[Bf-funboard] Critical improvements and features

David Jeske davidj at gmail.com
Wed Sep 18 18:38:31 CEST 2013


On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 7:01 AM, Gatis Kurzemnieks <
gatis.kurzemnieks at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2. Outliner
> 2.1 Outliner lacks multiple selected object drag-and-drop to
> parent/uparent.
> 2.2 Border selection (drag to select) is not working properly in outliner.
> Items get hilighted (what does it mean?) but not selected when doing this.
> Also click to unselect is not working. Expected behavior would be the same
> as in viewport or take Mayas outliner as a reference.
>

This is a confusing "blender-ism" called pre-selection (or activation),
because the outliner and dopesheet have a different selection context than
the 3dview. I'm not a fan of the blender behavior either, but you can do
what you want. After you box "pre-select" you can right-click and then
choose to add-or-remove them from your 3d-view selection.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Data_System/The_Outliner


> 3. Multi-object editing.
> 3.1. When multiple mesh objects are selected, only last - active - object
> can be edited in edit mode. This is not the case in many other 3d
> applications - Maya, Softimage, C4D where multiple objects can be edited at
> the same time
>

What happens in these other applications if an invalid mesh operation is
attempted? (such as connecting the mesh of two separate sub-objects)


> 3.2. Interface does not allow any convenient way to assign material to
> multiple selected objects at once.
> 3.3. It would be convenient to change other properties as well for all the
> selected objects from the properties panel.
>

I'm with you. Blender seems to have resisted multi-object property editing
for a long time. I'm not sure why. Are you looking for something like the
Maya Attribute Spreadsheet?

http://arnoldsupport.com/tag/attributes/

I find these kinds of features have resistance that come in three forms,
(a) ui philosophy, (b) lack of a clear and good UI design/proposal, (c)
technical limitations. It can be a combination of all three, but often
helping with "b" can bring features much closer to reality.


> 4. Extrude behaviour - Extrude region should have option to transform each
> face along it's own normal (default behaviour in all other 3d apps).
> Currently something similar can be achieved with shrink/flatten after
> extruding without any transformation, but it does not always work as
> expected.
>

Does "Pivot Point -> Individual Origins" not do what you want? This
transforms the extruded faces along their individual normals.

If you want this to be the default extrude behavior, I can see how it might
be annoying to have to switch the pivot point every extrude, and then
switch it back for all other operations.


> 7. Editing object pivot interactively - it would be nice if we could
> transform object pivots (centers) around using standard manipulation tools.
> The same would be nice for 3d cursor. (I know there is addons, but it
> should be incorporated in interface more nicely)
>

Are you talking about the "durable" object center? or the current pivot
point and rotational axis for a transform operation?

I really think blender is amazing software in so many ways - and just by
> fixing these not so complicated issues, blender could easily become the
> best 3d app available!
>

When looking at the big picture (not any individual issue), I have the same
sentiment you do, that blender is an amazing tool with many amazing
workflows which shoots itself in the foot by making certain common and easy
tasks too difficult.

While a few might be merely discoverability issues for current features,
and a bit of user retraining, others would be much better solved by some
small UI tweaks. If you can take the time to learn and understand blender,
you can help us figure out the "right way" to integrate some of those
capabilities into blender's current UI design.


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