Hi, my name is Michał Krupa. I’ve been using Blender for the past 25 years, and I currently work at CD Projekt RED as an Engineering Manager for the Assets Production Pipeline team. We’re a group of pipeline TDs focused on developing tools to support our artists.
We’ve successfully integrated Blender into our production pipeline for certain asset types—primarily static meshes used in level design. However, we’ve encountered an issue related to mesh naming conventions that’s causing some friction.
Our artists often hit the current 64-character limit for mesh names (MAX_ID_NAME). While they’ve adjusted their naming to avoid exceeding this limit, things get tricky when the assets are exported to Unreal Engine via FBX. Unreal requires specific prefixes (e.g., UBX_
for collision boxes), and the naming format also includes the parent object’s name—quickly pushing us over the limit.
Given this, I’d like to propose increasing the MAX_ID_NAME
limit to 258 characters (currently 66) in Blender 5.0. I understand this would break forward compatibility, but I’ve been told there are already compatibility-breaking changes planned for 5.0, so this could be a timely opportunity.
I realize the 64-character limit dates back to an era when every byte counted (I’ve been there 3,000 years ago). But in modern pipelines, where a single 4K RGB texture can use as much memory as ~195,000 object names, this restriction feels increasingly unnecessary.
I’ve already built a working version of Blender with the increased limit, and everything appears to function well. Implementation-wise, the change seems straightforward. My team and I are ready to drive this feature to completion, and we have access to a group of highly skilled C++ developers who can help support it.
So my main question is: Would it be possible to open a discussion about this change, or is the feature list for Blender 5.0 already closed?