[Bf-committers] About 2.46 RC

[Jarosław Kolmaga]

Hi there!

To introduce myself: my name is Jarosław "Galileus" Kolmaga, polish Blender
artist, co-author and author of two polish Blender books... Let me skip
other titles.
Without playing around, there is a lot of people in polish scene that are
really upset about erasing the UV Select Mode from Blender... There is even
an petition-thing, but I decided to keep things low - we are all mature
after all, and games like that won't do anything better. So, thing is easy -
we want it back, and we want to know, what you'll say.

And again, really, its big step backward for now. Maybe there is some kind
of plan behind all things, that can make it better in future, but for now,
best polish artists decided to use old blender for UV mapping - it explains
itself clearly. To not be empty-handed, there are some names of artists who
joined "the action":

Marek Ryś (MRys), with tons of ultra-precise aircraft models on his account
Anna Smolarek (Ania), great artist with several big 3D-contests awards
Maciej Halbert (Morte), author of Practical Exercises
Kamil Kuklo (Mookie), main author of Blender Compendium
Well... Me, co-author of Compendium and author of Practical Projects.

Plus a lot of people from main polish Blender community - in fact, not even
one voice against the whole thing. And as it goes for myself - I'm just done
with very complicated (about 150k faces) UV map, and I can't imagine working
whole time on Edit Mode...

Anna made a little list of things, that was made worse in newest version of
blender:
1. Marking single seam:
Old Blender: Alt+click => seam is marked in 1 step
New Blender: select, ctrl+E, mark seam => seam is marked in 3 steps
2. Marking 17 edges in a row which do not form a loop:
Old Blender:  Alt+click on first edge, Alt+Shift+click on last edge =>
marked in 2 steps.
New Blender: select each edge one by one (17 clicks), ctrl+E, mark seams =>
17 edges marked in 19 steps
Or shorter version: ctrl+tab, click Vertices, select first vertex,
shift+select last vertex, W, select vertex path, click one of the options,
ctrl+E, mark seam => marked in 9 steps
3. Marking edges around a selected group of polygons:
Old Blender: ctrl+E, mark border seam => 2 steps
New Blender: ctrl+E, region to loop, ctrl+E, mark seam => 4 steps
4. It's not possible any more to select a separated object part in edit/face
mode by ctrl+L, because the linked selection stops at the UV borders. (AFAIK
it bases on selection mode, still - it's disturbing...)
5. The UV in edit mode does not work together well with the Save UV Layout
script when it comes to complicated objects with multiple materials and
mapping. It results either in empty faces, or in just some few single faces,
or in mapping the whole object at once despite different mapping groups.

As 6. I would add, that it's not possible any more to switch between Edit
and UV Select modes for complicated hide/unhide or selection operations.
Without this, making UV maps for more complicated models is pure pain in the
ass...

We really appreciate your hard work, so please don't get us wrong - but this
little step for a developement was one huge step backward for UV mappers. I
hope there is possibility to put UV Selection Mode back in new releases -
let it just be there, while it works ok.

Sincerely yours.
JK.

PS. Sorry for my english - it's not so bad in a daylight, but in middle of
night it's worse...
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