Some days ago I’ve started to tweak the handles style to get something visually “lighter”, as I found the current handles style hiding way too much of the drawing, and so I always end deselecting/reselecting it to hide the handles to check the shape.
So I made this little patch, which change a few things:
-handles fill colors are half transparent
-handles outlines are thinner and grey color
-tangents are thinner (remove black outline, set color dark blue, similar to inkscape in edit mode)
I talked about it with genete and we thought it would be good to get some more users opinion about it before to change it in master.
Also he asked me if if it could be a solution to have an option in the settings to set handles color. I think that can be good to can set their opacity, but I’m not sure user should be able to change the RGB values as they are related to handles type, and so it could lead to confusion.
Or we could have a little switch to set half opacity on handles, side to the handles-type switch at the top of the canvas…
So please tell us if you would like this new style, what you think of this option idea, or if you have better ideas to improve it.
I like it a lot! Agreed that the current ones are a bit in he way while working.
Agreed that we shouldnt be able to change colour values of them but opacity. A switch in the canvas panel is not necessary I think as it is quite crowded there already, in setup should suffice. Perhaps with a shortcut key for fast switching if someone uses the function a lot?
This is a related/unrelated question, but for the rotate layer, could you make it possible to change the length from the angle handle to the orgin handle? Just like it’s done in the bone layer?
Hi Animtim,
I’m sorry for not reply tour thread before but I wanted to have some more feedback from the community before drop my opinion.
I’m sorry but I’m too used to the old line and color style. With the new proposal style for handles I feel that they are washed out and I confuse the types of handles easily. I think that washing out the handles color won’t help for people with color blind diseases. Also it introduces color effects from the background that makes me the effect that there are more than one type of handle.
I can understand that many people can like the new style more than before, as well as I expect that you understand that I (and possibly more people) would like more the old version.
Apart of that, we have recently made a huge effort to update the wiki to keep it updated with the new look of the terminology and icons, so it would be a bit confusing to change the look of the handles (or it will imply rework many of the screenshots of the wiki…)
It looks like it won’t be a good idea to change the handles types color, and based on your patch, you have changed this:
SOLID LINES (handles connections)
outside width from 3.0 to 0.0
inside color from 159,239,239 to 141,141,255
HANDLE (outlined circle)
inside color opacity from 1.0 to 0.7
outside color line from 0,0,0 to 153,178, 204
HANDLE HOVER (what is drawn when mouse hovers the handle)
radius increase from 1 to 0
So, my proposal is this one:
Add a preferences options to change the following parameters on how the handles are rendered:
SOLID LINES:
Option for outside line: yes/no
Option for inside line color: color selector
HANDLE:
Option for inside color opacity: opacity slider
Option for outside color line: use the same color than solid line inside color
HANDLE OVER:
Option to increase radius when hover: yes/no
And finally a button to reset it to defaults (the current one)
From current value (1 user unit) to what? Notice that angle handles doesn’t represent a dimension or position. It represents an angle (obviously) which units are the same in any kind of canvas resolution (it is an dimensionless value)
So to connect the handle to its origin we need to decide for one of this two options:
Make its size fixed to screen resolution (say 60 pixels)
Make its size fixed to canvas resolution (say 1 user unit). This is the current default.
Continue with option 2) but define a different value by user option is possible. As mentioned in the previous post, a preference can be added like:
Angle connector scale: A slider with a minimum of 0.1 and a maximum of 10
Would it be OK? Any other suggestion?
Alternatively, it is possible to use a fixed length (case 1) but it delivers to other kind of troubles…
Yes, definitely. With large size canvases the rot. handles get so small that it is almost impossible to change a small amount from current angle.
Also it would be extremely useful if we could extend the length of the handle without changing angle, say by ctrl+drag; ctrl+drag out handle, release ctrl and change angle. This would give us far better accuracy.
Thanks for your answer, I agree with most of your proposal, very cool
Just about “Option for outside color line: use the same color than solid line inside color”, I would like to can set a different color than solid line inside (as you can see I chose different values for the 2, that was on purpose).
When you are drawing (adding details to a draw) with the actual handlers sometimes you can see some parts of the lines… So, you must adjust a lot of time (deselecting or chekingout the handler).
With transparent option you could set the position without readjusting.
