than a slider.

In my opinion, Houdini's icon and UI are already clean and modern.

Only I can say is... Pls enlarge the default window size when I press Ctrl+o....lol

I wouldn't call the paramater pane "clean", for example.
It's a mess of misalignment of parameters that even show up in the factory nodes.

And this if we only we speak about the cleanness of the interface.
If we start to speak about wasted space, then the Parameter Pane become one of the worst offenders in Houdini.

Andr
I wouldn't call the paramater pane "clean", for example.
It's a mess of misalignment of parameters that even show up in the factory nodes.

Heh, not sure what's up with your system, but I can't recall Houdini ever looking like that (well, since I started using it from H17 anyway). Check your drivers or that you have a compatible system.

Thanks for sharing the image, it gave me a hint to what could be the cause.
I believe it's a UI bug: If you go to the preferences and set Icon Size and Layout to "COMPACT" this should produce the ugly misalignment of the parameters.

anyway while we are talking about parameters alignment, this is a UI trick I've found to align any parameter to the left margin .

1) Create a parameter (I usually use a label parm) before the Parm you want to align to left
2) Make it invisible
3) Check "join horizontally with the next paramater".

this allow you to pack more parameters together and save more space

Andr
I believe it's a UI bug: If you go to the preferences and set Icon Size and Layout to "COMPACT" this should produce the ugly misalignment of the parameters.

This was indeed a bug (123947) and it's been fixed in 19.5.367. Thanks!

I hope SideFX puts focus on polishing the UX and UI in the upcoming releases, there's a lot of minor issues as mentioned in this thread. The parameter pane is a big one, a bigger issue is UX and the movement between nodes, modes and contexts. Mode confusion is a recurring problem, almost anything that involves jumping between a node and the viewport feels inconvenient. Something about the current UX work pattern keeps me agitated.

And to add some specific examples of minor issues:

- the radial dial jitters (not much) but enough to easily select the wrong dial if not concentrating.
- the grooming tool modes have no visual cues as for what they do, just an infinite dropdown menu (Qt style).
- the new info panels are only partially implemented.
- pressing ENTER to active the node or viewer state only works if the mouse in over the viewport.
- selecting pieces by @name require configuring the group selection mode all the time (does it auto reset?)
- the tool tip covers the axis gizmo when the window pane is shorter than the tool tip sentence
- switching between selection mode and view axis occupies the same hotkeys, depending on mode
- every tools seem to have it's own hotkey pattern
- the add SOP has a greyed out transform handle that does nothing
- Houdini does not remember what node was pined to the parameter pane between sessions.
- the pdg workitem table pane is a mess
- the open in external editor (Alt-e) has been broken for years
- plugins that only be installed with .env or package scrips
- and much more...

Lots of UX screw-polishing possible. Blender has done an insane job on this front, I keep pushing work I used to to do in Houdini over to Blender because working there is much more comfortable. To the extent that it's worth the hassle of moving data between software.

Lots of good suggestions here, but I'd like to also see some improvements in functionality, like a better Hotkey system and editor. The option to make some hotkeys/tools transient, like snapping, which I use very frequently and I find perplexing that the devs decided this is a feature that's best suited for a radial menu instead of a transient hotkey. Radial menus are a great option to have, but it's not optimal in every situation, so a more robust hotkey system can only increase the customization capabilities, which is much better than trying to please everyone's workflow.