Andy, I get that everyone uses blender different. But my point of “you shouldn’t be doing UNDO 200+ times”, went directly to the OP opening with “I like teaching blender to my friends”. The title of thread, also directly focusing on “teaching blender”.
Hoping to rely on 256 undos is not a thing that should be taught.
To be fair, that really sounds like a case of saving a temp file or next version and doing whatever you want, rather then using 200+ undo steps.
And if it doesn’t work out, just load up the previous file and delete the temp one.
Lets face it, in most cases Blender files aren’t usually that large (especially if saved as compressed, can’t think of a reason not to) and storage shouldn’t be that tight that it matters.
Blender did have a different undo system at one point (v2.79, at least): No matter how far you went in Edit Mode, you could go back to Object Mode and hit undo a single time to return to the state of the mesh before you entered Edit Mode. I loved this behavior.
With the new system you need to duplicate the object or save a new file to take a snapshot, which is…safer, I guess, but not as convenient.
To be honest, no, I don’t assume that everyone is always happy, rested and perfectly concentrated when working. I am not. I have my issues and my stress and pressure and lack of sleep and what not as well when working sometimes. It’s even more important to be mindful of what I do then. And I am not saying the problems like this are not real. Just that the solution is not inside the computer then, because the problem is not. Solution is in the workflow, not the software. And it’s awesome, because if you manage to solve it and get used to working smart then it doesn’t matter if you work in Blender, 3ds Max or Maya or even Notepad, it works everywhere all the time, no matter if you are under pressure, depressed, tired or in a rush. Computer can just help a tiny little bit with it. I have my undo steps set to 64, I thought that’s a lot… I also usually use just 10-15 steps at most and that’s just in case. It’s not a good plan to rely on that.
I had a boss who tried to solve lack of planning and systemic workflow and general absent-mindedness with software. It was a nightmare for the whole team because it just doesn’t work. There are things that you have to think about and be on top of yourself. There are no full working software solutions for that. I think it’s a mistake in logic to expect that.
Huh, I always worked destructivelly. When I need to test several options I just duplicate the object and keep it on a hidden view layer so I have the original. This has the advantage that I can switch layers and compare the before/after.
I personally lost stuff a few times with this system. Never could wrap my head around it. The undo stack being non-linear and mode-dependent like this fucks with my brain. It’s still there, btw, you have to uncheck “global undo” (I think?)
Yeah, or you could do that, gets a little messy if its a fully rigged, etc character and you are messing around with a few bits, re-generating the rig and all that.
Yes, I use incremental saving for this, not the undo stack
I have tried unchecking ‘Global Undo’ in the past to see what it did, and it seems to mainly just jumble the undo sequence and make it unreliable. It even still jumps between modes, but with the added ‘benefit’ that now you can undo stuff that hasn’t happened yet and screw up your mesh.
In v3.6 there are still occasional issues even with ‘Global Undo’ checked - multiple actions will randomly get lumped together as a single step, or something will reset rather than return to a previous state. I hope this has been fixed in more recent versions.
The new global action sequence is conceptually much simpler and probably more aligned to the behavior of other software, so I can see why people might prefer it.
I don’t often need a big undo stack in blender, though that may be a result of getting used to how many undos I have to work with.
Autocad has an unlimited undo stack, and sometimes I do just hold ctrl z to turn back time. it works pretty good, 99% of the time, but 1% of the time, it will just crash. So it adds a fun level of danger to the workflow.
Gotta get your thrills somehow. I like to work with autosave disabled on a really windy day when the lights are flickering!
I like to work on my personal coding projects without git too.