Hi. I have worked with Max and blender for some time now and have some constructive criticisms on blender and some questions that I’m hoping some people know the answers to. This really is a take of the modding tools in both programs and I have found that Max is modeling tools are superior to quiet a few programs including blender. As such it’s something I always wonted to replicate inside blender with the same work flow but found it quite difficult because there are quite a few tools that I know of in Max that Blender could benefit from greatly. Also I never found the workarounds for allot of these things and was wondering if anyone here knows what I’m talking about and has found the workaround in blender and is willing to share. So I’ll talk about the tools I find that are great in Max that should be given some consideration in Blender or if there is a known work around that I have not discovered that someone would be willing to show me. I’ll start with the tools I think blender would greatly improve by and do not change much about blender in general.
First there is Edge Constants. This handy tool allows the user to move vertexes or edges without changing the shape of the geometry. What it dose is makes the Edges/vertexes constrained to the edges that are connected to it allowing the Edges/Vertexes to slide along the faces that are connected to them. This is great when you made a mistake and would like to rearrange the Vertex or Edges but would like to keep the general topology the same.
Duplicating/Extruding. In Max when you duplicate an object or extrude a face Max ask you how many time you would like to duplicate or extrude and if you put in a value more then one it will do the same action that many times over. This includes placing the object or extruded face the same distance away from the second object/Face as the second is from the first. This is a great tool indeed and greatly decreases the time it takes to do some actions. For example if your making a cannon on a ship and you have each port hole equilateral distance you only need to duplicate the cannon once and change the value to match the number of port holes. This could be included as a values next to the Extrude function in the mesh tools panel instead of a pop up like in max.
Smoothing groups are something that I have always been surprised that they where not included in blender. There seems to be only 2 smoothing groups. Smooth and not smooth with no ability to adjust weather one set of smooth faces is smooth with another set of smooth faces, I think most of us know how useful something like this could be. It allows one to crease edges without needing to apply the subsurf modifier.
Manipulation of object centers seems to be somewhat lacking, Only in that one cannot grab the objects center and place it where they wish.
Also I think there is a way to do this already but I have not discovered it yet. What I would like to know is how to put one object on another. That is to say a tool in witch you select one face of one object and attach it to another face on another object. This I have found is a vary useful tool.
That ends the section on the stuff I believe most people would find welcome tools to blender that don’t change blender much if at all. Now it’s time for more controversial stuff.
Most of the next set of tools are things that have to do with using Ngons and as such it really gets down to the matter of if blender wants to use Ngons or not. I think it should with maybe the ability to turn it off for users who dislike Ngons or would like to see the real geometry of there mesh.
The knife tool is one of the worst knife tools I have worked with in any 3d application. There seems to be a major lake of usability when dealing with this tool. In Max you can cut a mesh up whatever way you would like. It allows you to cut each face from edge to edge or vertex to vertex. Because there is no support for Ngons in blender this is not allowed and as such the knife tool suffers greatly from this.
Cutting holes in geometry is something that we all need to do from time to time and it would be much easier if blender allowed us to do that and then rearrange the geometry after it has been done to be more efficient. Rather then making us spend hours bleeding over some geometry that would take 5 seconds to fix in max.
A layer manager would be nice.
It would be nice if we could deal with some faces as one. Example would be the tops of cylinders, I would much rather deal with the tops of cylinders as one face rather then several. This is also a good example of having an ability to turn Ngons on and off.
It would also be cool to have snapping on all the time. This would help mappers who use blender.
If you have any thoughts, workarounds, or would like to add to the list please do so.