[Bf-funboard] snap / align improvements in blender 2.43?

[Alexander Ewering]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007, [ISO-8859-1] Karl Kühberger wrote:

> Seriously, shouldn't a professional software like Blender have
> basic features like that?
> You will say yes, but why don't all the coders out there
> understand the urgent need for it?

Well. I totally agree that a "real" measurement tool for angles and lengths
would be necessary. It would also be dead easy to code - probably around 30
minutes, as all necessary code is already there. The more important thing
would be a decent UI to access it - but such a concept idea would also come 
on an average walk outside :)

About snapping, I know how you feel because I had exactly that same wish 
when working with 2d graphics in dtpblender.

One major problem in Blender development in general is that Blender has
turned from "quick tool to get the job done" into "everything needs to be
perfect", which is the reason why features get coded so slowly. Well, and
there's also a lack of *really* proficient developers, as you can see there
are not many committers really going into depth with their commits or
managing huge projects.

Theeth has built the snapping framework for transform, but from initial
announcement to partial commit took around a year or two. In turn, I just
hacked in the snapping features in DTPBlender at some random location in the
transform code which I thought would fit (I don't know anything about the
transform code actually), and it worked well, so I was happy.

I think in general, to speed up development in general (apart from Ton - he
already codes at an amazing speed) - more dedicated developers need to find
Blender attractive, and features need to be able to get into the tree
without too much "concept this, proposal that" hassle.
However, it will be hard to find really dedicated developers, as this is
open-source, and nobody works for free unless he has a personal benefit (at
least in my way of thinking). *I* have a personal benefit from anything I do
for Blender because I work with it all day - that's not the case with all
coders. Well, I'm not an official Blender coder anymore even - but I've
coded my share already and always released it so others could benefit ;)

| alexander ewering              instinctive mediaworks
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