My main peeve when working in Blender is the INFURIATINGLY slow selection. Even with a moderately medium poly scene selecting objects and points in the viewport becomes unbearably slow, e.g. it can take up to 6 seconds to select objects with a 500k object.
Selecting in the outliner is immediate and fast, but with more complex scenes it can be just as slow to find the object in question.
With more complex scenes (tens of million polys) it can take up to 40 seconds or more to select objects. Blender will lock up during these times.
Here’s my hardware: core i7 [email protected], 12gb ram, ATI 5870 1GB, Win7, Revodrive 240gb. The machine is rock solid. This is no driver issue. Identical behaviour in Vista. Even with modded (and working) firegl v8800 drivers the same selection issue persisted.
I’ve used glintercept (http://code.google.com/p/glintercept/) to check which opengl method Blender uses for selecting vertices and objects. It seems to utilize the gl_select method. Since I have been struggling with this issue for a year now, I have been reading up on this. I am no opengl coder, but gl_select is supposedly an incredibly slow method for selection, and more or less deprecated. There exist far more efficient methods to resolve selection in opengl.
Now that I am working with very complex objects (modeling age of sail ship), I am seriously considering giving up on it. I do not encounter this issue in Cinema4d (v8.5) or Lightwave. Maybe this is Blender and ATI related - I don’t care. My other 3d apps are unaffected. So Blender’s selection algorithms are faulty, and can be improved.
Please check:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2011-June/012668.html
Someone already worked on resolving this (and only spent a couple of hours on it), initially reducing selection times from 30secs to about a second. SO IT CAN BE DONE.
I am surprised to find that no-one seems to care about this. Honestly, I am baffled that something seemingly as simple to fix as this selection bug (and yes, it IS a bug in my view) is still unresolved, even after the re-write of 2.5.
The entire workflow revolves around selecting objects - if this basic core functionality is broken, the rest crashes down like a house of cards. IT IS UNWORKABLE for me at the moment. Anything over a couple of 100k’s is utterly infuriating. At 3.5 million polys it takes 15 seconds to select an object.
This is a heart-felt plea from an enthusiastic Blender user:
Please, PLEASE OH PLEASE fix this behaviour / code. I am no opengl coder, otherwise I would have attempted to fix it ages ago. Someone, ANYONE out there with some opengl coding experience: please address this.