(LEFT) Softimage secondary selection is cyan while a primary selection is white (RIGHT) Blender secondary selection. Correctly color-identified objects in outliner and viewport.
Blender pie menu. Hover is primary selection (white), Release is secondary selection (blue) to be consistent with MENU selection as in the rest of the UI.
Softimage Render Bar options / Blender Render options
Softimage has different colored modules per action: Pressing 1 will take you to a purple-themed UI (geometry creation and modification). Pressing 2 will take you to a green-themed UI (animation). Pressing 3 will take you to a pale cyan UI (render). Pressing 4 will take you to a pale blue sky (ICE) interface. Pressing CTRL+1 will take you to an melon color UI (simulation). Pressing CTRL+2 will take you to an orange UI (Hair).
Color #3 scheme is Render which is the most used module after a work in 3D is completed. I reflected this on the Blender UI.
This becomes the basis for me to distribute these colors in the appropriate workspace in Blender so the Softimage user can identify their workflow in it, quickly.
Softimage "model" module themed in purple.
This "purple" theme was applied to the N menu in Blender, since most of the addons to MODIFY geometry and the actual transforms for the object seemed the logically correspond.
Softimage menu / Blender menu
Softimage menu has a high contrast whiter background after opening a subcategory on the menu. In Blender, I decided to keep the sub menus in the SAME color than the grey-ish UI because there are NO DETACHABLE menus at the moment in Blender. You can notice a little scissors icon which means it is to be "tore" and FLOAT on top of the UI. Blender doesn't have this function and therefore it is better to keep levels and sub-levels at the same color scheme than the main UI.
Softimage camera and explorer / Blender camera and outliner
In Softimage the camera has a dark blue color and the scene root has a green (bold) text color. In Blender I translated that in the outliner COLLECTION green colored and the camera continues to be in a dark blue color for contrast principle in the viewport.
You can also notice in Blender that the SHADER icon is now correctly colored in purple as in Softimage.
In Blender the outliner now reflects when an object is on EDIT MODE by turning YELLOW which is the global constant for editing anything in the UV editor and Graph editor. You can compare the same behavior on Softimage when an object enters edit mode in yellow color. Also, notice Collection is green colored just as its equivalency in Scene Root from Softimage.
I chose not to color the SCENE in green color in Blender because seldom we see a user identify a large collection of SCENES in an Outliner. It often happens that scenes are mostly used in the Sequencer, and scene clips are ALREADY green-themed there.
Softimage face selection (wireframe view) / Blender face selection (shaded view)
Softimage transform and edit manipulator (yellow) / Blender helper manipulator in blue for better contrast.
PLEASE SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN IN THE PAGE TO CONTINUE TO THE NEXT PAGE.
AT THE END OF THE POST THERE IS A BIG GALLERY OF PICTURES WITH MORE SETTINGS TO CUSTOMIZE.
Softimage file explorer / Blender file explorer (hovers in white, selects in blue).
Top: Softimage curves and edit colors / Bottom: Blender curves and edit colors
In Blender, go to user preferences>themes>Graph editor and change the size of vertex to 8 to identify where the keyframes are in the timeline easily. To isolate the curve press shift+h to hide all others besides the selected one.
In the Softimage Blender theme, when you grab a pole, you'll identify it's EDITABLE when it turns yellow. This only applies to "free poles" for now.
Select a keyframe in the graph editor, and press "V", select free. Now you'll know the difference between an automatic pole (white) and a free pole (yellow).
1. The status bar in Softimage notifying an error. 2. The status bar in Blender notifies ERRORs and other important information, so it cannot be RED-only since it's hardcoded to do a blend between the theme color selected and automatic alpha from 1 to 0. The color RED gets lost into a dark unreadable message. I decided to leave it in an ICE blue color for clear readability.
TOP: Softimage Dopesheet colors (tracks are in a pale olive green) BOTTOM: Blender's dope sheet track is in a pale olive green track while channels are mustard-colored. This color scheme also reflects on the NLA (action tracks are mustard colored) and graph animation's channels are also pale olive green. NLA, Graph Editor, Dopesheet are all consistent with their channel and track colors.
The only color exception is when EDITING stashed NLA clips. They turn PURPLE to suggest the user: Go back to use the PURPLE UI in the viewport (the N panel) and correct your animations/deformations. The blue arrow shows the occluded zone theme color (dark bluish-grey).
NLA and Graph editor make sense color-wise: they both use the track channel with the same pale olive green. The user associates that the NLA is receiving ACTIONS from the keyframes in the Graph Editor.
Green = keyframes in the timeline. Pale olive green = tracks of keyframed actions.
Green track in NLA associated to stored animation through green color.
Grease pencil DOPESHEET cannot be customized because it's hard coded. This breaks all other uniform congruence from the NLA, Graph Editor and Dopesheet color code.
NLA tweak track association through purple track.
LEFT: Blender render grid had to be darkened, since transparency was not clear to identify. RIGHT: Softimage render grid is very contrasty and makes it difficult to read any transparency.
The render grid becomes bothersome specially on VSE. It's too "contrast-y". So the render grid was reverted to a darker contrast color for easiness to the eye.
LEFT: Softimage Text editor / RIGHT: Blender text editor
To configure the correct display of the UI and the TEXT editor like in Softimage, you need to change the font display in MANY different places in Blender. The UI font is TAHOMA and the Text code is COURIER. Here are some captures so you can configure your UI:
USER PREFERENCES > INTERFACE >Text Rendering: Interface font: Verdana (if you're on MAC or Linux), but use TAHOMA if possible. Mono-space Font (the code editor and console text): COURIER.
Uncheck this on PREFERENCES>VIEWPORT>Quality for sharper lines in the 3d viewport and UV editor.
OH! don't forget to activate in USER PREFERENCES>SYSTEM>CUDA devices. Blender doesn't come with those settings activated, and they are important for you to render with your CPU+GPU processors, speeding up the render time when using Cycles or EEVEE.
To get access to the PIE menus, don't forget to activate these.
Also in ADDONS, check /uncheck these boxes. Activate the official PIE menu.
This is how the VSE editor looks like (image sequences are equivalent in color as in a dopesheet).
I did this as a quick capture between crossfade clips in the VSE.
Timeline scrub in Softimage
Timeline scrub in all the animation-capable context windows in Blender
LEFT: Softimage toolbar (modules). RIGHT: Blender (T) Toolbar. Notice this bar has a little bit of shading as you can see on the bigger buttons from the Softimage toolbar.
A.) Please notice all the TRACKS use the same color in all the different windows for an easy association of the data fed from the user.
B.) The default theme in Blender could identify it's NLA track in Blue to synchronize colors between windows. Consequently change all others to ORANGE.
LEFT: Softimage color schemes for the tracks in the NLA. RIGHT: The same color principle was adapted to Blender's Dopesheet, NLA, and Graph Editor (action editor) and VSE.
In addition, the most prominent UI colors were adapted for easy color and module association in Blender.
Final thoughts:
Application Templates in Blender 2.83 are really necessary so the user applies a one-time only-install for different settings, different fonts, text size, custom shortcuts, custom workspaces, addons and other things that otherwise are very long to install one by one.
Blender 2.83 Sculpt mode, Tracking, and Scripting were not further adapted to the UI color scheme because these modules are updating constantly and the theme-able colors tend to change or expand. I can board those modules once the LTS version is released.
I've been thoroughly testing the XSI theme and making a lot of video tutorials which people really appreciate on a CLEAR interface. Darker interfaces with long-tutorials are a no-no in education (people tend to get sleepy).
I propose this theme is called "SOFTIMAGE" instead of XSI. We are not calling "Wavefront Maya" the Maya theme. "Softimage" is more appropriate.
If you're an ex-Softimage user, please let me know what other areas in Blender you'd like me to customize for the upcoming version.
Please share and subscribe! -Thanks!
The following section is a collection of settings in case you wonder how to continue to adapt your current Blender theme.
DRIVEN parameters in Softimage have a special icon. In Blender I switched the pinkish color for a fitting theme CYAN for driven values.
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