Feature Proposal

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Fri Aug 06, 2004 11:11 pm

Dear developers,

after i talked with other cg artists about blender (i use Blender, they use 3dsMax) i started creating a feature proposal:
http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/

It is just a beginning, just a proposal not a law.
hope this is inspiring.

Sorry for my bad english.

z3r0_d · Post by **z3r0_d** » Sat Aug 07, 2004 6:10 am

when you constrain movement to an axis in grab mode [or scale mode and stuff] with either the middle mouse button or the x,y,z keys the axis does show up [it has for a couple releases]

as for the viewport thing you mention, I think it would end up with a "camera" like command to rotate the view, I would find it annoying, I don't usually need to constrain rotation of the camera to one axis [and if I do I would usually be okay simply using front/side/back/top/right/bottom views]

though, I think there should be a view rotation mode which doesn't allow the camera to be flipped over [like the blender camera controls in wings3d]. People think turntable should work this way [iirc it never has]

solidify sounds a lot like intrude does in wings3d [except it doesn't create holes on selected faces]

personally I don't use the intrude function [my objects have been too complex for it to be useful to me]

[oh, and you can do what you describe with: shift+d [enter, without moving anything], alt+s and a negative value, then [optionally] flip normals]

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Sat Aug 07, 2004 10:46 am

Thanx for your comments.

With rotating the perspective view around an axis i do not mean camera view.

Solidify is more as you discribed with
[oh, and you can do what you describe with: shift+d [enter, without moving anything], alt+s and a negative value, then [optionally] flip normals]#
If there where holes in the object or it is a tube or a half sphere it generates the side faces too.

I know that the axis is shown when you move along it but:
- when your object is located at the origin you do not see that because the axis is located where the standard axis is
- if your object not located at the origin you have two axis and sometimes it is good to know along which you movng your object

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Sat Aug 07, 2004 9:52 pm

I updated the solidify section with a example picture and links to solidify plugins from other software (bottom).

Take a look:
http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/#4

FourMadMen · Post by **FourMadMen** » Sun Aug 08, 2004 12:54 am

As far as the solify goes, I would suggest modifying the technique above to use "E" instead of "SHIFT+D":

1) Select verts
2) Select "Extrude" (press enter without moving anything)
3) Select "Shrink/Fatten Along normals" (move until the thickness is as you want it)

The extrude above will generate all required faces.

Here is an image that I just created using this method. The starting object was a half UV Sphere with a hole cut into it.

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Sun Aug 08, 2004 1:14 am

ok,
but think about speed (one step instead of some steps and the problem that you must think about how to do it without solidify) and think on complex objects
So i think a solidify function would be usefull.
As you can see at the bottom of the chapter other 3d software has these functions too.

FourMadMen · Post by **FourMadMen** » Sun Aug 08, 2004 1:19 am

Yes, I agree that it would be a nice to be able to cut out the extra step. I just wanted to point out a way it can be done at this moment (in case you needed to do it and we're not sure how).

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Sun Aug 08, 2004 12:19 pm

Thanx for your comments, it was interesting to see how it is possible now. But as you wrote you need some steps more for solidify and you can do this just outside or inside but not from center.

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Mon Aug 09, 2004 11:19 pm

I updated the feature proposal again:

# Face Selecting in Edit Mode
# Uniform Key and Mouse Action

http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:54 am

...and another update of my proposal, this time about the knife tool:
http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/#10

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Mon Aug 16, 2004 7:01 pm

Nice idea about the knife tool..

ideasman · Post by **ideasman** » Tue Aug 17, 2004 2:57 pm

Scaling allong normals isnt quite right for an inset function teachnicly speaking.

Say Im making a building and the walls need to be 90 cm Thick.

- Using scale allong normals dosent make all walls the same thickness.

Im working on an inset/outset function in python- Its not as hard as I expected-
The resulting mesh well have a uniform thickness.

- Cam

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Tue Aug 17, 2004 11:14 pm

...and again a update of my proposal. I thought about the boolean function:

http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/

theeth · Post by **theeth** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 12:39 am

The workflow you suggest for booleans doesn't fit at all in the UI. It's quite standard to have two (or more) object selected and have the Active object work on the Selected object(s).

Martin

ElBarto · Post by **ElBarto** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 9:35 am

@theeth
I know that and any time i use boolean (that is not often because the bad results) i do not know which object i must select first and which i must select last.
That's why i suggested this workflow because so you can abort without modifing the mesh if you have selected the wrong object first.