There’s a bug that makes blender hard to use for me. Basically, if you use “left select”, then you can’t select bones while in weight painting, and weight painting is severely limited. I see people complaining about this bug starting around the year 2010.
Needless to say, if it hasn’t been fixed in 7 years, it’s doubtful it will be fixed.
So, Is there a “bounty” system? Where we can “vote with our pocketbook”?
So perhaps us “left selectors” can say “Hey, if you fix this bug, you get this bounty!”.
Was also thinking about “BOUNTIES” the other day. Would be awesome to know about developers, programmers… willing to tackle an opportunity
Strangely, no site that i know of. Maybe righclickselect would/could host it?
I have been using ‘left select’ from the beginning, and selecting bone in weight mode does work to me.
I have searched in preferences for some changes I could have made at the time but I found nothing related, so I assume that it should work by default.
Patches from external developers can be difficult to be integrate into the code base. There are hundreds of patches right now that haven’t been accepted to the codebase. There are lots of great reasons why code doesn’t get accepted, and it is an important feature of maintaining a healthy codebase to reject inappropriate code, so it’s gonna happen sometimes. Unfortunately, those great reasons aren’t always visible from the user side, so code that seemingly works great may be completely unacceptable to the developers. A lot of users can’t see or understand why “working” code doesn’t get accepted and they get mad.
Now imagine that you spent $1000 to get this “working” code written up. That adds a whole new layer of frustration at the external developer for failing to deliver, and at the BI for blocking paid for code.
In the meantime, may I suggest learning to use right click select as an immediate bugfix to your problem? It turns out separating action from selection is important sometimes, and blender was built around this interaction paradigm.
For me, Left-click paints weights, regardless of if I click on a bone or not (unless I’m in right-click select mode), and selecting the bone in the outliner causes the armature to be selected and the mesh deselected, so I can’t choose them that way either. I went in to the settings, and told it to paint weights with the right button, and then it neither selected bones nor did it paint weights. So I’m at a loss.
There’s a website called Bountysource and Campbell set up an inofficial team ages ago. I don’t think anything ever came of it, something like this would need to get traction.
Even then, Blender has many problems that make it poor candidate for external development. There’s no real API, the codebase is monolithic, there is often no way to extend the program without patching it. Without a stable API, patches will inevitably break. This requires ongoing maintenance.
The BF is not thrilled about the bounty idea for a number of reasons. If you really want to spend your money on helping Blender’s development, your best and safest bet is to sign up for a monthly contribution to the development fund.
The advantages there are numerous
It helps the BF hire developers on paid contracts (meaning they stick around)
It funds projects backed by the BF (meaning a much higher chance of getting into master)
The developers hired tend to have more experience with Blender than a random person wanting to take on a challenge for money (no need to add weeks of learning time)
It increases resources for patch review and bugfixing (meaning a more stable and workable Blender with more features and tools).
More eyes on the code often means the code is higher quality (as areas get discussed more thoroughly and there’s more time to remove hacks and keep things clean).
The development fund’s donation levels start as low as 5 Euros a month (Which for Europeans is pretty cheap, it’s also a good deal for Americans at least if you live in a different country, especially when you consider that the US Dollar has strengthened).
Sure - that helps blender in general get better. But if there’s a specific bug that I care about, that’s been around for 7 years, I doubt that will motivate anyone to fix it.
I get everyone’s point though. It’s hard to work on, hard to pull in external developers work, and might even be pointless if the code doesn’t get accepted.
Maybe there’s a different way?
Maybe instead of a generic bounty, then a list of features/bugs that are outstanding, and we could influence the stack rank of said items by donating toward the ones we all want the most. I’m not about to drop a ton of money on Blender, but this sort of thing could be a type of crowd-funding.
I too have been using Leftclick select for as long as I can remember it not degrading workflow. And despite not being a hardcore Blender user -since I use it most as an aiding tool where 3dsmax is weak- these days I find LeftClick select doesn’t lack anything from Righclick.
So as already mentioned, you can select Bones with Ctrl+Click (single) or Shift+Click (multiple) while weight painting. Also, just like with Rightclick, for that to work properly you have to have armature in pose mode as Paolo said above. And when Leftclick is used, Shift+Rightclick pops the menu for the bone weight list. To move/rotate/scale bones you can just press the usual G/R/S as usual, while with Rightclick you could just click and drag. And Shift+Leftclick on the mesh (not the bones) while painting weights allows to overlay the bones on top of the mesh, which can be helpful to select the bones.
