mini improvement suggestions

Support Basics & Interface
1

i thought i start a feature suggestion thread. :o

but this thread is only for collecting ideas for small improvements or fixing little annoyances that probably even beginner blender coders could work on.

did i miss something and there is a better place for this?

anyways… i start with these three:

  • why is the number of grid stages limited? if i use blender units as meters and zoom in, the maximum grid size seems to be 1 cm. why can’t there be more grid stages for millimeters or tenths of a mm? i know the unit presets but even they have limits that sometimes are cumbersome with models that are big and have very fine details at the same time. couldn’t this be more user configurable?
  • in object mode we have the “dimensions” input box in the transform properties panel. often it would be helpful if the same could be done in edit mode with the current selection. for example i have some vertices selected and then i could scale them to a bounding box of 10,5,2 or something.
  • a “tauten vertices” tool. you select some vertices and then you can tauten them between the first and last selected one. the plane this happens in should be selectable (xy, zx, zy, normal to the line). see attached image.

taut.jpg900×1200 48.2 KB

what do you think?

2

I think I can answer the first question. I think the type of number representation Blender users (floating point) does not lend itself for unlimited precision zooming. A fundamental problem with floating point representation for a cartesian system is that while it is fairly good at attaining very small scales, it only does so when very near the origin. If you move a million units away from the origin, the minimum representable step can be huge.
I was once playing with a flight simulator that used floating point numbers for terrain, and if you flew far off the theater of operation the plane would jump up or down or to the sides by bigger and bigger steps, due to lack of precision.
So, I’m not a Blender developer, but my guess would be that limits in the grid system are there to try and steer you away from editing geometry that pushes the limits of representation too hard.

3

I have one. Removing material slots while in edit mode should work. There is no reason for it not to work, is there?