What is the most bat-guano-insane thing in Blender that you can't believe they haven't fixed yet?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
605

Indeed, that may not be necessary to have so much info.
But that would not be bad to associate a palette to color picker.

Currently, we have color palettes datablocks as brush settings.
But nothing similar to setup Object colors, Material colors, GN or Compositing nodes colors.
For that, we have to import or create an image to use eye picker on it or to copy/paste, drag a color from one setting to another one.

That is probably possible to write an addon to add a color palette panel to properties of shader editor or Material tab or View Layer tab.

But a solution should be present by default.

In fact, we have colored wireframe for almost everything, except Curve objects.

In theme, we can change Camera, Empty, Light, Speaker wire colors.
In Wireframe mode, we change color of wireframe per object, according to object color or set a random color.

The only thing can not have its wire colored differently than default are Curves.

Bezier Curves and Paths have an Object Color and support materials because they can be extruded and be treated as meshes. Extruded, they are colored.
Grease Pencil Object Strokes are colored according to Material or Object color, in Solid and Material Preview modes.
Same for Hair Curves.

Curve data is similar between those object types. But each one has a different way to be rendered.
That would make sense to Bezier Curves and Paths wireframe rendered according to their Object Color, although they are not supposed to be rendered by EEVEE or Cycles.
That is purpose of Object Color setting.

606

I’m less concerned about how they’ll render but how I can see them when I’m editing. They’re invisible in dark themes. I’ve changed camera & light colors to lighter ones so I can see them, but curves I can’t change without changing mesh wireframes which I need to be black.

Also this got ignored, I see developers are getting ideas here and want to throw this one out. I’m not trusting Right-Click select

607

Wireframes have same color in solid mode.
But in Wireframe Mode, you can color them.
You can add a Geometry node modifier on a Curve object, that is converting it into a Mesh.
As a mesh, it can be colored with Object color or accept a Random color.

608

You’re not getting what I want.

Imagine a scene, solid mode, object mode:

I have mesh objects, some of them have wireframe turned on
I also have lattices in the scene I use to deform mesh objects
All of those are black as they supposed to be, since I don’t want them to be an eyesore

Then I add curves to this scene, which I want to use in Curve modifiers, I don’t want these curves to be extruded or beveled, just remain as path for Curve modifier. They won’t be seen in render.

Problem is curves by default are black and its annoying trying to find them in the cluttered scene, I have to use outliner constantly which is also cluttered.

Editing them is also hard I have to stick my nose to the monitor to see what I’m doing.

I tried changing the wireframe color from the theme, but now mesh wireframes and lattices are also white and its even more of a visual clutter.

What I would like is to be able to have separate color for wireframes and curves in this scenario

609

I understood what you want.
I am not saying that can be done.
I am just explaining what current Blender is capable of.

That is why I talked about GN modifer. A Curve to Mesh node will only change curve as an edge loop, that will not represent a surface. Only surfaces or volumes are rendered.
Conversion from GN modifier is sufficient to have colors in Wireframe mode, corresponding to Object Color.
And as a modifier, it does not change behavior of curve in edit mode.

With my proposal, you still have to switch to Wireframe mode to distinguish objects, by their color.

But, you have a lot of tools to hide, filter, select objects in viewport or outliner.

  • In Viewport, you can use Select Menu > Select All by Types > Curves.
  • You can use Local View to limit display to a selection of few objects.
  • If you have Meshes and Curves in your scene, you can hide all meshes at once, by using Object Types Visibility popover.
  • You can lower opacity of wireframe. That will not affect curves.
  • You can also move curves to another collection and choose to display only this collection.
  • In Outliner, you can disable display of Meshes, Lights, Cameras, Empties in Filter popover to only keep display of Curves.

By default, display of handles is limited to Selected ones and Normals display is disabled.
You can change that in Viewport Overlays popover.
In Preferences > Interface, you can change Line Width to Thick.

Selecting and editing a curve may not be as obvious and fast as wanted.
But with current tools available, it should not be a pain.

610

Everything you proposed also changes a lot more than curves color, or involves work enough to actually rewrite blender and change curve theme color in that time. It’s not useful to those in each scene I’m working on, I’ll wait till somebody in Blender Studio also raises this question and developers give Curves separate color in theme

611

This isn’t really the place for elaborate workaround suggestions. Probably most regular visitors to this forum know all of what you said but we all also agree that it should be east to recolor how curves are displayed.

2 Likes
612

Where the hell ability to create custom modifiers btw? And why the hell that ability wasnt in mind of developers simply by default right from the start?!

Geonodes - are probably one of the most dumbest thing which i ever saw in blender. You look at one tutorial, you pick another one, you can also change version of bLeNdA! And what?! You simply didnt have some specific node because it was changed on the fly and it doesnt exist in version you are using. Then they change it again. And again.

And this are simply fundamentals of bender.
In 3ds max you can easilly find tons of scripts and plugins with requirement to specific version of 3ds max. And guess what?! Versions can start to count from 2012! Its a version of 3dsmax released back in the 2011! 12! Twelve years are passed and it doesnt broke tons of plugins or scripts.
In bLeNdA - one release and tons of addons are just broke.

1 Like
613

They where desperatly waiting for you to provide guidance …

2 Likes
614

The fact what you cant argue with my comment only show the quality of blender fanboys.

615

Let’s be civil, please. Frustrations should be focused on issues, not each other.

1 Like
616

Your right ! sorry , I should stay away from that thread !

617

Correction: The fact @sozap doesn not want nor inted to argue with you and waste his time on such ignorance as your’s, shows the severe lack of quality in your understanding of blender development, in what the developers actually do and your severe lack of any research.

greetings, Kologe

2 Likes
618

Really? Then go and tell that to @sozap who:

  1. leave a commentary which make no sense at all.
  2. didnt argue but simply try to troll.
619

Actually, no, it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that people who have frustrations with Blender should work to implement fixes. Blender is open-source, if you’re unhappy with it, you’re welcome to submit a pull request or a patch, open a suggestion on RCS, or bring up your concerns with developers on blender.chat. I recognize this is a “venting” thread, but it’s still worth noting that @sozap 's solution, while perhaps a bit terse, is entirely reasonable

5 Likes
620

Go ahead and argue with this:

  1. Still no ability to create custom modifiers
  2. Still no stability in geonodes development

Cant argue? Keep your comments for someone else and dont ping me.

621

To have custom modifiers, you need to support enough operations done on the mesh and enough combinations, to make it interesting.
And you need to keep in RAM enough data to be able to join an interpolated state with basis.

Modifiers stack was created, 17 years ago.
Only 9 modifiers were available.
4 mesh data generation/removal : Subdivision Surface, Decimation, Boolean, Build Effect
5 mesh deformations : Hooks, Armature, Lattice Deform, Curve Deform, Wave Effect

17 years ago, Blender and computers were different, less capable.
They would not have been able to support same amount of nodes and mesh data.
A geometry node modifier is currently able to be a graph for a whole scene.
At that time, only mesh data of two meshes was taken into account by a boolean modifier, that was not producing Ngons, but only triangles.

Blender is evolving according to users feedback.

When geometry nodes were introduced in 2.92, it was clear that was an initial implementation that will evolve.
In 2.93, there was only an expansion of amount of nodes.
In Blender 3.0, there was a big change of paradigm with introduction of fields and abandon of named attributes, to simplify maintenance, bug fixing and stabilization of feature.
In Blender 3.2, named attributes were reintroduced in a more elegant way.
But temporary removal of named attributes was the only temporary lost of abilities.

When a node disappeared, it was to be replaced by several ones to make system more flexible and more capable.
Or it was just a renaming and a change of its UI.
But renaming and UI changes are happening, anywhere in software, each time, addition of a new feature is implying a clarification.
And it is always documented in release logs.

That is not the role of Blender Development to correct all tutorials created by community.
Most of time, somebody wrote a comment under video to correct problematic step.

Again, there is an LTS release, each year, supported during 2 years.
So, if you stick to LTS release, you only had to experiment two different versions of geometry nodes (2.93 and 3.3) since their creation, 2 years ago.

2 Likes
622

Stick to the long term support version. They fixed one rendering bug in cycles and introduced 3 new ones that I don’t expect to be fixed this decade by the paid developers. I think there’s 2 active volunteer devs capable of fixing 2 of them but who knows if they will ever feel like tackling those problems in their free time.

Max script has the benefit of being created and maintained by much larger dev team with more experience and bigger salaries for it’s entire existence along with feedback from professionals for most of that time.

Blender only recently got big money (still nowhere near the annual budgets of Maya/max/zbrush) and their dev team hasn’t increased much in size or salary. Feedback from a bunch of professionals is a new thing for them. It will take 8 years before blenders API evolves to the point where it’s bug free, well designed, and reliable like mel and max script.

1 Like
623

Until geonodes is capable of doing everything currently possible with animation nodes, I don’t see it being anywhere near stable. Consider this, how much time and money did it take for Houdini to get to where it is? That’s how many more years Blender users will be waiting just to get on par with the Houdini like and mograph like features of Maya. Not even on Houdini level or c4d level.

Stick to long term support versions.

624

I think the official answer for custom modifiers is to just write them directly in the blender source code with c++ because nothing is stopping you. This is an option people using other software would kill to have.