One Blender Issue To Rule Them All

[sgoudham]

Background

Currently, we have 2 Blender issues proposed for review into the organisation:

• Blender #2014 by @codekisser
• Blender #2040 by @Dalibor-P

And we also have https://github.com/nekowinston/ctp-blender.

Description

Basically raising this issue to see how we can go forward from this state that we're in.

If I'm right in remembering, winston's repository was more of a mockup and not necessarily up for consideration.

I'm currently unsure which existing Blender issue to favour going forward. Is there an unofficial consensus on which one is worth reviewing/merging right now?

I'll hopefully get around to installing Blender soon and try out the themes to find out for myself, but I wanted to raise this issue for transparency.

[Dalibor-P]

I have recently looked at my theme with the newest version of Blender, and it still works well. Maybe some of the newest features in Blender may not have the correct colors, but I don't think it matters much. The core appearance works.

The catch is the difficulty of developing and maintaining Blender themes. Here is a list of things that frustrated me:

1. Blender has hundreds of color properties. Each editor has its own properties for multiple background and foreground layers and editor specific properties. Each property has to be checked and edited individually. Only one half of those properties are relevant. The rest is either doing nothing (as in, the color property exists, but doesn't affect Blender in any way, essentially being useless) or it controls an obscure feature that no one ever uses.
2. There is at least one button type, that wasn't editable through Blender, and I had to find it in the .xml file that has a length of 1 500 lines.
3. There are 20 different button types, each had to be verified individually, some of which exist only in one panel or one editor.
4. Changing colors via search and replace function en masse is risky, because the same color can be used as a panel background and button outline.
5. When an update rolls out, there is no list of new properties added with the updated, forcing me to search for them myself based on patch notes.
6. Sometimes, one button property looks well in one panel, but looks awful in another panel. I found I had to make many compromises, sometimes even having to backtrack on dozens of changes done to editor/panel backgrounds.
7. Blender development team develop blender UI for a dark theme (Blender Dark) first and foremost. Even their official light theme Blender Light uses dark buttons and accents. It's difficult to make and maintain a custom light theme.

All the points above make it difficult to come back and continue the maintenance of the theme, because of how overwhelming all those settings are. It's bloated, and I don't remember what each of the settings does.

So, my take is that I don't feel like continuing maintaining my repo. Not until Blender devs simplify the theme development by reducing the amount of properties, improving consistency of button properties, cleaning it up and merging the same properties together (one property to change all backgrounds in all editors), and I doubt that will happen.

Finally, take note of https://github.com/ameknite/blender. This person has forked my theme and built their own theme off of mine, but just after a few versions, theirs look a lot different from mine. The difference between our themes is that I made it light (latte) theme first, while they made it dark (frappe) theme first.

[sgoudham]

Thanks for sharing your experience @Dalibor-P, I assume you no longer would like to merge #2040 into the organisation as you have expressed your disinterest in maintaining the repository going forward?

Recently, we had a similar situation with catppuccin/steam and opted to archive it as it proved too difficult to theme reasonably and consistently, it sounds like Blender might also come under this category for now?

However, I'd be interested in hearing how @ameknite and @codekisser feel about their repositories, and if they've mitigated some of the pain points mentioned here.

[ameknite]

Right now my project is stale, but I really like catppuccin themes and with the announcement of the Extension Platform in Blender, I have plans to refactor all the project to parse correctly the Blender Theme and create a cli tool to made it easier to support different flavors and versions of blender.

When I have something decent, I'll open an issue, so people can check it out.