Matt Ebb

Until recently, this hasn’t been a feasible change to make, since the centre points were the only indication of selected objects in solid or shaded display. However, with Ton Roosendaal’s addition to highlight the edges of selected objects, the centres are no longer as necessary. I’m convinced this is already an improvement in terms of getting rid of the clutter and allowing me to concentrate on my work, but the real value comes when modelling. The XYZ axis marker displays aligned with the object’s local co-ordinates, not global co-ordinates, which is extremely helpful when using axis-constrained transformation (move, rotate, scale). I already owe Martin ‘theeth’ Poirier a lifetime’s supply of free beers for the implementation of this wonderful feature, but one drawback has been that it can be difficult to work out which local axis to constrain to, since the local axes aren’t visually communicated in any way. With this addition, it’s very easy to see, for example, the direction that the red line is pointing in, and quickly hit the G, X, X key sequence to move an object or sub-object along the local X axis. Very fast modelling workflow that takes minimal thought after getting used to the X = Red, Y = Green, Z = Blue convention.

Another interesting side-effect is the extra visualisation of the object’s transformation. While the center dot only represented the object’s location in space, the axes visualise location, rotation and size. This may be increasingly useful information to see, with the addition of the new ‘Align’ mode for transforming object centers only, which will be in Blender 2.34.

On a vaguely related note, I hope you like my new ‘Light’ colour theme :) I found the default was just too dark to be effective in the office I’m working in at the moment – right next to a very bright wall of windows. It also seems to fit in much more nicely with this Mac OS X desktop, too. Colours and themes are also another item ony my list for further investigation before 2.35. Actually, speaking of releases, this will be my fifth post here, with four of them about Blender UI. Yes, there is more to me than Blender, I guess it’s the general state of excitement leading up to what will be a very impressive 2.34 release!

Some of this functionality can already be achieved by appending datablocks from another .blend file, however this method has the following disadvantages:

• It’s not easy to install new presets
• It’s not easy to include new presets by default in the installation package
• It’s not possible to append presets for things that don’t have datablocks (like themes)
• It’s not possible to prest only some of the settings in a datablock. For example if I append a ‘Scene’ datablock, it will also import a whole bunch of other information, when all I might want to preset is the frame size and pixel aspect (perhaps for a proprietary image or video format one might be working with).

There are also additional advantages to using Python for this:

• Values can be generated programatically, for example using random numbers, or generating values based on relationships to other Blender data
• Presets could integrate well with other Python scripts, such as a script that applies variations on a preset to a number of other objects. Python script authors would also be able to easily copy existing code to or from presets to other scripts

The code I have working (shown in the screenshot), was relatively simple to create. Ideally, I’d rather have the presets in a proper popup menu (like the image format menu) so you can see what preset is currently selected, and somehow have it change to ‘Custom’ when the values have been manually changed. The scripts I used to make the presets in the screenshot are available here: A3, 300dpi, HDTV 1080/24p. These scripts can be run manually inside current Blender versions, but of course won’t show up in a presets menu.

Perhaps one more thing to go on the 2.35 todo list!