Say yeaaaaaaaaaaaah! Simple, awesome, god damn it marvelous. Thank you Harley!
Very modo-esque, I like! 
@Harley Nah if it’s to much work to just fork that out to a .diff don’t. Rather submit the whole thing I just wanted to play around with the gradient background color ASAP.
Oh sweat! so you’re actually thinking ahead and making it themable. So the gradient is working like blenders other themable stuf, like the buttons you chose one color, and it generates a +10, or -10 offset for the shading.
I can’t see a use for setting a quad gradient 
but hey! never say never.
could you make it so, when setting the gradient you enter a TOP_COLOR and BOTTOM_COLOR, and it makes a linear interp. between them and makes a smooth gradient.
I can see people wanting to set a grayish color fading to a dark blueish ala Maya 3d viewport. etc.
I can’t wait for this to get into trunk.
Ooh, that is a great idea! It would save a lot of “selecting the wrong vertex” when background gemoetry is on, especially for stuff like retopology.
The gradient bg is great for modeling and sculpting. Thank a lot Herley
 Originally Posted by <b>FreeMind</b> ♦ Highlighting objects/edges/verts/faces that you are about to select, so you know what you will select. Ooh, that is a great idea! It would save a lot of "selecting the wrong vertex" when background gemoetry is on, especially for stuff like retopology.
Another great idea
crazycourier,
One thing I did change…increased the background int maximum value from 50 to 200… any reason I shouldn’t have done that?
No, I had just left it there because I didn’t like it being too contrasty. I should have widened up that range like you did before letting anyone else play.
I was seeing a lot of banding in the gradient.
Yes, OpenGL does that gradient. It is fast but it doesn’t dither so you get that banding if the range is too narrow.
I still can’t decide whether having a gradient is actually useful and beneficial in any way. It seems to look better that way, but I kind’ve doubt that anything is improved at all.
Oh well, I guess that is the whole purpose of this exercise, to see if anyone can find a reason for these things.
Harley
Will really appreciate a Win x32 build please. Thank you.
Harley, sounds good. I’m really glad you made this. I’ve been wanting the gradient background for a while. I don’t know about anyone else, but having that seems to outline my model much better. It helps outline the shapes for my brain to comprehend! 
@nabeelaejaz, Demohero created a 32 build which he posted in post #4 of this thread. Here’s another link that he put on his blog: http://foreverblender.blogspot.com/2011/04/gradient-bakground-by-harley-acheson.html
If you don’t already, you should follow his (Demohero’s) blog: http://foreverblender.blogspot.com
I for one, find it incredibly useful. He publishes a lot of good stuff for all levels of blender users pretty regularly. That’s how I actually found out about this patch. Thanks for that Demohero!
Tried it out. Love it.
You can actually make Y being up this way which is a good thing.
Sadly, turntable and ortho views don’t change to y being up…
The background should definitely be in the theme editor, not the Display, and as a gradient editor (like in materials). Or if that’s not possible, as two colors and a balance slider.
Love the ground alpha.
Another thing I noticed:
Turn the Alpha to at least 0.1 to see it:
If you tab into Edit mode the grid lines become brighter…
Thanks for the link. The gradient sure is a beauty and it must be included in the BF trunk asap. This is a must have for all!!!
Not untill it’s in themes are more customisable
You can actually make Y being up this way which is a good thing. Sadly, turntable and ortho views don’t change to y being up…
For Y-up I had assumed you could turn off the z-floor, turn on the Y-floor, and then just swap the keyboard shortcuts for the various views. Would there be more to it than that?
The gradient sure is a beauty and it must be included in the BF trunk asap
My gut feeling is that we’ll be getting all sorts of UI cleanup and visual goodies soon. So many things like this are on the To Do list. The emphasis so far has just been getting Blender as stable as possible. We’ll soon see a nicer-looking UI and even the floating transparent panels will probably come back one day.
For me, I’ll wait to see if my multi-axis floor grid patch gets approved. If it does I’ll see if I can add a transparency option to it, rather than treat them as separate things. At first I wondered if there was any utility in having a a line grid on in one direction and also a translucent wall in another, but I haven’t found any. It would be simpler just to add translucency as an option to the grid floors.
Harley
awesome, in trunk please!!!
when it comes to visual tweaks, PLEASE look into having an alpha option for wireframes, when in edit mode. imo the best visual tweak blender could get. love these changes as well, always wanted a gradient background.
PS. the linear gradient could be exchanged for a large radial gradient with center in the lower part of the screen. this would give a vignette feel. thanks!
yo. this is great. love the gradient thing. i saw it in maya 2011 and was envious. fantastic. love it. and why is the bge disabled?
+1 to have this in the trunk.
The background gradient may be trivial to some, but for me I love it in other apps and would like to see it added to blender.
I think the grid floors could potentially come in handy.
Would love a 64bit linux build.
Great work.
@iKLsR,
If you were using my build, I didn’t even notice that I had the BGE flag set to false when I was building. I’ve re-uploaded my build with this up on graphicall for Win64, this time WITH BGE enabled!
Download here: http://graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1907
Just gave this a whirl, very impressive, with very little performance hit. my only real gripe, is that in solid mode the grids are behind the object not through it. This would be very usful to many people, i’ll discuss with ton and the others about this and hopfully will get this commited
Just gave this a whirl, very impressive
Thanks Michael!
my only real gripe, is that in solid mode the grids are behind the object not through it
You could you describe a bit better what you see and how you would like to see it differently? I’m not quite sure what you mean.
This would be very useful to many people
which part? A patch for the multi-dimensional grids are in the tracker. The gradient background is just an easy silly thing, but its been proposed many times before without a lot of interest.
As for the translucent floors, I personally like it as an option. But I haven’t found any good reason to enable them separately from the grid lines, though, so I’d be tempted to just treat the two as one and the same. Enable a grid floor and optionally adjust transparency, not two different things to enable.
Harley
- when in editmode the grid is always behind the object not through it like in object mode.
- All the parts are useful, and since they are disabled by default, it would be fine for older users who don’t need or want them
- Yes it would be good to merge some options.
it still needs alittle bit of polish here and there, i think there is a real chance of this stuff getting commited