When I batch-rename meshes in the view layer list (ALT + Return), everything works most of the time. Sometimes though (no idea why exactly) when I try to attach the suffix '_low' to meshes (intended for import into Substance Painter), Blender will attach '_low.001' to the mesh names instead. I need to then remove the '.001' for each object manually. Any ideas why this is happening? Some setting I might have set incorrectly, duplicate objects hidden somewhere in the scene (why does manual renaming work then though?), or a bug in Blender?
Personally I find selecting through mesh like that weird, because I've used Blender for so long. It's like making 100% sense that I'm selecting only what I see and need. I've always used wireframe mode to select things through on purpose if I need to select things from behind too. Because in wireframe mode you can see the rest of the things you can select. That GIF above feels like a bug to me, lol. Like "Oh damn, it also selected the ones from behind I didn't want to... guess I have to deselect these by hand then".
Tbh, I select only the visible portion like 90% of the time, and selecting through the rest 10%.
Well I strongly disagree good sir! That's the standard I've come to get used to by using Maya and Max, and I would rather keep it like that so that switching between apps at work (which I need to do) is even more seamless. I could concede that it's just my own preference making me biased, but I also think that in most cases this deals to less clicks & smarter thinking on how to select everything you need in one go.
I've always used wireframe mode to select things through on purpose if I need to select things from behind too.
While this sounds reasonable, even though I would prefer not to have to switch to another mode simply to select things, there is one other problem to this. It's the fact that doing that in vanilla Blender (since 2.8 only i think?) forces you to select based on face-centers, which is completely unreasonable. It changes your mind on how to approach selections, and having to switch between face-modes, Xrays or wireframes, is unneeded tasks the brain needs to keep track of.
Art is art though. Who cares how you make it obviously. Except if it's select through. Fuck em.
Dont fight children. As long as it is an option everyone can toggle to their liking, everything is dandy. And that is pretty much what they are planning to do, if read it right.
Apart from that, having to select faces by their center has always been a thing in Blender wireframe as long as I remember.
haha yeah, all I wanted is the option to do this. Forcing anyone to a certain behaviour doesn't seem right, and enabling us to choose whichever we prefer seems like a very good idea.
yesssss custom build is done and the select-through feature is working! so happeeeeeehhhh
I have to admit this is really helpful. Often I just need to select a whole section of <something> to move it slightly and this always forces me to toggle view modes. Way less often I just need to border select the visible stuff only. And for this an "ignore backfaces" mode will do the trick.
haha yeah, all I wanted is the option to do this. Forcing anyone to a certain behaviour doesn't seem right, and enabling us to choose whichever we prefer seems like a very good idea.
Yeah, it's cool for people who need it. As long as it's a toggleable setting on something, it's more than fine.
EDIT: Come to think of it, it's like the Show X-Rayin 2.8, but a "Hidden X-Ray". Because with that setting on, you can also select through the mesh without going to the wireframe mode.
Yeah and that's why I never missed it. I just press the toggle x-ray key, select what I want and press the key again. I rather do that instead of flying blind with selections. ^^
Edit: For completeness' sake, on default keymap:
Shift+Z: toggle between solid and wireframe
Alt+Z: toggle X-Ray for the current view mode
The above means, that you can have separate X-Ray toggle states for each of those two modes. By default it is off for solid and on for wireframe.
haha yeah, all I wanted is the option to do this. Forcing anyone to a certain behaviour doesn't seem right, and enabling us to choose whichever we prefer seems like a very good idea.
Yeah, it's cool for people who need it. As long as it's a toggleable setting on something, it's more than fine.
EDIT: Come to think of it, it's like the Show X-Rayin 2.8, but a "Hidden X-Ray". Because with that setting on, you can also select through the mesh without going to the wireframe mode.
In theory it should be, but the Xray thing switches the selection scheme too (area-based selection becomes face-centers-based selection), which changes how you would go about selecting things.
Personally I find selecting through mesh like that weird, because I've used Blender for so long. It's like making 100% sense that I'm selecting only what I see and need. I've always used wireframe mode to select things through on purpose if I need to select things from behind too. Because in wireframe mode you can see the rest of the things you can select. That GIF above feels like a bug to me, lol. Like "Oh damn, it also selected the ones from behind I didn't want to... guess I have to deselect these by hand then".
Tbh, I select only the visible portion like 90% of the time, and selecting through the rest 10%.
same for me, I want to see what I select, if something is occluded, I switch to wireframe or xray. It is always good to have it optional of course.
Seems to me like one of the main problems with this functionality is not how to implement it, but how to put in the UI. I can say from experience, UI design is not easy and you have to consider quite a lot. Otherwise you end up with something like whatever ZBrush's UI is. :P
Setting up 2.8 here and am wondering if it's possible to set a color and default size for the curve normals display? Can't seem to find anything in the preferences.
It's not available to download as a build - currently you have to make it yourself.
I could upload it somewhere though, if it's just about uploading the root folder containing the executable. Is that all that's needed?
Oh, it was @Kio / Benjamin who implemented that one. So yeah, can guarantee you its well backed up on productivity. Lol But yeah, I'm eager to test this as well since I'm tired of xray switch.
Setting up 2.8 here and am wondering if it's possible to set a color and default size for the curve normals display? Can't seem to find anything in the preferences.
For the size you can set it to what you like then go to File > Defaults > Save Startup File.
Just make sure that the scene / viewport etc. is in a state that you want to see every time you start the program.
I could upload it somewhere though, if it's just about uploading the root folder containing the executable. Is that all that's needed?
I think you just need "blender.exe", you can name it "blender custom 02.exe" and put it together with the original one, in the same installation folder (you'll need admin rights to do that if you're on Windows).
yesssss custom build is done and the select-through feature is working! so happeeeeeehhhh
should be done like in Modo in my opinion:
left-click drag -> select only front vertices middle-click drag -> select through.
Simple as that. No better way to do it. No UI buttons you need to click or checkboxes to activate, and then need to de-activate again. That takes too long.
@wilson66 so long as the user has the power to decide what click-drag thing does what, that would be for the best. I think there's a ticket speaking about that particular modo feature in the blender RCS forum.
yesssss custom build is done and the select-through feature is working! so happeeeeeehhhh
should be done like in Modo in my opinion:
left-click drag -> select only front vertices middle-click drag -> select through.
Simple as that. No better way to do it. No UI buttons you need to click or checkboxes to activate, and then need to de-activate again. That takes too long.
Imho middle mouse button is for navigation, I wouldn't like to have tool functions on that. Clicking a checkbox would be inconvenient of course, I would rather have something like left-click drag + Alt.
Prime8 Imho middle mouse button is for navigation, I wouldn't like to have tool functions on that.
I have assigned the functionality 'select linked' to the middle mouse/pen button in Blender, works flawlessly, and its fast. I see no reason not to do that.
I toggle XRay on and off automatically upon dragging selection with addon. Also it temporary disable solidify (as Solidify clutter xray view when object mode edge wires enabled) and mirror modifier. So it works like this: I can share addon if someone need it.
Something else I noticed: its really hard to quickly distinguish visually whats a button and whats a slider/ input field e.g. in the properties of modifiers. Might be a good idea to make this more distinguishable. If I e.g. add a bevel modifier, and am looking for the angle limit or something, it sometimes takes several seconds to find it. It looks slick and all to put the label of the sliders into the actual slider itself, but it makes the slider/ input field look exactly like a button, and thus harder to find what I am looking for.
What @Cirno said. Though changing anything more substantial than that will most likely involve changes in the UI widget system. Also if you want to make suggestions, you should really open a ticket for that. Chances of a Blender dev finding this here are slim.
One rule of thumb that should be true for all themes:
- buttons have their text centered
- sliders have their label left aligned and value right aligned (and sliders actually have a value, buttons don't)
- sliders behave differently when hovering over them
That figures. It seems I have a real talent for always stumbling over this kind of edge case stuff. Thanks for looking that up!
This addon has some custom colouring stuff, maybe it works for you? And if it doesn't contain coloured normals, you could request it, the guy's really receptive to feedback!
Another quick question: is there some way to bevel only hardened edges? Meaning, I can mark edges as sharp (select edge -> right-click -> Mark Sharp), useful when creating smoothing groups.
Can I assign a bevel modifier that only bevels the edges I have marked as sharp? If I can, whats the settings I have to adjust?
Another quick question: is there some way to bevel only hardened edges? Meaning, I can mark edges as sharp (select edge -> right-click -> Mark Sharp), useful when creating smoothing groups.
Can I assign a bevel modifier that only bevels the edges I have marked as sharp? If I can, whats the settings I have to adjust?
You can set a bevel weight per edge and then need to switch the bevel modifier limit methode to "weight".
Thanks. How do I 'set a bevel weight per edge' though? Sorry, newbie in this area. Can I somehow convert already hardened edges, or do I need to re-select the edges and apply a bevel weight to them?
EDIT: have found out already that I need to adjust the 'mean bevel weight' for the edges. Question remains though, can I somehow convert/ automatically select all hardened edges in a model so I can apply bevel weight without having to re-select them manually?
Maybe some list where bevel weights ect are stored and where I can convert weights to a selection?
To dig a little deeper into what @Prime8 mentions, there are a couple ways to go at it.
• If you create your hard edges fully procedurally by angle threshold (for instance by setting autosmooth to 30deg), then you can use the same angle threshold in the bevel modifier and naturally the same edges will get beveled.
• As mentioned, you can also set the bevel value manually. Select all your hard edges (either by hand, or by select similar>hard), and set them as a full marked bevel. Then use the weight options in the Bevel modifier.
• Considering all of the above, you can also use something like PieMenuEditor to convert from "marked as hard" to "marked as beveled" in one macro. Thus basically creating a workaround for the Bevel modifier not having the option to natively operate on hard edges only.
It seems to me that the Bevel modifier not having a limit to hard edges function is a deliberate design choice. I mean when you think about it, in a shaded smooth mesh, hard edges and bevel are oftentimes the opposite result in terms of smoothing.
(And holy hell, is it just me or is this forum text editor really bad, especially on mobile?)
If I use the scale tool, I need to move the cursor towards the center of the object to scale the object down (all axis simultaneously). If I move the cursor past the center of the object, it will actually scale the model up again. This is especially fiddly because the little circle in the middle of the scale widget naturally is at the center of the object already.
This behavior feels really, really odd to me. Is there some way to adjust this behavior? What could be the reason having to move the cursor towards the center of the object to scale it down? This decreases precision extremely the more I scale it down, it makes exact scaling with that tool impossible.
EDIT:
Wait, I can use the white circle around the tool widget to scale it more precisely, you can actually click anywhere within that circle and drag. I should try first before posting on this forum too quickly. Sorry about that.
And I actually have Hardops installed by the way, I will have to actually look into the details now...
@wilson66 I think that might also be a remnant of when there were no dedicated widgets. Without widgets you would just press the scale tool hotkey (S by default) and move your mouse from anywhere in the viewport.
If I use the scale tool, I need to move the cursor towards the center of the object to scale the object down (all Wait, I can use the white circle around the tool widget to scale it more precisely, you can actually click anywhere within that circle and drag. I should try first before posting on this forum too quickly. Sorry about that.
And I actually have Hardops installed by the way, I will have to actually look into the details now...
While you have the scale tool active you can also use Shift to scale in a much smaller increment or Ctrl to snap scale to the grid.
"It seems to me that the Bevel modifier not having a limit to hard edges function is a deliberate design choice. I mean when you think about it, in a shaded smooth mesh, hard edges and bevel are oftentimes the opposite result in terms of smoothing."
Not at all. Using hard edges as a first pass to visually establish edges later to be beveled/double edged is an extremely common practice in Max and a good thing to do in general regardless of the app. It's probably one of the most time saving approaches for quick hard surface work, especially when time is tight and production is not allowing for many iterations. The Blender bevel modifier not having the option to operate on that (and of course setting everything to smooth on top) is definitely a missing feature.
I mean hey more user options is always good. And thinking about it (without intimately knowing the blender codebase) I imagine I'd would not even be that hard to implement.
Edit: BUT, we already have a dedicated edge property for the bevel modifier. And if you add sharp as a limit, you would also have to add the other three edge properties as well, which could quickly let this get out of hand. And thinking more about it, in contrast to the current limit methods, it would logically be possible to combine a limit of let's say sharp and UV seams to limit the bevel. That would open a whole other can of worms. I mean I don't really see the problem with either starting directly with edge bevel weight instead of mark sharp or just selecting similar for sharp and then applying edge bevel there.
The advantage is not so much technical, and moreso that of visual feedback.
When time is tight being able to show a somewhat accurate preview of the end result early on (hard edges) and then being able to convert that easily to smooth subd is a huge plus.
As said it's not a big issue at the moment anyways since converting from one to the other isn't hard, it's just a bit tedious if not using a macro or script. But the benefits of possibly having it natively as an option in the Bevel and/or Subdiv modifiers alongside Weight and Marked cannot be understated. It might not sound like a big deal "in theory" but in actual practice it very much is.
That sounds pretty awesome! I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing.
Hey, anyone know metal materials that I could grab from an existing library that look like the one in this picture, and use it on meshes without UVs? Take note of the grunge and edge wear details.
This addon has some custom colouring stuff, maybe it works for you? And if it doesn't contain coloured normals, you could request it, the guy's really receptive to feedback!
Thanks, I will look into that! Although my screenshot was probably very misleading: I'm not working much with beziers - it's all NURBS here. Perhaps these do share the same inner workings in this case though.
I'm now dealing with the finer points of my configuration and here's another theming related one -
In this screenshot I have turned on face orientation display - and also selected a single face on my mesh. As you can see it's a bit confusing to look at this way. The former Max user in me however refuses to accept anything but red as the selection highlight - any chance the face orientation colors can be changed somewhere? Can't seem to find them in themes.
Replies
I need to then remove the '.001' for each object manually.
Any ideas why this is happening? Some setting I might have set incorrectly, duplicate objects hidden somewhere in the scene (why does manual renaming work then though?), or a bug in Blender?
While this sounds reasonable, even though I would prefer not to have to switch to another mode simply to select things, there is one other problem to this. It's the fact that doing that in vanilla Blender (since 2.8 only i think?) forces you to select based on face-centers, which is completely unreasonable. It changes your mind on how to approach selections, and having to switch between face-modes, Xrays or wireframes, is unneeded tasks the brain needs to keep track of.
Art is art though. Who cares how you make it obviously. Except if it's select through. Fuck em.
https://gum.co/collection_grid
Jump to 9:10 for official Evangelion Art sauce.
There's a bigger thread here with people that have had more time with Blender than me talking about this in more detail:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/decoupling-x-ray-and-limit-selection-to-visible/3498
It is always good to have it optional of course.
I often use Select Linked (L or Ctrl-L) as well.
That's great! Where can I download this build?
I could upload it somewhere though, if it's just about uploading the root folder containing the executable. Is that all that's needed?
But yeah, I'm eager to test this as well since I'm tired of xray switch.
left-click drag -> select only front vertices
middle-click drag -> select through.
Simple as that. No better way to do it. No UI buttons you need to click or checkboxes to activate, and then need to de-activate again. That takes too long.
Clicking a checkbox would be inconvenient of course, I would rather have something like left-click drag + Alt.
I can share addon if someone need it.
or here:
There is also a button on the toolbar:
Something else I noticed: its really hard to quickly distinguish visually whats a button and whats a slider/ input field e.g. in the properties of modifiers. Might be a good idea to make this more distinguishable. If I e.g. add a bevel modifier, and am looking for the angle limit or something, it sometimes takes several seconds to find it. It looks slick and all to put the label of the sliders into the actual slider itself, but it makes the slider/ input field look exactly like a button, and thus harder to find what I am looking for.
Just a thought. Might just be me.
Another quick question: is there some way to bevel only hardened edges? Meaning, I can mark edges as sharp (select edge -> right-click -> Mark Sharp), useful when creating smoothing groups.
Can I assign a bevel modifier that only bevels the edges I have marked as sharp? If I can, whats the settings I have to adjust?
EDIT: have found out already that I need to adjust the 'mean bevel weight' for the edges. Question remains though, can I somehow convert/ automatically select all hardened edges in a model so I can apply bevel weight without having to re-select them manually?
Maybe some list where bevel weights ect are stored and where I can convert weights to a selection?
• If you create your hard edges fully procedurally by angle threshold (for instance by setting autosmooth to 30deg), then you can use the same angle threshold in the bevel modifier and naturally the same edges will get beveled.
• As mentioned, you can also set the bevel value manually. Select all your hard edges (either by hand, or by select similar>hard), and set them as a full marked bevel. Then use the weight options in the Bevel modifier.
• Considering all of the above, you can also use something like PieMenuEditor to convert from "marked as hard" to "marked as beveled" in one macro. Thus basically creating a workaround for the Bevel modifier not having the option to natively operate on hard edges only.
This behavior feels really, really odd to me. Is there some way to adjust this behavior? What could be the reason having to move the cursor towards the center of the object to scale it down? This decreases precision extremely the more I scale it down, it makes exact scaling with that tool impossible.
EDIT:
Wait, I can use the white circle around the tool widget to scale it more precisely, you can actually click anywhere within that circle and drag. I should try first before posting on this forum too quickly. Sorry about that.
And I actually have Hardops installed by the way, I will have to actually look into the details now...
Not at all. Using hard edges as a first pass to visually establish edges later to be beveled/double edged is an extremely common practice in Max and a good thing to do in general regardless of the app. It's probably one of the most time saving approaches for quick hard surface work, especially when time is tight and production is not allowing for many iterations. The Blender bevel modifier not having the option to operate on that (and of course setting everything to smooth on top) is definitely a missing feature.
When time is tight being able to show a somewhat accurate preview of the end result early on (hard edges) and then being able to convert that easily to smooth subd is a huge plus.
As said it's not a big issue at the moment anyways since converting from one to the other isn't hard, it's just a bit tedious if not using a macro or script. But the benefits of possibly having it natively as an option in the Bevel and/or Subdiv modifiers alongside Weight and Marked cannot be understated. It might not sound like a big deal "in theory" but in actual practice it very much is.
Hey, anyone know metal materials that I could grab from an existing library that look like the one in this picture, and use it on meshes without UVs? Take note of the grunge and edge wear details.