Papercuts - Copy/Paste

Archive Usability
1

Hi everyone,

I have two small papercuts regarding the copy/paste behavior in the viewport. This could be a quick and easy win in regards to usability and step forward towards industry-standard UX.

1. Gizmo position of pasted objects
I actually believe this one might be a bug, but it’s connected with the second point.
When pasting an object, the gizmo is not positioned at the newly created object, where you would expect it. Instead, there are two cases:

2. Pasted object isn’t active
When pasting an object, arguably most users want to have control over it straight away. Therefore it’s not clear why the pasted object doesn’t become active.
This can lead to unexpected results.

In this example I want to copy and paste the light, move it to the side and change its color.

Group 5
Group 52285×4204 862 KB

Potential fix:

  1. The gizmo could always appear where the object is pasted (belonging to the new object).
  2. The pasted objects could become active. When multiple objects are pasted, the selection and active object could be transferred to the newly pasted ones. Also, all previous selections could be deselected after pasting.

Thanks for consideration :slight_smile:

3 Likes
2

These both seem like bugs. Especially (both scenarios of) #1.

3

Thinking of the copy-paste concepts in a text editor or a spreadsheet. It looks like there is the equivalent paradigm is applied here.

  • Copy Formatting: Only the appearance
  • Copy Text: Only pure text
  • Full Copy: Both formatting and text

With the same mind set there would be multiple ways to copy. Though there are might be 100 ways or even more, but at least the most fundamental (according to use cases) would be:

  • Copy Data: Only the properties and values of the object (data).
  • Copy Full: The entire object as a class template + all of it’s data data.
  • Copy Transform: Since transforming is quite very fundamental I just throw it around as a extra.

And with the same idea pasting as well:

  • Paste Data: Only the data.
  • Paste Full: Everything.
  • Paste Transform: Only transformation.
4

I reported the issues some days ago via bug-report (https://developer.blender.org/T79733)
Hopefully, not only the buggy part will be resolved, but also its behavior.

Copy/paste could simply get aligned with the duplication behavior as this works like a charm!