Small issues that are stil present in Blender 2.6x

Couple of new ideas someone may find useful. Perhaps the first one is for bugtracker but the rest should be serioulsy taken into consideration by developers, I believe. Anyways I would appreciate any kind of feedback for these propositions; if there’s a place where I could share my ideas directly with developers, I would be greatful for a hint.

  1. Bevel and collapsing edges destroys seams; shouldn’t bmesh keep mesh information?
  2. Skin modifier creates too many edgeloops between vertex; there should be only as many edgeloops, as there are actually needed.
  3. simplify curve should be enabled by default and hidden in W menu where usually Remove Doubles is located (very helpful while working with grease pencil)
  4. Grease Pencil should not be attached to active object; it should be available for non-user as well
  5. scaling/rotating/moving object should not be available in Toolbox bottom panel; while adding a new object you want to tweak its number of vertex or rings but sometimes you don’t see it well; rotating object to see its actual look deletes object-creation options and replaces them with Rotating panel.
  6. ability of copying modifiers and constraints should be enable by default
  7. Curve modifier is very unfriendly as it’s hard to control (it’s hard to place deforming and deformed object together well so that deformation would go along the curve)
  8. there should be a way to “freeze” (make chosen object unselectable) object directly from 3d viewport
  9. there should be a way to make object transparent in viewport without a need of adding transparent material for it
  10. there should be an option “Save selected” as .blend files that would save only selected objects to the seperate .blend file
  11. lack of selecting all connected vertex at once in edit mode; I know the L shortcut but imagine (and I had such case today) you work with bunch of flowers joined in one object; in order to select all the stalks you have to click L like dozen times; selecting joined vertex/edges/faces would limit this operation to one click and mouse drag (just like the option of selecting islands in UV/Image Editor).

I agree with most of that.

  1. Yes and No. This had to be checkbook option. For sculpting you need all of this loops, its called uniform geometry.
  2. As I know Ton is working now about that and other blend files related things.
  1. I very much agree here. I hate it when I need to find the object that has by accident a grease pencil layer. While I like to be able to attach those to objects just being apple to draw them would be a good addition as well.

  2. Agreed

  3. That one is true as well, maybe the modifier should have some tool tips displayed. There are certain rules to follow and when you do it the modifier works very well.

  4. agreed because I hardly use the outliner at all

  5. that is very true as well as an additional per object option

Abour Curve modifier - it works well when you parent an object to the curve and choose Curve modifier. But deforming object by selecting modifier from modifier list is a nightmare, although I’m an experienced 3d graphic I never know where to place origin, should I apply transformation etc. Horror, I say.

About Skin Modifier - you are right, Monio, I think that some kind of option uniform/non-uniform geometry would work quite well.

  1. You can use the Decimate modifier set to ‘planar’ to reduce the unwanted extra polys generated by the skin modifier.

Carefull with the “planar” setting of the Decimate modifier, it creates lots of ngons.
Probably not something you want on an organic model generated with the Skin modifier.

I added another point:

  1. lack of selecting all connected vertex at once in edit mode; I know the L shortcut but imagine (and I had such case today) you work with bunch of flowers joined in one object; in order to select all the stalks you have to click L like dozen times; selecting joined vertex/edges/faces would limit this operation to one click and mouse drag (just like the option of selecting islands in UV/Image Editor).

Totally agree with most of them.

  1. I think we’re to wait for the UV tools’ ‘preserve uvs’ to be merged, but to me surprisingly neglected so far in Blender’s development.

  2. Same here, even with relatively simple shapes, like branches, it creates bad, intersecting geometry compared to zspheres.

3,7. Totally, I found the fastest way to deal with tubular shapes is to extrude the curve out of vertices, subsurf it, convert to an actual curve object, simplify and make it 3d. Of course it doesn’t work for other curve deformed objects.

What I really want is a ‘Solo’ button in the outliner. When you click it, all you see in the view port is the object that is soloed. Yes, you should be able to solo multiple objects. I know, I could move it to it’s own layer…

!0.) Could be done as an AddOn, I did something close to that with the RE:Vis AddOn. All you have to do is make a list of all object linked to the scene. Then make a list of all objects selected. Unlink everything except the selected, Issue a Save Ass (which already exists in the API) then re-link back into the scene the objects that were previously in the scene. Multiple scenes in a single Blend, of course, become an issue. Do we save that data as well?

Solo? Not the same as the / key on the numpad then? Since it probably isn’t, forgive me if I am wrong. I select multiple objects in the outliner, then use the / key on numpad to only show those objects, and then I deselect and select the one I want to go to edit mode in.

Thank you Craig, I did not know about the NUMPAD-/ key. That is the visual part of what I want. Now I want that keystroke linked to an icon in the outliner. So we would have 4 buttons instead of 3. The eye, the solo, the arrow and the camera.

gotta be possible, it’s just code, right?

While i think about it :

  1. no antialiasing option for the texture/ao/normal/etc… baking functions (so you have to bake at 4x the size and rescale in an image editing application to simulate a 4x antialiasing)

Why not be in a side view in wireframe mode, then select the bottom verts with border select then press ctrl+l?

Big +1

although #7
I know, that Parent to Curve, is not just “add modifier” but also parent object to curve object macro.

Modifiers could use collection of basic macros/operators, to set up them quickly, like for example Lattice, Booleans are much more useful that way. I use my scripts for that purpose, but it something that should be in default tool set. Many tasks using modifiers are very common and repetitive operations.

Next thing would be Gizmos for modifiers or macro/operator that will automatically set-up empty for modifiers and parent them to object/s.

You could always just keep it as the last modifier in the stack. That way it’s cut down on the fly after the rig deform.

a tip to do that. Hide active object. Show Hidden. No more active object.-> Grease pencil available for all.

Ctrl L to copy modifiers. Menu Object-> Constraints -> Copy Constraints to Selected Objects (no shortcut).
Copy Attributes Menu add-on will not work with 2.66. Ctrl C is now used to copy objects selected to buffer.
It is not as elegant but Copy/Paste(Ctrl V) can be used for 10)

Keep Curve’s origin to same location of object. Don’t scale curve in object mode.
Enable Stretch and Bounds Clamp options in Shape Panel of Curve.
Now it is friendly.

Question: Are all of the good action-items that seem to be coming out of this thread, “here,” actually going to be on the to-do list of the development team, “there?” Once the discussions in this thread boil down to actual, clearly-defined, actionable items that a software developer could respond to, we need to be sure that they actually get to the place where they need to be. . .

To the contrary, Copy Attributes works just fine. I’ve been using it in trunk and it hasn’t broken yet.

OK! It was fixed.
It was not working with my build from yesterday.
So when add-on is enabled, copy/pasting objects with Ctrl C is not available.