Blender 2.59 - WOW, what progress!! HUZZAH! but...

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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:slight_smile:

howdy everybody.

i use maya at work and do most of my modeling in lightwave and zbrush so i don’t get a chance to keep up with blender but i am a blender booster and fan and like to peek in on the new versions every now and then.

some things that struck me about the newest version:

  • as soon as i opened it up, i cheered because moving the mouse did not remove that opening pop up dialog! i always felt one of the issues with blender was that even though it was quite stable and solid, it FELT unstable because you ended up repeatedly DOING THINGS YOU DID NOT INTEND. in the previous versions of blender, even the slightest mouse movement as you started the program got rid of the splash page and left a bad first impression. SOLVED!

  • no more separate CONSOLE WINDOW!!! awesome! i hated the fact that in previous versions, if i closed the console, it closed the app and unlike other parts of the blender dialog, there was no “are you sure”, it just kicked me out. again, this added to the feeling of instability and doing things inadvertently. anyway, solved.

yay! the app feels really solid and “mature” now and i love it. i think the only thing i would ask for is changing the representations of the camera and the lights… i know it’s minimalist and elegant in its way but it does evoke a feeling of mid 90s command like rendering. come on blender, all the other apps have somwhat prettified representations for the cam and lights… and with the lights, they are even functionally useful in distinguishing between types. appearances matter… so can’t we have a refresh of this?

and i’m still having trouble with customizing the interface the way i like it and i’m pretty sure that as it is now it is unsolvable - it involves mousing:

  • in preferences, when i set the big option button to LEFT MOUSE SELECT vs. RIGHT MOUSE SELECT, this does NOT propagate this change in “philosophy” throughout the entire gui.

so even though i can LMB select in the 3d windows now, i still need to drag in the timeline with the RMB and there seems to be no way to remap that function in the timeline.

i’ve glanced over the thought behind the input refresh but it seems like with this LMB, RMB thing, you guys didn’t go far enough. for the user, if we select LMB SELECT, this needs to propagate to EVERY INSTANCE in which the RMB is preferred over the LMB.

it would be ok if we could still remap later in the individual windows but you CAN’T do that now.

as i say, i’m a HUUUUUGE fan of blender. and i’d love to be able to use its truly jaw dropping features at work and setup workstations with blender. but i can’t do it if blender doesn’t bend to me (and others familiar with other apps, namely maya) and we need to bend to it.

and i understand that blender has no desire to become a different app but imo, it will find the greatest infiltration into the market if blender literally BLENDS… can be a chameleon and be setup to anyone’s specific taste and workstyle.

with the new inputs refresh, it’s close. but still no cigar.

this customizability applies for blender’s Z-UP world space as well… there really does need to be a way to change it to Y-UP… and i can’t imagine that it would be difficult programmatically to implement this option. am i wrong?

anyhoo, awesome progress! i’m disappointed that it’s still not at a point where i can start using it regularly but please let me know if these issues get addressed or are in the works now. otherwise, i’ll just check back periodically.

thanks much and rock on.

jin

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I think there are navigation Presets you can change to maya.

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How much work is being done on those maya presets? The last time i looked, it did a lot of nice things, but was inconsistent throught the ui and broke most of the shortcuts and popup menus.

Oh, and while i agree with most of this post, ive already accepted defeat on the subject of y or z up. Apparently, that function is buried deep in the core and would probably require another massive refactor to change, so ive learned to live with it.

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so even though i can LMB select in the 3d windows now, i still need to drag in the timeline with the RMB and there seems to be no way to remap that function in the timeline.

I reported this as a bug recently and the response was:

While clearly not optimal, ultimately this leads to a hotkey clash in the animation editors (timeline drag vs select…

here is the report if you want to chime in http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=28300&group_id=9

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yay! the app feels really solid and “mature” now and i love it. i think the only thing i would ask for is changing the representations of the camera and the lights… i know it’s minimalist and elegant in its way but it does evoke a feeling of mid 90s command like rendering. come on blender, all the other apps have somwhat prettified representations for the cam and lights… and with the lights, they are even functionally useful in distinguishing between types. appearances matter… so can’t we have a refresh of this?

Good lord, you actually like Maya’s camera that looks sort of like a real camera? You know it’s pointless, right? It adds absolutely nothing to the interface except clutter.

If anything, it’s the camera objects in OTHER apps that are outdated. They’re modeled after those reel-to-reel film cameras that nobody uses anymore, only shittier.

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The keymap system is extremely flexible… you can easily change items per editor.
The system is missing warning the user about other things mapped to keys though…

The actual keymaps are something Ton wants looked at and to offer a set for different use cases.

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Double post… oops

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  • as soon as i opened it up, i cheered because moving the mouse did not remove that opening pop up dialog! i always felt one of the issues with blender was that even though it was quite stable and solid, it FELT unstable because you ended up repeatedly DOING THINGS YOU DID NOT INTEND. in the previous versions of blender, even the slightest mouse movement as you started the program got rid of the splash page and left a bad first impression. SOLVED!

Well, they actually added some important functionality to the splash, so hiding it by mouse movement would be freakin ridiculous.
In the previous versions, the splash was nothing more then an Image showing the version - nothing important…

  • no more separate CONSOLE WINDOW!!! awesome!

I’m glad they finnaly did it as-well. This should have been done ages ago.
Good part is, you can get it back in “Help/Show system console” if you need it.

and i’m still having trouble with customizing the interface the way i like it and i’m pretty sure that as it is now it is unsolvable - it involves mousing:

It is solvable.
All you have to do is go to imput and search through all the hotkeys. If you find something that says “Right mouse”, change it to “left mouse” and everything that says “Left mouse”, change to “Right mouse”. Might take some time… Then just save your settings as default and you’re done.
I find the right click select idea the most ridiculous design idea in blender there is.
It’s basically “Just because”, without any real benefits or reason.

this customizability applies for blender’s Z-UP world space as well… there really does need to be a way to change it to Y-UP… and i can’t imagine that it would be difficult programmatically to implement this option. am i wrong?

That is true, this option is missing.
Blender shouldn’t limit anyone, that’s bad design.

i’m disappointed that it’s still not at a point where i can start using it regularly

Why not? These tiny tiny issues?

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  • in preferences, when i set the big option button to LEFT MOUSE SELECT vs. RIGHT MOUSE SELECT, this does NOT propagate this change in “philosophy” throughout the entire gui.

In a paint mode, select and paint can not have same shortcut.
So there are some shortcuts in the keymap which refers to Left/Right mouse button and others to Select/Action Mouse button.

The big button philosophy in the preferences is about which one is the Select button and which one is the Action button.
If you find a setting that is not influenced by that switch; you can precise Select or Action button in keymap.

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Is it possible to save a keymep as a file that can be applied elsewhere? Like, can keymaps be saved independantly of the rest of the interface settings? I’m a little fuzzy on how that works.

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yes. they get saved in the <user settings/local config>/2.59/scripts/presets/keyconfig as a py script so are very portable.

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@fahr, it is stored in your startup.blend.
If you open this file elsewhere, all settings “keys” are there.

Cheers, mib.

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mib2berlin, that too!
if you “save defaults” then it gets saved to startup.blend

I was talking about when you “export key config”… that way it’ll show up on the pulldown in the splash screen… and whichever is the active keyconfig gets saved in teh startup blend as default.

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  	 				this customizability applies for blender's Z-UP world space as  well... there really does need to be a way to change it to Y-UP... and i  can't imagine that it would be difficult programmatically to implement  this option. am i wrong?

3d content creation requires CONSISTENCY. I can think of nothing that would cause more confusion, cursing, and loss of productivity than the addition of a “switch global up axes” feature.

Artists working as a team need to have already difficult discussions involving XYZ coordinates. If you enable everyone to choose their own axis, you turn those conversations into Abbott and Costello arguments.

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“export key config”…

Ah, never used this, since when it is in 2.57? :o

Cheers

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Max and maya have this… it doesn’t really cause much harm… most projects adopt one or the other, so a team member is never confused.

It did give me problems with the fbx format and maya in the past on a “y up” project… blender 2.49 exporter and maya importer worked seamlessly to translate to the right “up”, but all my objects had a very hidden rotation on the axis system that took ages to track down… had to do all sorts of voodoo in maya to “clean” that out…

Had blender allowed an axis switch then I could have worked with the projects up axis and eliminated that problem…

That said, I believe the 2.5x fbx exporter is much improved in that area… haven’t tested it on a live project yet though!

I guess something like this done properly would touch a LOT of places in the code, and is a lesser priority as it only really affects interoperability and that can be addressed on export/import…

The rest is just personal comfort from habit… easy to adjust!

I do wonder how far you could get by just changing the “box view” and rotation controls so that top becomes front, bottom back etc and rotation “up” axis changes to y up…

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Regarding different Up Axis, yes- this could be added easy, and with some more work you could make sure BGE supports gravity… fluid and all physics would also do gravity using the configurable up axis.

But I don’t see what we gain from this really. its not like the app works better because up can be made to another axis, most importers/exporters support selecting the up & forward axis now so its not an issue for IO. So this only means blend files you link in can have different up’s defined (ok they can already have different scale used. maybe different up is ok too, how hard is it to rotate after appending, unless its many animated objects)

So even though it could be supported, I think we mainly get increased incompatibility between blend files by adding this.

Incedentally, would be interested how many other apps have configurable up axis (which effects physics etc too).

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Maya, Modo, supports changing the Z-up to Y-up settings, and by default nowadays AFAIK are Y-up. Softimage, C4D, Houdini are also Y-up, but doesn’t support changing it. Lightwave is Y-up also AFAIK, 3DS MAX is Z-up. And Blender is also Z-up.

For people coming from other apps that’s not 3DS max or people having to deal with established pipelines this is one of the first things that disorient and quite FAST. People coming from 3DS doesn’t notice the difference, but maybe adding the possibility of change it would be cool, at least for modelers.

Warning: The following is an uninformed idea, so before you throw me these tomatoes be warned of that:
But since can be problematic for other things, maybe we should ask the bmesh guys to do this?? This because bmesh .blend files are kind of backward incompatible anyways, so probably is best to ask them if that is possible or not, and leave trunk for now untouched. Bmesh will bring big changes anyways and this could be one of these.Maybe Campbell/howardt/Joe can answer that.

Regards

J.

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coming a CNC machining background most vertical mills were Z up, and horizontal mills were y up.
the z effects the drill/tool depth offset on both machines.

on a vertical Mill X would be left and right, Y would be forward and back, Z tool up/down.

Horizontal Mill Y up/down, X left right, Z tool offset depth in out…

(basically X is the same on both machines also, the bed transverse which is usually a the longest movement of travel)

it, can be a little confusing sometimes…
and a program for the wrong axis can be bad, and destroy lots of expensive equipment.

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Has anyone else noticed that the OP never returned to the thread? It doesn’t appear he was soliciting opinions, just stating his and moving on…