GUI Prototyping thread...

[Carbonflux]

I thought I would start a prototyping thread.

My idea is to put forward a set of working place holders, only using wxFormBuilder and a copy of the GUI this way the mockup will be easy to implement.

I am using this thread as a starting place: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=665

Please beat them up. These are just place holders for all the features and not meant to be seen as final or even a suggested look and feel.

I think the goal of this thread should be to gather up all the ideas so far and bring them to the level of a UI mockup, I believe just talking about it will generate inertia for GUI dev. Also the idea is to make a contribution to luxrender, if this is not welcome or I seem to be stepping on anyones toes Please let me know and I will back off or just slow down.

I meant to get this started last week, heh, RL, etc...

Here are the first two, there will be more comming...

This adds some of the controls to the tool bar that I have seen discussed in other threads. Display interval is also a button that will refresh the display when pressed.

This one implements the same features in a options dialog and clears the tool bar for more controls.

I am working right now on learning Violet so I can fully understand the current ideas about tonemapping and also implementing the wxTreeControl to propose it as a way of merging network management and a rendering queue, which in theory I should have prototyped before this weekend.

Best Regards.

[patlecoq]

Hi,

Don't you think buttons with icons instead of text for 'Display Interval' and 'Write Interval' would be better,
as in Radiance's mockup?
Maybe a button in the toolbar to open the 'LuxRender Options' dialog box could be a better solution than
to have the checkboxes directly in the toolbar, as it takes a lot of space.

Do you think if could also be possible to save the UI state when you quit LuxRender and reuse it each time
LuxRender is launched?
It would be nice to save the window state (maximized/not maximized), its position, the positions of the
wxAuiNotebooks if they have been dragged...

Regards.
Patrice

[Carbonflux]

well, mostly I was just trying to define what controls should be where not how they look, the problem with icons is that they are also a language that you have to memorize because no icon is ever going to have the same universal meaning, that being said ya they should be icons, if that is its desired that these things be on the tool bar at all, also adding icon's in the prototype would mean altering wxluxgui and stuff to add them to the memory bitmap or adding them in gimp...all the controls you see work but they are not hooked up to functions, everything is from wxFormBuilder so when a final form is decided it will look and function exactly like that. I have many times worked on projects where we did not do it this way and had a nightmare of a time getting the app to look like the design.

I added the window position and states to my notes, that is standard and I consider it a required for a release version.

Thank you for commenting

[Ratow]

Hey carbonflux,

Keep those ideas coming

Personally, I like your idea of an option dialog since this would keep the toolbar more "action" oriented and with less configuration stuff (which is less used). If a lot of configuration options appear in the future, we could easily organize them inside tabs, this way.
Tonemapping configurations, however, shouldn't be on a dialog, I think, since you want to see the results right away. In this case, the original idea by radiance seems to be a better one, but what do you think of one of those floating tool windows?

Do you think if could also be possible to save the UI state when you quit LuxRender and reuse it each time
LuxRender is launched?

I know that some of the state can be saved, however the wxAuiNotebook panel has no real support for this, unfortunately. It has been some time since I searched for this though. Maybe things have changed...

implementing the wxTreeControl to propose it as a way of merging network management and a rendering queue

Hmmm, this should be interesting.

-Ratow

[Labello]

When is it planned to add some new stuff to the gui?

[Carbonflux]

I think the options dialog might be better for some of the controls that are not changed a lot also, I can chip away at a more detailed version tonight and a bit next week, I also thought about how easy it would be to just add tabs and again it has the value of being where people expect to find those things, leaving the toolbar free for real time control.

I think it terms of release planing of UI additions that will emerge as a set of firm features is established and some kind of metric as to how fast we can implement them in practice given everyones RL demands

Personally I am a fairly slow programmer, I used to be quite fast but moved into more and more abstract roles, etc <hand waving>

Still, I think it would be nice to maybe have some UI additions approved and in place for the .06 release.

[miga]

It would be nice to set all the render options in the GUI. So it will read them out of the Luxrender files but you can change them in the GUI if you want to (or if they are empty).

Also a buffer to store an image would be nice so that you can save one image to compare differences: e.g. at minute 20 you press a button and it will save this image somewhere else. Then you can change from image_20min <-> image_live to see what changed.

[jeanphi]

Hi,

There is (was?) a mantis task for this, but I think it got out of focus. This would definitely be worth to have, but it can't apply to all parameters (preprocess phase, kd-tree structure, image resolution, ...)

Jeanphi

[Carbonflux]

There is a clipboard copy command in the current CVS version, we added a View menu, its under that and will copy the current image to the clipboard, which is a cheap way of getting what you want in terms of the "buffered" image.

I agree about setting all lux params in the GUI and in fact that is the kind of vague goal we are chipping away at, the practical part of it relates to the refactoring and some rewrites that might need to be done to be able to get at some of that stuff.

Granted we can just alter the scene files on disc and restart the rendering thread.

The basic direction I was taking was to get all the controls for setting all those things in place and then we can fill in the functionality as it becomes practical.

I will check for a Mantis task, I know there was one relating to a rendering queue, which is what I was basing my ideas about it on.

[Ratow]

When is it planned to add some new stuff to the gui?

Actually, new stuff was planned for some time now but, as Carbonflux said, RL is in the way right now. Thankfully some contributions have been popping up and slowly but surely the gui is getting better.

There is (was?) a mantis task for this, but I think it got out of focus

I think this is the one you are talking about: http://www.luxrender.net/mantis/view.php?id=263

The basic direction I was taking was to get all the controls for setting all those things in place and then we can fill in the functionality as it becomes practical.

This is also a good way to get to know all the api change requirements before anything is done.

-Ratow