Hey all, I do a lot of work with fine measurements and even if I wanted to use the metric system, most people send me measurements in imperial so its just easier to work with imperial measurements.
I realize there is an “imperial” setting that allows me to set the Blender Units to Inches, Feet, Yards, etc… but it doesn’t go any smaller than inches and I NEED that!
I have seen a lot of people ask how to customize the grid and I think my idea would resolve this issue for people once and for all!
A fully customizable grid system (not the grid floor but the grid that you snap to) in the User Preferences (or under “scene” settings):
I don’t know how many levels this should have but I think it would be amazing if we had this! I could set inches to be divided into 16ths, 32nds, 64ths… you get the idea!
Sometimes I think we should just remove both the “None/Metric/Imperial” switch and the numerical “scale”. Replace them both with a dropdown list of “scale presets”. Each scale preset containing the maximum scale unit, size of blender units, any subunits and their relationship, and information about grid displays.
Right now it isn’t entirely obvious that selecting “Metric” and scale 1 means that one blender unit equals one metre (it could very well be 1 cm or 1 km). Even when you know that one blender unit equals one meter at scale 1, it isn’t entirely obvious what to change the scale to if you want a blender unit to be one centimeter (0.01 or 100).
Depending on the scale you might want to see differing subunits. And different people might want different subunits from each other, and people might disagree on grid markings.
So a “scale preset” could solve all these issues. Select “Kilometres” and you will see simple numbers in parts of km, like 1200.5678km. Select “Kilometre with metres” and it should show “1200km 56.78m”
We could have, if we wanted, “Feet”, “Feet with inches”, “Feet with inches 1/64” and “Feet with inches thou”, each with different method of unit and grid display.
On a slightly related issue:
Does anyone else get annoyed by the fact that blender doesn’t preserve “zoom units”, whenever you’re in perspective or a non-(front/side/top view)? (i’m not sure exactly what it’s called, but whenever you zoom in in a front/top/side view in orthogonal mode you get smaller units when you zoom in)
For example, in this image all I did between the two views was rotate slightly, but as you can see it changed the size of the snapping grid.
I run into this all the time. I zoom in and find out I want to move a vertex about 3cm to the left, but can’t see it from whatever top/front/side view I’m in, so I rotate the view, but then the increments on the snap go back to being huge (1 meter or so).
don’t forget that if you change the scale in world
you cannot rechange it after and have the proper dimensions!
you need to manually re scale all your objects!
so i think you talking about grid scale
and unit measures in N panel i guess
and i would like to see something better allowing for the imperial system to work with inches and fractions of inches
like 1/2 1/4 1/8 ----- 1/128 1/256
but for metric also using mm CM DM HM KM
I’d prefer a drop-down selection myself with one of the options being a “powers of two” setting - incredibly useful for game asset modelling, texturing, and level design.
I wish I could say it was my idea, but I got it from all the videos I’ve watched over the years describing how one does exactly that (setup a “powers of two” grid) in other software packages for the purposes of appropriately sizing models and projecting a repeating texture onto them that doesn’t need to be stretched or waste texture space to cover exactly.
It’s another one of those things I have on my list for bringing up/developing when Blender Foundation decides to focus on game asset development in some hypothetical future
But in this collective we call Blender development everyone works on whatever they want to. So the focus is a very nebulous thing, something like the aggregate direction of everyone working independently. If you do develop game asset functionality then that is, in a small way, changing the focus toward that direction and making your hypothetical future a bit more real.
