GSoC 2021: Knife Tool Improvements: Weekly Reports

Thanks for all of your amazing work, let’s also not forget undo improvements, that is a long-awaited lifesaver! Kudos to you for managing to implement everything in time for 3.0!!!

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Just… thank you man…

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Congrats ! thanks for this amazing contribution !

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Thank you so much for your work. I tried everything out in master today, and the changes are perfect!
I have a question though


It would be nice if the axes for the knife tool could be changed in the keymap section in preferences.
I usually change my Y axis to “C”, so overall it is “ZXC”, as they are all beside each other. Just a small preference of mine, and I would love to be able to do that for the knife tool as well. Would this be possible?

As well, I would like to add that snapping to an axis on my computer seems to be quite sluggish, there is a palpable lag when switching between them. Is this operation running on the CPU or GPU? I am running an AMD Ryzen 7 2700x 3.70GHz, but a very old terrible Radeon card atm moment.

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Thank you! I will see what I can do about the things you have reported.

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XYZ axis locking is now exposed in the knife modal keymap.

With regards to axis locking feeling sluggish, I have no such problems on my computer, would you be able to share a video/gif showing what you mean? I will try see if I can use a low power computer to test it out soon.

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Wowzers that was fast!!

Here is a gif, I hope this shows well.
Lag
I start by showing the speed on my computer of normal translation axis switching, then move on to the knife tool. I am choosing an axis, then immediately changing it to local, and you can see it takes some time.
CPU
GPU
And sorry I forgot I switched to a really old Nvidia card. My good graphics card broke.

I tried out the Knife Tool in Master last night before bed. Have to say, I am impressed! Lots of great quality of life changes if you ask me and it is honestly an excellent upgrade over the old one.

That said, there are a couple of things I think could be improved. For one, you can’t actually change any settings in the toolbars while in “Cut Mode”. Right now there are two states when you are either inside or outside of this mode, meaning that unless you cancel yourself out you can’t interact with anything in Blender. The mouse cursor icon definitely needs new icons which show when when the tool is active and inactive, since there are multiple times where I have been confused by how I can’t click on any tools in the left toolbar or change the Cut settings in the top toolbar (this affects other Blender panels like Preferences as well, which makes it impossible to get out of Cut Mode if you don’t press the right Cancel assigned button). I think clicking outside of the 3D Viewport should cancel Cut Mode regardless of what my Keymap looks like, since you can actually lock yourself out from using all of Blender if you potentially remove all Cancel actions in the Keymap (was customizing the tool and took notice of this while working on it).

My other critique is that pressing undo after removing all cuts except the source doesn’t cancel you out of Cut Mode. To me it doesn’t feel right that undo just stops working after undoing every cut. It would feel a lot better if everything went back to standard Edit Mode once reaching the beginning of the cut chain so the normal Undo started working. I tried changing this myself in the Keymap, but it only worked properly while using “Double Click”. That however came at the cost of ruining the new Undo system you made by cancelling all cuts if I tapped ctrl+Z too fast.

Btw, regarding the shift modifier snapping cuts to the mid point of an edge, is there a way to make a clean straight cut while only snapping the end point to the middle of an edge without affecting the other cuts? Don’t know if that is actually possible yet, so just wanted to ask. ^-^

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This should now be fixed. Let me know if it persists for you or not.

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This is due to the way Blender’s operators (and by extension, tools) work. With the way the knife tool is designed there is no easy way to fix this at the moment. To allow you to interact with the UI your current cut would have to be thrown away. A different icon is potentially an idea, but I am not even certain if that is possible either.

I agree that it should cancel you out and will change it.

This is not possible at the moment, however it could be added in the future.

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Well, I would be content with just having the cut be thrown away as long as the rest of Blender becomes responsive. Being locked out from the rest of the program because of one tool just doesn’t feel right. Not to mention the potential of perma-locking yourself if you accidentally remove all Cancel commands in the Keymap. That said, you are the dev, so you know best here. I can only give my thoughts on the matter. ^^;

Glad you agree! :partying_face:

Cool! Good to know! :smiley:

This has been fixed! Thank you so much

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