Few measuring, length and edge questions

Instead of opening a bunch of topics, I’ll ask a few questions here.

  1. (How) can I see edges of other objects (like when viewing in edit mode) if I am in edit mode in a different object? Wireframe mode does this, except that it also shows you all edges, including those that are behind walls,etc. and it doesn’t show you faces, I want everything to remain the way it is when editing an object in material or texture mode, but to see edges on other objects as well, not just the one I’m working on.

  2. Can I enable length info automatically, without having to go to edit mode and then find “length” every time I create a new object? Also, can I have length shown on neighboring objects as well, not just the one I’m editing currently?

  3. If I have a house, backyard or whatever and want to quickly measure from one end to the other, but the floor/terrain is not a single polygon, then what’s the quickest way? Back in Sketchup I just took a line tool and drew a line between two vertices. While writing this I remembered that there’s an addon in Blender also called Line tool that does this and it shows length (unlike some-knife I know), but perhaps there’s another measuring tool or something?

Hey; Measure-it add-on, not sure if it works in current blender version, but it does in 2.76

in grease pencil tab in tool panel
there is the protractor tool to measure

happy bl

What about the first two questions, does anyone know?

Q1 don’t know if there is a way in blender

Q2 in bl normal no edges L shown

but there are some scripts that might show edges length or other things like that

but I would not use this for a lot of objects in a scene anyway
not practical

happy bl

  1. Look for the display options in object properties, check wire.

  2. I believe there’s no way to have it turned on by default, so I guess you’d need a script.

bpy.data.meshes[meshName].show_extra_edge_length = not bpy.data.meshes[meshName].show_extra_edge_length

That toggles it on and off. So it’s nothing all that special, just messing with bools. Showing it on all objects even outside of edit mode? Not sure, but I could take a crack at it if you reaaaaaaally need it.

For what it is worth, if you have edge display turned on with another object, and you are in edit mode on the current one. Simply ctl select that object and it will highlight. Of course there are some tools that take advantage of this - such as hooks. But for most modeling tasks it won’t matter what is selected outside.