@guitarguy00 Yes, there are some basic modeling tools from Max that I'd love to see, but the Loop Tools and Set Flow addons are decent enough as quasi-alternatives. I miss SwiftLoop the most. The others can all be worked around.
Now that you mentioned it, I would have liked the loop tool to in Blender to work like Max, ie allowing you to place it anywhere right from the start, rather than placing it in the very centre and then having to move it etc. Connect Edge with pinch option would be great too. But not a huge deal.
Haven't done any real work in Blender yet, but my initial impressions is that I wish the move/scale (and other related tools) would contraint initial movement to one axis by default based on mouse position and screenspace movement, rather than spaghetti around everywhere. The XYZ contraint keys could still be there, but I would rather have just one key that once I'm moving in this imaginary natively-supported-one-axis-contraint, I could press down to lock movement to that one axis, in case I want to use more precision with my mouse by moving it in other directions. Exactly like Photoshop's behaviour of Shift I believe, right after you press down the brush. There, Shift locks you into one of the two axis, and thus you can move anywhere you want. In Blender the only difference would be the addition of a third axis.
But yeah, need to start getting some experience working and testing for myself. Today I wanted to do something simple, so maybe I'll come back with some results. Time to open the ol' hard surface challenge threads......
"[...]but I would rather have just one key that once I'm moving in this imaginary natively-supported-one-axis-contraint, I could press down to lock movement to that one axis, in case I want to use more precision with my mouse by moving it in other directions."
That's middle mouse button - and you could probably remap it to whatever suits your needs too.
@guitarguy00 for connect pinch I just lay in an edgeloop and bevel it, but it would be nice to see the Loop cut and slide tool with more interactive features.
@justo once you get used to MMB to lock axis it's pretty good.
A tip for MMB transform: don't keep clicking the button, click and hold>drag to the desired axis. It will dynamically snap to each axis and then you can release.(although it sounds like you've already released upon discovering this....... )
MMB goes even further : it's also possible to tab grab, loosely move in the guesstimated direction of the desired axis, and then tap MMB to lock. it will constrain to the expected axis and will do so in alignment with the location the object was at before it was grabbed and moved around. And then Ctrl to constrain to increments.
And as usual : all that without any need for the mouse cursor to be anywhere near the object itself, and no need to keep any mouse buttons held down during the operation.
MMB goes even further : it's also possible to tab grab, loosely move in the guesstimated direction of the desired axis, and then tap MMB to lock. it will constrain to the expected axis and will do so in alignment with the location the object was at before it was grabbed and moved around. And then Ctrl to constrain to increments.
And as usual : all that without any need for the mouse cursor to be anywhere near the object itself, and no need to keep any mouse buttons held down during the operation.
I still prefer to drag with MMB than tap, although I'm still very much getting used to the system and have a lot more practice required to get up to your level.....
Parts 2, 3, and 4 of my 2.80 for Max users modeling sub-series are up. Hope this doesn't seem spammy, but it's probably the best place to post them here.
@musashidan I will watch these, thank you for sharing your findings with us. I'll watch it next week though, since I need to start preparing for a trip now.
I'm so slow haha...But learning new software is exciting!
During the creation of this bolt head, these were my main concerns during the modeling:
Any one-button solutions to snapping the pivot (in Blender I believe it's called Origin) of an object to the bottom of its Z height? I found a bunch of old scripts but they all seem to not work in 2.8.
Easiest solution to edge-straightening? This video named a bunch, and I was wondering what people might think of these as the best one, if there is anything like that. I activated the LoopTools addon to use GStretch, which is my current solution, but there are a ton more options apparently:
Some of these I think havent been ported to 2.8. I was particularly interested in 2), since it also acts as a circularize if a closed loop is selected.
I'll need to start looking for grow/shrink loops/rings options
Any interactive, quick primitive creation methods? (instantly creating cubes or cylinders and dragging mouse button/using hotkeys to quickly define in realtime the divisions, size, height, etc)
If I am grasping the use of MMB during move/scale ops correctly, am I correct to say there is no way to automatically enable all that behaviour that MMB gives, as soon as we use RMB to activate the tool? Because the way I see it, we are almost always pressing RMB followed by MMB (at least), right? For certain tools like Scale its convenient, since scaling everything uniformly is a common operation, but moving things around in screenspace, not so much. There is no way to use that MMB behaviour by default, and then press some key to activate all axis at once, is there? Obviously I am willing to give myself more time to get used to "the Blender ways", but I am asking this to know whether there are other options or not in this area.
"Any one-button solutions to snapping the pivot (in Blender I believe it's called Origin) of an object to the bottom of its Z height? I found a bunch of old scripts but they all seem to not work in 2.8."
For these the thinking goes differently. In Blender everything that involves placing the origin (or even any scene object really) to a specific location (outside of the grid increments and outside of snapping to existing geo) involves the 3D cursor. For instance :
> Selecting a vert, > Setting the 3d cursor there (It's called "Snapping" in Blender terms, but this is actually more of a "send to" ; hence in this case, "snap to selected" will send the cursor to that one selected vert at the bottom of the object), > going back to object mode, > and then performing "Origin to 3D Cursor".
You will probably argue that this seems like a lot of steps compared to the Max/Maya ways (live editing of the pivot itself through a special pivot editing mode) but the advantages far outweighs the limitation because the cursor can be placed anywhere you want independently of the scene contents - by clicking on the surface of objects of course, but also by manually editing its XYZ coordinates, or like here by "snapping it" to an active selection.
On top of it being a reference point for things like moving the origin, the 3D cursor can also act as a temporary center of action for any manipulation (like bending a finger) - meaning that in such cases, messing with the origin of the object for it to be at a new location is not even necessary as the 3D cursor takes that role.
On a side note I personally use the 3D cursor to navigate the viewport, thanks to "frame viewport to 3d cursor". Meaning that unlike in Max/Maya, the center of viewport rotation doesn't have to be the current selection of components, or the bounding box of the currently selected object - it can just be the 3D cursor itself, set arbitarily in space or placed at the surface of an object with just right click. Therefore it is possible to navigate very intricate geometry without having the viewport fly out of the way when rotating. This makes 3d manipulation much more intuitive because nothing unexpected ever happens that way - the result always matches the input. Therefore no more 3d nausea, yay !
(That's why I think it's a bit of shame that 2.8 is forcing right click menus so hard everywhere. It takes away from the usefulness of the 3D cursor and therefore will probably cause new users to completely miss out on it. These menus are of course easy to disable, but I think philosophically speaking this change is a mistake. Anyways ...)
• Because the way I see it, we are almost always pressing RMB followed by MMB (at least), right?
Nope - that's only true for people who need axis alignment for most of their work (like an environment artist working by a grid). But for organic modeling or curved hardsurface you pretty much never need that as most everything is done in screen space in these cases, hence no need for such snaps. Not everyone does the same kind of work. Also not sure where the mention of RMB comes from - moving an object along X for instance is done by either tapping Grab > tapping X (or XX) > moving the mouse ; or tapping Grab > moving the mouse in the approximate X direction > tapping MMB > moving the mouse. No RMB involved.
For single hotkey origin placement I'm using Maxivz's tools 'Quick Pivot'.
To straighten an edge I'll either do it manually s>x/y/z>0, use the align pie, or in some cases use Gstretch(which is actually designed to align itself to a grease pencil annotation, but defaults to a straight line if none is detected)
Anyone have any experience doing architectural or level design work in Blender? I'm going crazy without a "preserve uvs"(in max/maya lingo) option while moving verts. I can't even make a wall longer without distorting my uvs. There's the "correct uvs" option on the edge slide tool, but it's only on that tool, which usually isn't quite what I want. Why isn't there a "correct uvs" on the move tool?
@pior Thank you for the informative answers I'm really learning a lot from your inputs, you being the Blender user with more experience in knowing how all the systems relate with each other. For the pivot thing, I was just looking for a Pivot-To-Bottom solution because it's something I do pretty frequently in my work. The fact that Blender has powerful tools is great, but just like in Maya and Max, sometimes a 5-lines-long script is all we need for simple, commonly used functions. We can leave the powerful, many-clicks tools for more complex situations. I'll keep looking for a good solution to this.
As for the way manipulators work, yes, I believe I am starting to understand how it all works. It is a powerful way of working for sure - never switching specifically to a move/rot/scale tool, grab the gizmo, pull, etc. Just make selections, hold down certain keys to move/rot/scale, move on... ...I think though that given my position at work, where the client is not at a point in which he'd agree with dropping autodesk apps for Blender for deliveries, means I would still be forced to use those regularly. And what this means is that, for the moment, I think the smartest thing would be to find a moderate balance of behaviour in my 3D apps, so that if certain modeling things are required to be done in Maya/Max, opening them doesn't slow me down too much.
In other words, I think that a "soft transition" is more reasonable for people like me than "hardcore rewriting all the rules" in my brain, as attractive and powerful as they may look at first glance. So I would still like to switch to dedicate tools in Blender, though I am willing to change my ways by not having to go over to the gizmo, and making use of this automatic axis-recognition. But my personal takeaways at the moment is still that pressing two keys, (Grab+Axis Constraint or Grab+MMB) is a bit silly to move stuff in one direction, since it is one of the most used things during work. My thinking is that only one key should be pressed for this, and the program should predict our axis movement by default. A lot like @maxivz Smart Translate tool, though his doesn't support modifier keys.
Of course, like you say it may be just an initial overreaction, but we'll see.
And the reason why I use RMB inside the move/rot/scale is because I've set it up so that I can actually select things with LMB while in those tools
@musashidan Nice, I had not idea about QBlocker. It looks powerful, I will definitely need to study it in more detail. I know that by default Ctrl+ +/- is grow/shrink; I was asking about doing this for loops and rings though.
Bear in mind that in 99% of the cases the object in question will be built directly over and in relation to the 0,0,0 of the scene anyways. So all that one might need is to set the location of the origin to just that (Apply > location). This along with Set Origin to Center of Mass will cover tons of cases.
"[...]where the client is not at a point in which he'd agree with dropping autodesk apps for Blender for deliveries"
As far as I am concerned, having an external vendor/service provider suggest a change of delivery specs these terms (specifically from autodesk to blender) is quite a bit of a red flag imho - there are always ways to discuss things of course like agreeing on a more open format or a recognized exchange format instead (FBX/OBJ) ; but suggesting/insisting on a change of proprietary app itself causing a change in delivery is a big no-no in my opinion, as it would make a provider seem unprofessional.
I am actually surprised that would even be part of the considerations here as this is imho completely irrelevant to ones learning of an alternative toolset. If a client wants a ZTL, a freelancer would have to provide just that even if most/all of the sculpting work was done in another program.
If anything if a client wants a delivery in a proprietary non-open file format requiring a commercial package to spit it out, what you can always do is to to include one month of subscription for it in the negotiation.
"Just make selections, hold down certain keys to move/rot/scale, move on..."
Hmm, you must be doing something odd here too - the whole point of this interaction paradigm is that these keys *do not* have to be held. The concept is that once a selection is made, you tap the key assigned to Grab, then move things around (with or without restrictions, and with or without numerical keyboard entry), and then confirm. This behavior is actually rooted in CAD software like Autocad.
@pior Right, I stand corrected - I meant to say tap, not hold.
"[...]I am actually surprised that would even be part of the considerations here as this is imho completely irrelevant to ones learning of an alternative toolset. If a client wants a ZTL, a freelancer would have to provide just that even if most/all of the sculpting work was done in another program."
You are not wrong in this. Nonetheless, I talked about this subject to explain my situation and reasoning why I can be adamant to just learning the intended way, encouraged by the app's developers, to learn this software. Maya and Max is so ingrained in our work, that, to be brutally honest, it is a scary idea to my career to move away from them to such different workflows.
Maybe I'm just overthinking all of this I'll continue to plow ahead through hardsurface challenges and come back with Qs.
@pior Thank you for the informative answers I'm really learning a lot from your inputs, you being the Blender user with more experience in knowing how all the systems relate with each other. For the pivot thing, I was just looking for a Pivot-To-Bottom solution because it's something I do pretty frequently in my work. The fact that Blender has powerful tools is great, but just like in Maya and Max, sometimes a 5-lines-long script is all we need for simple, commonly used functions. We can leave the powerful, many-clicks tools for more complex situations. I'll keep looking for a good solution to this.
Wazou's Pie Menu (free and awesome set of pie menus, highly recommended) has such option on the Shift+S menu, here's the code:
import bpy
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'OBJECT') bpy.ops.object.transform_apply(location=True, rotation=True, scale=True) bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_GEOMETRY') o=bpy.context.active_object init=0 for x in o.data.vertices: if init==0: a=x.co.z init=1 elif x.co.z<a: a=x.co.z for x in o.data.vertices: x.co.z-=a
@RaphaelBarros Thank you for sharing this - I did know about Wazou's addon but I haven't had the time to read up on it. So much stuff to keep track of, Blender's community is huge!
Using this script, I seem to be getting different results if I move vertices of a model in the XY space. Do you know why this is so? In theory, it should only be sticking the origin to the lowest Z-height of the model.
@RaphaelBarros Thank you for sharing this - I did know about Wazou's addon but I haven't had the time to read up on it. So much stuff to keep track of, Blender's community is huge!
Using this script, I seem to be getting different results if I move vertices of a model in the XY space. Do you know why this is so? In theory, it should only be sticking the origin to the lowest Z-height of the model.
Sadly I have no idea, I'm still getting acquainted with python coding.
"- Germano Cavalcante de Sousa (mano-wii) for work on snapping tools and precision modeling. (3 months)
- Nathan Letwory (jesterKing) for half time development coordination. (Welcome back!)"
Nathan worked before in Blender and is a Rhino dev (integrated Cycles as far as I know), and mano-wii is the developer of the great addon Snap Utilities.
@musashidan What I mean is I believe originally @Justo was looking for a hotkey that would increase/decrease the number of selected loops/rings. So strictly speaking there is a "limitation" of the Ctrl+Shift +/- hotkeys in that instead of selecting the next loop/ring, it only selects a single edge from said loop/ring. Nevertheless you're right and this can be worked around by selecting the edges and then running Edge Loops. That being said I think the devs could perhaps change the behaviour of Ctrl+Shift +/- in the future to simply select the next loop/ring if the previous selection was also a loop/ring. Cheers
Any tips to use the boolean modifier? I am trying to merge these two simple meshes together but get awful results topology-wise, namely faces within both shapes and connected together with outside faces at all the wrong places.
Currently the cube has two NGons, but I also tried with a triangulated version, snapping its bottom to the exact middle of the cylinder, and then offsetting it slightly. What and how could we get optimal results?
- If you want specific help on an issue like this, post your file. - 2.8 is still in beta. Even though you may be able to solve that one issue in particular, as a willing user of a beta you are taking on the responsability of being... a beta tester. And therefore reporting that sort of stuff to them first and foremost.
Any tips to use the boolean modifier? I am trying to merge these two simple meshes together but get awful results topology-wise, namely faces within both shapes and connected together with outside faces at all the wrong places.
Currently the cube has two NGons, but I also tried with a triangulated version, snapping its bottom to the exact middle of the cylinder, and then offsetting it slightly. What and how could we get optimal results?
I don't get exactly what are the two initial meshes. The result loos ok:
I will be happy to share the file tomorrow - not near Blender atm. @RaphaelBarros you understood correctly the shapes I was illustrating (how exactly do you preview objects like you did? looks way cleaner. XRay and...?)
@musashidan my order of operation was add the modifier to the cylinder, add the cube, set the operation type to Union, Apply modifier. And the results gave internal geometry, like you seem to be experiencing I think. My build is from June 4 I think, so this may have been addressed by now if it really is a bug.
@musashidan Yup, I remember having applied transforms / freeze transformations.
I also am aware of the Machin3Tools clean up, and definitely plan to incorporate it into my workflow I was curious though as to how good can the result be if everything clicks correctly using the native tools first.
Most Blender addons are native tools, it's just that the addon is leveraging those tools and making them work more efficiently or tailored to a specific workflow. Machin3Tools Clean Up is using the native clean up tools from the mesh menu, but all in one handy hotkey.
Edit: Now I'm having the same issue again, internal faces are not being removed. Will keep investigating. I really hope this isn't the long-standing issue that the 2013 thread I mentioned might indicate.
Edit 2: tried the exact same process 10 times in a row and can't reproduce the non-manifold/internal geo error.
Sometimes booleans act weird if the two meshes have some geo that perfectly lines up. Try moving the boolean object ever so slightly to see what happens.
Now, does that means we'll be able to achieve a realtime bevel shader for Eevee? The blur capabilities of the voronoi texture in the first thread is exactly what blender was lacking. But it's still quite limited, unfortunately.
I still wonder why there is nobody willing to port open source Berconmaps to Blender! This would be a very good addition specially working with nodes and displacement. Blender have a few nice one but Berconmaps is a superior beast!
Strangely enough, I cannot seem to reproduce yesterday's bugs now. I've tried with three different types of blocks (with NGons, triangulated, and with its bottom slightly offset in regards to the cylinder's middle edge) and all of them seem to come out correctly. Attaching the scene to this post anyway. Sure, a little cleanup is needed, but it's what is expected out of a bool op and there're no internal faces now.
More Qs 1) I remember @pior you mentioned that it was possible to change the MMB button mapping during the move operation to lock to other axis. Do you know where in Preferences would that be? Going to 3DView>View3D Move Modal, or 3DView>Object Mode>3D View Tool: Move dont seem to have anything. 2) I want to confirm whether I understand this correctly: at the moment there is no "global" import command, right? The way Blender works, you have to choose to import specifically the file type you want, but you cannot just hit Import and choose the file from amongst all your different filetypes in one directory? 3) What's the quickest, easiest way to select the top and bottom faces of a newly created cylinder? As it is now Blender doesn't allow for backface selection, and if I enable XRay and align my viewport so that it is looking at the cylinder from the top-ish, drag-selecting both faces seems to only select the one in the back... 4) Is there any way to modify the smart sub-obj preview selection parameters? For example, the range of pixels at which it will activate, or whether it could preview-display in a color the sub-obj that's going to be selected if the user clicks (basically Maya's convenient behavior)?
3) What's the quickest, easiest way to select the top and bottom faces of a newly created cylinder? As it is now Blender doesn't allow for backface selection, and if I enable XRay and align my viewport so that it is looking at the cylinder from the top-ish, drag-selecting both faces seems to only select the one in the back...
Not sure what's going on there, but both wireframe and Xray(show whole scene transparent) work perfectly as expected my end.
Strangely enough, I cannot seem to reproduce yesterday's bugs now. I've tried with three different types of blocks (with NGons, triangulated, and with its bottom slightly offset in regards to the cylinder's middle edge) and all of them seem to come out correctly. Attaching the scene to this post anyway. Sure, a little cleanup is needed, but it's what is expected out of a bool op and there're no internal faces now.
Co-planer intersecting edges will (can) cause problems with Blender's Boolean tools. Switching the solver from BMesh to Carve usually solves the problem but if you use a lot of Boolean modifiers you'll see intermittent issues.
*Edit*
This error is error is reproducible in Blender 2.8: Under certain
circumstances the co-planer edges of intersecting Boolean geometry will
cause the operation to error by either leaving mesh parts behind or not
closing intersecting faces.
After a little
testing I've found that switching the Overlap Threshold from the defualt
value of "0.000001m" to "0m" resolves the issue in Blender 2.8 and the Boolean operation runs successfully.
@Justo I'm pretty sure the default MMB transform axis constaint shortcuts are hardcoded. I couldn't find anything relevant to change using the "middle mouse" keyword in the search bar. I have custom shortcuts for individual axis/plane constraints in Keymap > Transform Modal Map if you're interested. It would be nice to be able to change the default MMB shortcuts ofc:
@RN Awesome find. I don't suppose this code is somewhere in my Blender root file directory, and I just need to replace that MIDDLEMOUSE with my preferred key, is it.....?
@Justo That's the source code of blender.exe (the 2.79 version at least), it's useful for understanding some of the internals but it'd be a whole lot of trouble to actually change it, a process called "building Blender from source".
I did build it once to run an old version of the Armory3D plugin, and it was a total pain.
If it was me, I'd rather write a custom transform operator that lets you use some other method to pick an axis constraint, but I personally think the built-in way of pressing X, Y or Z is intuitive enough, after a few weeks I didn't think about it anymore.
For me, coming from Max, I really like the hotkey translation. It actually feels liberating abandoning the gizmo. However, I would love to have a quad tap constraint setup: 1 press=free move, 2 press=X, 3 press=Y, 4 press=Z. I've gotten so used to multi-tap hotkeys in Max that it's hard to do without them. I've set a few 'double-click' hotkeys in Blender like the default GG, but the delay between keystrokes(whatever way it's set) means that this doesn't work for some tools.
I still wonder why there is nobody willing to port open source Berconmaps to Blender! This would be a very good addition specially working with nodes and displacement. Blender have a few nice one but Berconmaps is a superior beast!
Getting a simple sphere gradient in the node editor is a pain. I feel obligated to tweak all parameters using a color ramp all the time. And we all know that the color ramp node needs some serious care from a developer. ahah
For me, coming from Max, I really like the hotkey translation. It actually feels liberating abandoning the gizmo. However, I would love to have a quad tap constraint setup: 1 press=free move, 2 press=X, 3 press=Y, 4 press=Z. I've gotten so used to multi-tap hotkeys in Max that it's hard to do without them. I've set a few 'double-click' hotkeys in Blender like the default GG, but the delay between keystrokes(whatever way it's set) means that this doesn't work for some tools.
does anyone know of a multi-tap addon?
There's a double/multitap key option for hotkeys in 3dsMax??
Replies
But yeah, need to start getting some experience working and testing for myself. Today I wanted to do something simple, so maybe I'll come back with some results. Time to open the ol' hard surface challenge threads......
That's middle mouse button - and you could probably remap it to whatever suits your needs too.
@justo once you get used to MMB to lock axis it's pretty good.
holy
A WHOLE NEW WORLD HAS OPENED UP BOYS
And as usual : all that without any need for the mouse cursor to be anywhere near the object itself, and no need to keep any mouse buttons held down during the operation.
I'm so slow haha...But learning new software is exciting!
During the creation of this bolt head, these were my main concerns during the modeling:
1. Edge Unbend - an operator in Align Tools in CTools by Chromoly. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OePp...
2. Line Up - from Zaloopok addon. https://www.blendernation.com/2016/06...
3. Vertex Align - from Vertex Tools. http://samoloty.wjaworski.pl/download...
4. Relax - from LoopTools (built-in).
5. Zero Scaling on Custom Orientation - Manual way to straighten.
6 . Curve Strech - from Mira Tools.
Some of these I think havent been ported to 2.8. I was particularly interested in 2), since it also acts as a circularize if a closed loop is selected.
For certain tools like Scale its convenient, since scaling everything uniformly is a common operation, but moving things around in screenspace, not so much. There is no way to use that MMB behaviour by default, and then press some key to activate all axis at once, is there?
Obviously I am willing to give myself more time to get used to "the Blender ways", but I am asking this to know whether there are other options or not in this area.
- "Any one-button solutions to snapping the pivot (in Blender I believe it's called Origin) of an object to the bottom of its Z height? I found a bunch of old scripts but they all seem to not work in 2.8."
For these the thinking goes differently. In Blender everything that involves placing the origin (or even any scene object really) to a specific location (outside of the grid increments and outside of snapping to existing geo) involves the 3D cursor. For instance :> Selecting a vert,
> Setting the 3d cursor there (It's called "Snapping" in Blender terms, but this is actually more of a "send to" ; hence in this case, "snap to selected" will send the cursor to that one selected vert at the bottom of the object),
> going back to object mode,
> and then performing "Origin to 3D Cursor".
You will probably argue that this seems like a lot of steps compared to the Max/Maya ways (live editing of the pivot itself through a special pivot editing mode) but the advantages far outweighs the limitation because the cursor can be placed anywhere you want independently of the scene contents - by clicking on the surface of objects of course, but also by manually editing its XYZ coordinates, or like here by "snapping it" to an active selection.
On top of it being a reference point for things like moving the origin, the 3D cursor can also act as a temporary center of action for any manipulation (like bending a finger) - meaning that in such cases, messing with the origin of the object for it to be at a new location is not even necessary as the 3D cursor takes that role.
On a side note I personally use the 3D cursor to navigate the viewport, thanks to "frame viewport to 3d cursor". Meaning that unlike in Max/Maya, the center of viewport rotation doesn't have to be the current selection of components, or the bounding box of the currently selected object - it can just be the 3D cursor itself, set arbitarily in space or placed at the surface of an object with just right click. Therefore it is possible to navigate very intricate geometry without having the viewport fly out of the way when rotating. This makes 3d manipulation much more intuitive because nothing unexpected ever happens that way - the result always matches the input. Therefore no more 3d nausea, yay !
(That's why I think it's a bit of shame that 2.8 is forcing right click menus so hard everywhere. It takes away from the usefulness of the 3D cursor and therefore will probably cause new users to completely miss out on it. These menus are of course easy to disable, but I think philosophically speaking this change is a mistake. Anyways ...)
• Because the way I see it, we are almost always pressing RMB followed by MMB (at least), right?
Nope - that's only true for people who need axis alignment for most of their work (like an environment artist working by a grid). But for organic modeling or curved hardsurface you pretty much never need that as most everything is done in screen space in these cases, hence no need for such snaps. Not everyone does the same kind of work. Also not sure where the mention of RMB comes from - moving an object along X for instance is done by either tapping Grab > tapping X (or XX) > moving the mouse ; or tapping Grab > moving the mouse in the approximate X direction > tapping MMB > moving the mouse. No RMB involved.
As for the way manipulators work, yes, I believe I am starting to understand how it all works. It is a powerful way of working for sure - never switching specifically to a move/rot/scale tool, grab the gizmo, pull, etc. Just make selections, hold down certain keys to move/rot/scale, move on...
...I think though that given my position at work, where the client is not at a point in which he'd agree with dropping autodesk apps for Blender for deliveries, means I would still be forced to use those regularly. And what this means is that, for the moment, I think the smartest thing would be to find a moderate balance of behaviour in my 3D apps, so that if certain modeling things are required to be done in Maya/Max, opening them doesn't slow me down too much.
In other words, I think that a "soft transition" is more reasonable for people like me than "hardcore rewriting all the rules" in my brain, as attractive and powerful as they may look at first glance. So I would still like to switch to dedicate tools in Blender, though I am willing to change my ways by not having to go over to the gizmo, and making use of this automatic axis-recognition. But my personal takeaways at the moment is still that pressing two keys, (Grab+Axis Constraint or Grab+MMB) is a bit silly to move stuff in one direction, since it is one of the most used things during work. My thinking is that only one key should be pressed for this, and the program should predict our axis movement by default. A lot like @maxivz Smart Translate tool, though his doesn't support modifier keys.
Of course, like you say it may be just an initial overreaction, but we'll see.
And the reason why I use RMB inside the move/rot/scale is because I've set it up so that I can actually select things with LMB while in those tools
@musashidan Nice, I had not idea about QBlocker. It looks powerful, I will definitely need to study it in more detail. I know that by default Ctrl+ +/- is grow/shrink; I was asking about doing this for loops and rings though.
Bear in mind that in 99% of the cases the object in question will be built directly over and in relation to the 0,0,0 of the scene anyways. So all that one might need is to set the location of the origin to just that (Apply > location). This along with Set Origin to Center of Mass will cover tons of cases.
"[...]where the client is not at a point in which he'd agree with dropping autodesk apps for Blender for deliveries"
As far as I am concerned, having an external vendor/service provider suggest a change of delivery specs these terms (specifically from autodesk to blender) is quite a bit of a red flag imho - there are always ways to discuss things of course like agreeing on a more open format or a recognized exchange format instead (FBX/OBJ) ; but suggesting/insisting on a change of proprietary app itself causing a change in delivery is a big no-no in my opinion, as it would make a provider seem unprofessional.
I am actually surprised that would even be part of the considerations here as this is imho completely irrelevant to ones learning of an alternative toolset. If a client wants a ZTL, a freelancer would have to provide just that even if most/all of the sculpting work was done in another program.
If anything if a client wants a delivery in a proprietary non-open file format requiring a commercial package to spit it out, what you can always do is to to include one month of subscription for it in the negotiation.
"Just make selections, hold down certain keys to move/rot/scale, move on..."
Hmm, you must be doing something odd here too - the whole point of this interaction paradigm is that these keys *do not* have to be held. The concept is that once a selection is made, you tap the key assigned to Grab, then move things around (with or without restrictions, and with or without numerical keyboard entry), and then confirm. This behavior is actually rooted in CAD software like Autocad.
"[...]I am actually surprised that would even be part of the considerations here as this is imho completely irrelevant to ones learning of an alternative toolset. If a client wants a ZTL, a freelancer would have to provide just that even if most/all of the sculpting work was done in another program."
You are not wrong in this. Nonetheless, I talked about this subject to explain my situation and reasoning why I can be adamant to just learning the intended way, encouraged by the app's developers, to learn this software. Maya and Max is so ingrained in our work, that, to be brutally honest, it is a scary idea to my career to move away from them to such different workflows.
Maybe I'm just overthinking all of this
import bpy
bpy.ops.object.mode_set(mode = 'OBJECT')
bpy.ops.object.transform_apply(location=True, rotation=True, scale=True)
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(type='ORIGIN_GEOMETRY')
o=bpy.context.active_object
init=0
for x in o.data.vertices:
if init==0:
a=x.co.z
init=1
elif x.co.z<a:
a=x.co.z
for x in o.data.vertices:
x.co.z-=a
o.location.z+=a
Using this script, I seem to be getting different results if I move vertices of a model in the XY space. Do you know why this is so? In theory, it should only be sticking the origin to the lowest Z-height of the model.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/discussions-for-better-snapping-and-precision-modeling-to-come/5351
- 2.8 is still in beta. Even though you may be able to solve that one issue in particular, as a willing user of a beta you are taking on the responsability of being... a beta tester. And therefore reporting that sort of stuff to them first and foremost.
The result loos ok:
@musashidan my order of operation was add the modifier to the cylinder, add the cube, set the operation type to Union, Apply modifier. And the results gave internal geometry, like you seem to be experiencing I think. My build is from June 4 I think, so this may have been addressed by now if it really is a bug.
I also am aware of the Machin3Tools clean up, and definitely plan to incorporate it into my workflow
More Qs
1) I remember @pior you mentioned that it was possible to change the MMB button mapping during the move operation to lock to other axis. Do you know where in Preferences would that be? Going to 3DView>View3D Move Modal, or 3DView>Object Mode>3D View Tool: Move dont seem to have anything.
2) I want to confirm whether I understand this correctly: at the moment there is no "global" import command, right? The way Blender works, you have to choose to import specifically the file type you want, but you cannot just hit Import and choose the file from amongst all your different filetypes in one directory?
3) What's the quickest, easiest way to select the top and bottom faces of a newly created cylinder? As it is now Blender doesn't allow for backface selection, and if I enable XRay and align my viewport so that it is looking at the cylinder from the top-ish, drag-selecting both faces seems to only select the one in the back...
4) Is there any way to modify the smart sub-obj preview selection parameters? For example, the range of pixels at which it will activate, or whether it could preview-display in a color the sub-obj that's going to be selected if the user clicks (basically Maya's convenient behavior)?
Getting a simple sphere gradient in the node editor is a pain. I feel obligated to tweak all parameters using a color ramp all the time. And we all know that the color ramp node needs some serious care from a developer.