I’d like to start this thread for everyone to collect suggestions about improving Blender defaults, since there are already big and courageous changes happening in 2.8. As almost all of you know, Blender has quite a few defaults that not only confuse new users, but are also widely unpopular among current, veteran Blender userbase. If there are some defaults that are disliked by both new and existing users, and changed by majority of them, then they are obviously not good defaults. The point of defaults is to align out of the box state of the software with expectations of the majority of the users, not minority, regardless of how vocal the minority is.
I am not going to mention default mouse button for selection, since it’s already been beaten to death and consensus on that is pretty clear. So here’s a few things I consider disliked by both new and existing users:
1, Selection should be not additive by default. This applies for both single item selection and border selection. Additive mode should be triggered by a modifier key, and default modifier key-less selection should override previous, not add to it.
2, Release Confirms feature should be enabled by default. The current way “tweak” tool sticks and waits for another mouse click makes it slower to use, less precise and evokes impression that user’s mouse button has malfunctioned. It’s a feature which often feels more like a bug.
I’ll keep adding more of these over time, and I hope others will too.
Free transform (manipulator-less translate, rotate and resize) should always respect active transformation orientation user chose. Right now, it’s really uncomfortable to have to press desired axis button twice every single time user wants to translate an object in local space for example, especially in cases where user does many quick transform tweaks in local object space. In that case, using free transform tools to do that is so agonizingly slow it always in 100% of cases pays off to use manipulators instead.
What I propose is that axis constraints of free transform tools always respect transformation orientation chosen in the header.
In the video editor, could you make ‘Alpha Over’ the default setting for imported items such as video and images.
Why (You don’t really have to read this part)
After about 3 years, I just found out recently that alphaOver was possible in blenders video editor. Everything we do uses alphaOver.
No one wants the transparent part of their image to fill up with black.
And if they do, it’s unusual, so I think those kinda people deserve to have to waste 3 seconds changing it to “Cross”
When it comes to fixing renders by overlaying videos with new frames, Blender does it with a lot less stress than AfterEffects, Because blender is a lot faster and more comfortable in terms of its method of importing and handling files and frames.
I use this function often and I’m sure a lot more people will realise this if it were ‘AlphaOver’ by default.
