User Role is a complete new concept in ZW3D 2016 version to store UI settings (Figure 1). With the new user role manager, you can easily to apply the recommended and integrated user role, what’s more, you can also customize your own user roles and switch between them at ease. This article will introduce how to use it to customize UI.
1. New User Role Manager
In the previous version, you can setup UI for different user by Configuration->User.
Figure 1: UI setting in old version
Besides of the above UI setting, these is also a new manager panel, user role manager, available in ZW3D 2016 (Figure 3). Let’s dive deeper to run this new user role function.
Figure 2: Interface of role manager
2. The Default Folder Node
Here are some default roles in the content folder to meet the needs of different users.
Primary role: The primary role provides the essential tools to do simple tasks. This role is recommended for new users, especially new users or users who don't use ZW3D regularly.
Intermediate role: The intermediate role provides the most common tools to perform ordinary
tasks. This role is recommended for most users, especially users who use ZW3D frequently.
Advanced role: The advanced role provides the advanced functions to complete complex tasks. It is suitable for experienced users.
Expert role：The expert role provides extra application tools. This role will includes full interface.
Notice: These default roles are built-in in ZW3D, so they cannot be modified. When you first starting ZW3D 2016, it will apply the Intermediate role as the current UI setting, if you want to see full interface, you can double click to switch to Expert role.
3. The User Folder Node
In most cases, these default roles are enough. However, for some designers, they may like to do some changes on the default roles. The user roles in the user folder node can satisfy their requirement in the role manager. To achieve this, designers need to go through the following steps.
Step 1: Create a new user role
Check the right-click menu, there listed three options: Create, Refresh and Import. Pick the “Create” option, here we can see a “copy from” option (Figure 3). Select the advanced role and click OK, then a new user role copied from the advanced role will appear in the user folder node.
Figure3: Create a new user role
Step 2: Customize and save the new role
Double click to apply the new user role, then you can make some changes such as removing ribbons, adding functions and so on. Don’t forget to save it when finishing your customization.
So far you have learned how to create a new user role based on the default one, and you can apply it quickly next time.
Notice:A role can be applied but not activated, which means when a role is applied, the current role is as the same as the applied role, but if you do some changes, the current role will be not equal to applied role any more. No matter what roles you apply, the current role can always be changeable. In addition, the changed current role cannot be saved, but we can create a new role and copy from the current role (Figure 3) so that we can apply it next time.
Figure 4: Copy from the current role
When designers have created a new role, there are some options in the right menu. Designers can apply it or delete it quickly, as well as edit its information. Moreover, they can export the user role to a zip file (Figure 4) and import the ZW3D packages installed on other computers (Figure 5), which is convenient to share the customization.
Figure 5: Export the user role
Figure 6: Import the user role
4. What can be tailor-made with user role
In a word, the new user role can be customized and support the store of all the tailor-made UI settings, such as the ribbon tab, menu, hot key and much more. For instance, when designers customize a new user role, they can directly hide the functions or removing ribbons or even modules they don’t need, and they can change the size of icon, the style of the interface and so on (Figure 6).
Figure 7: Show or hide the functions and modules
What’s more, here is also a customize option (Figure 6). Pick it and a customize table exists (Figure 7). Designers can add or delete any commands. Besides this, they can also do some transference or set hotkeys and mouse.
Figure 8: Customize table
Notice:Though the user role is helpful to design, one thing we need to pay attention is that it can’t manage the configuration setting (Figure 9). In other words, we cannot rely on the user role to help customize the configuration setting so far.
Figure 9: Configuration cannot be customized by user role
Customization of user roles can simplify the design environment by cutting the unrelated commands and reserve the useful ones. This characteristic provides higher efficiency for designing.
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