That would be Window > Duplicate window. And you can then streamline that new window so that it shows only one panel (UVs for instance). However I have very little experience with that, and I don't think this can be saved as preference since it is essentially a whole other instance of the program. Not sure !
What I personally do is to keep a very thin panel at the bottom of my layout, that I can then easily expand into whatever I need - UV editor, timeline, and so on . And I then reduce it down to a few pixels when done.
You can use the shift hotkey when dragging the gizmo, it'll make it as a new window. It's Shift+Space to quickly expand window (I guess you already know that ). There's also a set of layouts that you can find and modify in the Info menu and save it as preference.
Oh, I completely forgot about shift dragging the panels ! Thanks for pointing it out. Goes to show that they really, really need to make that sort of very useful stuff more discoverable.
Is there a way to select faces like in max (when you drag select anywhere above a polygon it becomes selected unlike the default command that wants you to select the center on the face)?
As far as I know that's the way it works in Blender too. Just because it displays the face centers doesn't mean that you have to select there, you can click in the corner and it'll just work. It works the same way for box selection.
If you need to select through you can either use the Wireframe view mode or toggle the Limit Selection to Visible button on the bottom bar (next to the subobject mode buttons.)
Hum, in fact the drag selection doesn't work like that (at least in 2.76). You have to box select the whole the centers and the same goes for the per face selection.
EDIT : In fact, you can select with part of the face if the Limit selection to visible feature is turned on. How ca you have the same behavior without this feature turned on?
hm, "works on my machine" (tm). click selection, box, circle don't require hitting what blender calls the selection point. i don't recall if i changed any setting but blender is quite customized here. i looked through prefs and the select menu and could not find anything related either (2.74 here).
for what it's worth i found the only solution to tame this beast was to start with my own configuration, i looked at that silo-esque one and a few others but mainly to get an idea of what's doable in customizing blender. resetting to defaults - to do this have you tried moving the folder that blender stores it's configuration in and letting it create a fresh one? if mine wasn't running on this hipster-approved fruit-machine i might even be able to tell you where to look for it in windows.
When I got the word about all this from joebount, I tried to reset Blender at work and thought I was able to reset it to get the default behavior that thomasp describes.
Back home wanting to troubleshoot the setup, I tried reverting to defaults on my system at home, and can't get it to behave like that. Basically it behaves same as my setup when I revert. Odd, now I'm not sure if I was seeing things on the system at work.
But, it seems we're not the only ones experiencing this. As
joebount pointed to the BA thread, Stan Pancakes describes: in face selection mode, if you're using wireframe view or disable "Limit Selection to Visible", they will only capture faces if their "dot" is inside it. In solid mode with "Limit Selection to Visible" turned on, they'll capture all faces the region intersects, regardless of the dot.
Can more people confirm this issue? If it is so, that on some systems you can get the same Face Selection behavior for Box Select regardless of the "
Limit Selection to Visible" toggle, then it seems it's something related to OpenGL / GPU / System Config.
Let's try to identify what's going on and report the bug on bugtracker!
Yeah, it definitely has something to do with selecting through/selecting during wireframe mode vs. not selecting through in a solid mode. That definitely seems like something that should be more configurable and it could be nice to have an option for it working like Modo where you can set it up so that only faces completely contained in the box or lasso get selected.
box and lasso select behave exactly the same on my setup, that is, i do not need to touch the center point of any face to add it to my selection regardless of what display mode my mesh is set to. picture shows my selection results with 'limit to visible' turned on which is also the only mode i ever tend to work on.
if i disable 'limit to visible', indeed it only seems to pick faces where the selection includes the face center point. does that help?
JedTheKrampus, thomasp, thanks on the confirmation. Yes, that is consistent to what joebount was reporting. We all have it behave the same way then.
I'll report this, on the bugtracker, as a bug/inconsistent feature. hopefully what comes out of it they give us an option to set it up in the settings, and have it consistent throughout the different modes.
For anyone interested about the Face Selection behavior for Box Select influenced by " Limit Selection to Visible" toggle that joebount mentioned, bug report was not accepted.
I'll create a proposal for the blender mailing list, just to entertain myself and see if and when (we)'ll have any success resolving this issue. I'm skeptical that it can be as fast as if this was accepted as a bug. I'll post my proposal here as well if anyone wants to chime in.
here's a question regarding object creation - when i create a new primitive, blender highlights the new object in face edit mode and gives me access to a set of parameters, e.g. number of subdivisions. if i deselect and reselect the object, i do not have these options available anymore, any trick to make these available again if the mesh hasn't been edited otherwise or does deselecting it already constitute a 'commit' action?
also are there any resources out there in regards to customizing/configuring panel-headers? i would like to add/remove buttons on the headers (menu bars) and ideally make the interface more rigid by removing the possibility to rescale or split certain ones.
How can I make the imposition of the material more natural? My grid did not work because I used the "boolean" modifier. How do I subtract objects better? w8 big picrutes!
Is anyone using the new depsgraph? Is it ready to use or are there known issues with it.
If you're talking about the multithreaded part of it, yes, it's in use already. It should make a bunch of things faster, and I know that for example BEPUik uses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG3uKYQTVj4 If you're talking about the --enable-new-depsgraph thing, you'll just have to test it. It should work with some things but since it's still an option it probably breaks some stuff pretty bad. I tested it with my rig just now and it didn't work at all (BEPUik rig).
I just realized that I need a better control for edge padding with textures which weren't baked (getting nasty bleedings from UV seams in Unity with mipmapping).
So, does Blender's texture painting tools have an eraser brush that only erases pixels from outside UV shells (if I can paint straight in the UV editor)? I'd just need a 100% clean, non-antialised alpha channel for manual dilation in Photoshop with xNormal plugin.
Or any other quick way to erase everything from outside the UV shells, accurately?
Bake the texture from the lowpoly model to itself (i.e. with selected to active unchecked) with zero edge padding. Or, increase the edge padding in the bake if you just want to have Blender do the edge padding. I recommend using Blender Internal for this.
Bake the texture from the lowpoly model to itself (i.e. with selected to active unchecked) with zero edge padding. Or, increase the edge padding in the bake if you just want to have Blender do the edge padding. I recommend using Blender Internal for this.
I think I found a similar solution from xNormal. I'll just generate a simple AO with zero edge padding. It also creates a mask texture, which is nice for selecting the boundaries of pixels. But thanks for the tip, might be even better.
In XNormal I prefer to use the base texture bake just to get a mask, although I suppose any bake with zero padding would work just as well as long as it gives you a mask in Photoshop.
Is anyone using the new depsgraph? Is it ready to use or are there known issues with it.
If you're talking about the multithreaded part of it, yes, it's in use already. It should make a bunch of things faster, and I know that for example BEPUik uses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG3uKYQTVj4 If you're talking about the --enable-new-depsgraph thing, you'll just have to test it. It should work with some things but since it's still an option it probably breaks some stuff pretty bad. I tested it with my rig just now and it didn't work at all (BEPUik rig).
Wow the BEPUik rig looks interesting. Do you think its not working with --enable-new-depsgraph because BEPUik is a separate blender branch?
I was talking about --enable-new-depsgraph , using it gets rid of some lag I have with drivers that I have, however I will probably change the rig to work without it.
Wow the BEPUik rig looks interesting. Do you think its not working with --enable-new-depsgraph because BEPUik is a separate blender branch?
I was talking about --enable-new-depsgraph , using it gets rid of some lag I have with drivers that I have, however I will probably change the rig to work without it.
It's hard to say. It's a vanilla 2.76b meaning it's the same as the files on the blender site (just with BEPUik added) so it won't have all the latest commits like the graphicall builds do. Maybe the latest graphicall builds have a better new depsgraph but in that case I have no way to test it with my rig anyway.
You can try running blender with -d in the path to see if you've got dependency issues in your rig.
For a while I've been looking for a little bit more versatile selection growth, and that indeed looks promising. Nice.
Another thing... It would be nice to have kind of a "selection only" mode in the edit mode where you can't modify your mesh, but only select vertices, edges and faces. Like pressing "Q" in Maya or Max. Just to be extra careful when UV unwrapping or rigging. Of course we have a selection threshold helping a bit, but sometimes I accidentally move, scale or rotate something when I don't need to.
Is there any good solution to retopology within blender without paying $80 for Blendercookies toolset?
I tried Retopo MT and I can't stand it. The only alternative I can see is to use Blender's projection snapping with standard modeling tools and shrinkwrap, which is incredibly slow.
well, for characters nothing beats a nicely structured basemesh to start your sculpt with - and then some manual labour to fine tune it. for anything else i find this quite handy: http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/instant-meshes/
The snapping/projection stuff is actually not that slow for manual retopology once you get used to it. Just copy the shrinkwrap modifier that's on your lowpoly before you apply it so you don't have to constantly be re-adding it from the modifier menu, and know about the existence of the project individual elements option for face snapping. Make use of stuff like grid fill, organic extrude, and F2 and you can get a good result in a pretty reasonable amount of time.
Is there any good solution to retopology within blender without paying $80 for Blendercookies toolset?
I tried Retopo MT and I can't stand it. The only alternative I can see is to use Blender's projection snapping with standard modeling tools and shrinkwrap, which is incredibly slow.
For $80 I may as well just buy topogun.
You don't actually have to pay. the license is GPL.
Is there any good solution to retopology within blender without paying $80 for Blendercookies toolset?
I tried Retopo MT and I can't stand it. The only alternative I can see is to use Blender's projection snapping with standard modeling tools and shrinkwrap, which is incredibly slow.
For $80 I may as well just buy topogun.
You don't actually have to pay. the license is GPL.
Replies
What I personally do is to keep a very thin panel at the bottom of my layout, that I can then easily expand into whatever I need - UV editor, timeline, and so on . And I then reduce it down to a few pixels when done.
That and Preserve UVs... I used this heavily in Max and Blender doesn't appear to have anything comparable
Quick question:
Is there a way to select faces like in max (when you drag select anywhere above a polygon it becomes selected unlike the default command that wants you to select the center on the face)?
Thank you
If you need to select through you can either use the Wireframe view mode or toggle the Limit Selection to Visible button on the bottom bar (next to the subobject mode buttons.)
EDIT : In fact, you can select with part of the face if the Limit selection to visible feature is turned on. How ca you have the same behavior without this feature turned on?
edit: this page https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling/meshes/selecting/faces.html suggests that it is the default behaviour (bottom paragraph).
https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/1159/victor-and-frank-in-renderman.html
I did reset to factory settings and it indeed works. The issue is that I'm using a custom version of Blender that doesn't drive me crazy (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?352666-Input-Custom-Blender-Setup-Silo-Maya-esque)
I'm going to check this thread closely and check if anybody has an idea.
EDIT : in fact after reseting to the tdefault configuration, the same thing happens... arg...
if mine wasn't running on this hipster-approved fruit-machine i might even be able to tell you where to look for it in windows.
I will start with a fresh install and have a look. Since I use steam, everything is localized there.
EDIT : ok, so what bugs me is depicted here, maybe I wasn't clear :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?388418-How-to-Decrease-Clickable-Distance-from-Object-Component-to-Mouse-Cursor
Check the last post.
When I got the word about all this from joebount, I tried to reset Blender at work and thought I was able to reset it to get the default behavior that thomasp describes.
Back home wanting to troubleshoot the setup, I tried reverting to defaults on my system at home, and can't get it to behave like that. Basically it behaves same as my setup when I revert. Odd, now I'm not sure if I was seeing things on the system at work.
But, it seems we're not the only ones experiencing this.
As joebount pointed to the BA thread, Stan Pancakes describes:
in face selection mode, if you're using wireframe view or disable "Limit Selection to Visible", they will only capture faces if their "dot" is inside it. In solid mode with "Limit Selection to Visible" turned on, they'll capture all faces the region intersects, regardless of the dot.
Can more people confirm this issue?
If it is so, that on some systems you can get the same Face Selection behavior for Box Select regardless of the " Limit Selection to Visible" toggle, then it seems it's something related to OpenGL / GPU / System Config.
Let's try to identify what's going on and report the bug on bugtracker!
if i disable 'limit to visible', indeed it only seems to pick faces where the selection includes the face center point. does that help?
OSX 10.9 / intel 4000 iGPU.
I'll report this, on the bugtracker, as a bug/inconsistent feature. hopefully what comes out of it they give us an option to set it up in the settings, and have it consistent throughout the different modes.
Hopefully we can hope for more customization options on that side in the future!
This was my bug report:
https://developer.blender.org/T47061
I'll create a proposal for the blender mailing list, just to entertain myself and see if and when (we)'ll have any success resolving this issue. I'm skeptical that it can be as fast as if this was accepted as a bug. I'll post my proposal here as well if anyone wants to chime in.
when i create a new primitive, blender highlights the new object in face edit mode and gives me access to a set of parameters, e.g. number of subdivisions. if i deselect and reselect the object, i do not have these options available anymore, any trick to make these available again if the mesh hasn't been edited otherwise or does deselecting it already constitute a 'commit' action?
also are there any resources out there in regards to customizing/configuring panel-headers? i would like to add/remove buttons on the headers (menu bars) and ideally make the interface more rigid by removing the possibility to rescale or split certain ones.
i found some first info here: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/3393/add-custom-menu-at-specific-location-in-the-header
just wondering if there is a comprehensive doc on what's possible out there somewhere.
And I don't think is possibile to customize headers and panels yet, I hope for 2.8 refactoring they gonna make it possible.
cheers.
top 22 (yes twentytwo) developers of 2015
http://www.blender.org/development/top-22-developers-2015/
and Blender branch that are almost there
http://www.blender.org/development/blender-branches-to-watch-in-2016/
If you're talking about the --enable-new-depsgraph thing, you'll just have to test it. It should work with some things but since it's still an option it probably breaks some stuff pretty bad. I tested it with my rig just now and it didn't work at all (BEPUik rig).
So, does Blender's texture painting tools have an eraser brush that only erases pixels from outside UV shells (if I can paint straight in the UV editor)? I'd just need a 100% clean, non-antialised alpha channel for manual dilation in Photoshop with xNormal plugin.
Or any other quick way to erase everything from outside the UV shells, accurately?
I was talking about --enable-new-depsgraph , using it gets rid of some lag I have with drivers that I have, however I will probably change the rig to work without it.
You can try running blender with -d in the path to see if you've got dependency issues in your rig.
New Pattern Select in Blender from Sebastian König on Vimeo.
Another thing... It would be nice to have kind of a "selection only" mode in the edit mode where you can't modify your mesh, but only select vertices, edges and faces. Like pressing "Q" in Maya or Max. Just to be extra careful when UV unwrapping or rigging. Of course we have a selection threshold helping a bit, but sometimes I accidentally move, scale or rotate something when I don't need to.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?350794-Addon-Surface-Constraint-Tools
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?344060-Retopology-Tools
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?366107-MiraTools