Blender - Grab enhancements

Mechanical Blender by Mauge
The patch adds the cursor as Snap Element, and “Manual” on Snap Target, and also “manual” as pivot point.
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I think it’s great!!!

this is simply amazing!
So glad somebody is working on basic tools with such great ideas.

Nice functionality. Don’t call it Mechanical Blender though or Ton will break out his ‘Blender is for artists!’ response and spend 10 years playing ignorant over it… :no:

Yeah its true I am still smarting over wireframes perpetually lost in action somewhere in cyberspace. :mad:

Absolute grid snapping can be considered a more ‘mechanical’ feature and it’s in version 2.76.

Basically, the most common issue that delays these workflow patches is keymap limitations (and how to make them work with all possible key combinations). Johnathon W of CGcookie and this forum is supposed to get the keymap overhauled sooner or later, but I haven’t even seen him around these parts much in recent months.

Snapping like in 3ds Max with even more functionality. Awesome, that´s one thing I´ve missed in Blender quite a lot.

If I can comment, on thins that come to my mind when I see this more things that I missed for years -

midpoint snapping(edge-face)

multiple snapping types at once(rather than only one, like cursor, edge, vert, face, - ability to have these together)

cursor snapping - having to go to the menu is long, snapping lnteractively like this would be more logical for it too (if we actually need a cursor at all after these changes)

Really really good!I like the philosophy of these tools. And doesn’t seems to interfeer with usual transformation methods. If you want to grab the object with the manipoulator or to type the distance o the rotation, you can do as always, but if you want to define some reference points just press a key and you are done. Excelent!

Right on! Keep it up.

Love it! Fusion 360 has a point to point move and that is terrific!

Now what I really would love is the ability in edit or object mode to move and snap the object pivot/origin point.

In Alias and Maya you can select and drag it - only in Blender you have to use the set origin command with placing
in edit mode the 3D courser to a vertex … grrr

Great, UI basics that had been discussed for a few years ago and rejected w/comments like:’ Blender was not intended to be a CAD tool’ ) finally got through and found understanding. )))

Whilst I agree that it should be easier to move the origin (the object mode limitation is very weird… it should be easy to work around that in code), I really think it’s the 3d cursor that needs the love. It’s called a 3d cursor, but it’s completely 2d in its operation. It’s very hard to move it around because of the way it works (no dragging for example), and it’s given a whole mouse button all to itself. Whilst the concept is very useful, I think the implementation could be greatly improved so that it could be more easily moved around, precisely snapped (verts, edges, midpoints etc.) and aligned. Since it is basically used as a temporary origin point most of the time, I’d like to see it be a more effective one :smiley: The 3d cursor could also support rotation so we could use it instead of the slightly clunky custom orientations.

Back on topic though, these snapping tools are excellent, and I hope they make master!

probably not, but I have to say I thought it would go to official immediately, since it is a really great improvement, something ppl are waiting for for years.

Yeah I think they had once upon a time a good idea but then never revised or updated it!

Yeah this should definitely be merged in to the official blender branch as fast as possible.

wow, how did I miss this news!!?

cool stuff.

So this is a custom Blender build and not an add-on?

Any news about this?

It’s a separate build, and for some reason I thought it was going in 2.77, but it doesn’t appear to be :confused:

I wonder if there is any chance that they will land in master one day? These tools look to really streamline precise object manipulation (no faffing around with the 3d cursor and multiple snap menus) so I’d love to know if the Blender devs are looking at it for 2.8 or an earlier release. In fact, I wonder if there is a list of addons/separate branches and forks that the BF are looking at taking work from or outright merging with master. I heard they were interested in working with the PBR viewport branch developer.

I tried to be included, but they said to wait until 2.8 and try to integrate it on the work about custom widgets.

We continued the development adding dimensions on a fork, more info on http://mechanicalblender.org