I made an addon with ChatGPT, again… haha
Well, it’s not a discovery of America.
It simply displays a better, more customizable text overlay for edge length.
Main premises:
- you’ll find it in N-panel > View tab > new “Custom Overlays” menu,
- it uses its own overlay system, working independently from Blender’s Measurement overlays,
- the main difference between this and MeasureIt addon is that MeasureIt adds permanent annotations in 3D space, while this only displays temporary overlay - it’s meant for quick checking, not rendering; MeasureIt in Mesh Debug mode however, doesn’t provide edge length info - only index,
- no unit suffix displayed as it clutters and obstructs view - the addon uses scene units and updates values dynamically when unit system is changed from Scene properties,
- there are a few useful settings you can play with - font size, color, shadow and outline, value rounding degree (number of decimal points) and which edges are measured: none, only active, selected or all,
- unit precision is “dynamic”, so you can set precision to 3 decimal points but when a value is a perfect integer, it’s shown as integer, which is another de-cluttering feature (e.g. 2m is displayed as “2” instead of “2.000”)
Currently, it’s only for edge length and only works in edit mode, but I may update it for indices, coordinates, face area and/or other quantities, and object mode, perhaps even multi-object edit mode.
Tested in Blender 5.0, no issues found.
If you find one, let me know.
Feel free to use, share, edit, comment and review, add new ideas.
edge_length_custom_overlay.py (6.2 KB)