Posts by Nicholas Francis

Semitransparent GUI is all the rage these days. This is usually not a good idea. Here, I’ll go into some of the details why transparency (mostly) sucks.

Transparency creates visual noise - our eyes are very good at edge detection, and having transparent stuff increases the number of edges that we have to process. Also, a lot of GUI has some sort of layering effect - either through shading, coloring or by using floating windows. Using transparency breaks this layering (in nature, very few things are partially transparent).

Who got the idea that having a large 50% transparent panel was a good idea? - you can neither see the panel nor the text beneath.Now, I said at the top that semitransparent GUI is ususaly not a good idea - let’s take a look at where it does work:

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A request I’ve gotten from quite a few new users is to have some indicator axes in the Scene View showing you what is up and what is down. There is a reason why they are not there, and it ties into the core of my Job here at UT: GUI design. I’ve wanted to comment a bit on this.

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