Millimeters always displaying as centimters

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi, I am using blender for architecture and therefore always need to work in mm. I have followed the guidance on this forum and am now able to input values as mm. However, the mesh display > edge info: length is still in cm, and the translate values are still given in cm - see attached screenshot. Is this a bug or have I missed a setting somewhere?

What I have changed so far:
Scene properties tab > scene units - millimeters, length - metric, unit scale - 0.001
Numerics window > view > change camera clip end value to large enough value
I have also changed the grid scale to 112.5 so that when I am drawing walls I can snap to brick dimensions (225 whole brick 112.5 half brick), but I understand this doesn’t affect the units, only the snap increment.

I am using blender 2.78c on ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Many thanks for your help,

Ben

mm-display-problem.png1535×876 182 KB

2

Object mode, select the object, ctrl+A -> scale.

Edit: hmm, perhaps you didn’t mean the measurement is wrong, just that it shows centimeters. Quite sure there’s no way to change that.

“Hi, I am using blender for architecture and therefore always need to work in mm.”

No you don’t. You can work in toaster units if you want, as long as the final has correct dimensions in real world units.

3

Yes that’s right - real world dimensions are correct it just shows up in the wrong format.

For context - the entire construction industry of Europe thinks in mm. I need to show the carpenters (who receive all drawings in mm) this project so they can make it. It would be great to save a screenshot of my project with the edge lengths displayed in mm for them to look at. And I am also in the process of convincing my boss that blender is a better alternative to sketchup. If I can’t do something as simple as displaying dimensions in mm for our guys in the workshop, then I will get comments such as ‘might as well just use sketchup’, which make me die inside!

I welcome any comments which can confirm whether this is a bug or not, or any other workarounds!
Thanks again,
Ben

4

MeasureIT addon allows to add measurements and set units and decimals

screen.png1920×1004 190 KB

Didn’t find any bug reports about the units in edge length display on the blender bug tracker, confirmed or otherwise, so not a bug.

5

Thanks JA12. MeasureIT seems pretty good having spent about half an hour getting to know it!

I will still submit a bug report though. If people want to see dimensions displayed in cm in the viewport, then they should set the dimensions to… cm! If people want to see dimensions displayed in mm in the viewport, then that should be an option. We shouldn’t be using add ons to correct the default behaviour of blender.

Cheers,
Ben

6

already been discussed and not done
so I doubt this will be done right now
Devs got too much work for 2.8!

There is someone doing a CAD SVN version for blender so this might be included soon
but it is still a WIP being slowly modified and may take a long time to get all the features claimed

see

happy bl

7

Thanks @RickyBlender. Ok, so it is already a known issue. I’ll watch the progress of the subversion with interest!

8

On development pointed by @RickyBlender is added a flag to force units, so the units will always shown in the same unit defined

9

but would it be possible also to see edge length in a certain way like mm or in Imp inches in 1/8 or 1/16 multiples ?

and what about having may be a sort of new primitive to do thick line
could be with options for different pattern like dash , dot dash ect…

do you have an idea when a new version will be available for Win 10 ?

hope this can add some news features as soon as possible
may be add some new API command to help make python scripting for CAD scripts!

We need more CAD feature like in Bl
many peoples would use these for archi / mechanical modeling

thanks
happy bl