Viewing Mesh Statistics While in Object Mode

User Interface
#1

Some users have expressed a desire to view mesh statistics without having to toggle into Edit Mode for each object. I have a patch that does this with builds linked below.

With this change you can enable “Statistics” in Viewport Overlays. With nothing selected it will just show the scene totals, but select any mesh object and you will also see the details you normally can only find in Edit Mode:

ObjectStats

Builds:

Useful or unnecessary? Obvious or confusing? One concern we have is this creates more UI changes as you select objects, which could be distracting. But this is only on an optional overlay, so is that okay?

Your thoughts and feedback are appreciated. But please stick to the subject of the inclusion of this data in this way.

31 Likes
#2

There is a small bug - if you select one object (active) and then box select some others (not including the active), the stats do not update and show totals only.

Generally its something I would like to have in heavy scenes - I used it a lot in other packages. But not sure if the total is necessary to be visible when something is selected. In edit mode it makes sense, but in object mode it can get a bit noisy:
image
As totals are anyway optionally visible in the bottom scene stats…
I think this should be more of a guide for scene awareness - so edges and faces might be overkill (in object mode)

#3

Absolutely useful, it allows the user access to data without going to edit mode that is just extra pointless clicks for 1 feature, something like this is what i wanted for some time and I’m sure others did too :grinning: (it’s one of those features that people assume is already in blender but isn’t :sweat_smile:)

Would be interesting if you could toggle on/off objects/vert/edge/face/tri/ individually (but something like that would be strictly in the settings menu somewhere)

one small note would be that if you deselect an object the object text should disappear (the sphere text did not disappear after deselecting as seen on the demo gif)

1 Like
#4

Hello,
I’m trying your build and good, it’s functionnal. Not always easy to read the line, maybe to try another align ?

  Objects | 9
 Vextices | 398
    Edges | 860
...

And why not some option. I’m working on video games, and it’s not interesting to me to have Faces, and edges, only triangles.

#5

I’m pretty confident in saying this is how the majority of users expect it to work.
Makes totally sense that way and is very useful!

1 Like
#6

Made a similar feature to check topology statistic:
(second Torus - instanced)

Would be nice to see this too.
P.S. delete the post if needed to keep thread clear. Sorry.

1 Like
#7

Yea, this makes sense. Never missed it really bad, but it’s absolutely welcome. Cheers !!

#8

IMHO: When you select an object, you see both object and scene statistics. That can be confusing. I think it should either one or the other (unless specified otherwise).

No active selection: Only scene statistics
Active selection: Only object(s) statistics

#9

Useful and obvious, absolutely. Thank you for tackling it.

Couple of notes:

  1. Like Atair, at first I thought this would be too noisy and only showing info about the selected should suffice—you can see the totals by de/selecting everything anyways. But it didn’t feel bad in usage to me, and there’s the scenario where you have something selected that’s outside viewport borders at the moment so you think you’re seeing totals when you’re not. Maybe that’s a corner case, not sure, but being unambigous might be better.

  2. Non-mesh objects have inconsistent implementation. Lights and grease pencil strokes know they’re not meshes; cameras, point clouds and curves don’t, displaying an unhelpful 0 / 12345: Probably only the “showing 0” part is strictly the concern of this patch, but it would be nice if all object types could enjoy the same first class treatment. It’s also technically misinformation potentially confusing for beginners (it’s not that this point cloud doesn’t have any edges…)
    stats

  3. It uses the active object to choose the category of info to be displayed, so it only shows totals when there is no active object. I know this is inherited behaviour and it was kind of OK when only totals were ever shown, but with the emphasis now being on the selected objects, this feels lacking to me:

    image
    image714×403 39.2 KB

    image
    image703×375 92.4 KB

I don’t know, current looks alright to me:
stats align

#10

Content of Outliner and Properties are changing during selections, too. That is not a lot more disturbing.

I think that is possible to mitigate visual impact of change.
Globally most of totals will have same amount of digits.
Your example is at 3 vertices to correspond to that.
90 % of time, hundreds of vertices will corresponds to hundreds of edges, faces, triangles. Same for thousands of vertices. Same for millions of vertices.
So, if numbers are aligned to the right, instead of being aligned to the left, there is a strong probability that 4 last separators will almost constantly be aligned.

The reading would be easier.

And the change of counts of selection would be less noticeable than current situation in edit mode.

#11

No. The magnitude of the number of components selected is not related to the total. You can select 1 vertex out of millions.

This isn’t really the place to for this, but you’d really have to mockup how it would look in every circumstance. It isn’t as easy as it might seem at first. You either have even columns that are constantly changing widths, or you have large empty spaces that intrude into the workspace.

#12

By using the world “totals”, I meant second number of row for scene total.

stats_counts

The width of column just have to be adapted to the longest row.

Or you can have width of column for selection equal to column of total.
stats_counts_2

Most of time, visible gaps will be 2,3,6 characters wide. They will not be noticeable.

Statistics are displayed on top left corner of 3D View.
If changes happening on the right of 3DView, in Outliner and Properties are not disturbing ; it is because there is a clean border between editors.
If you create a clean border at the right of statistics, with middle of 3D View where attention of user is focused : there is less disturbance.

#13

just throwing it out there:
image

A bit harder to read, but for sure minimal…
i mean - we do this for light power with MW - and that is a way worse place for it then here

#14

There are many places where we could bikeshed about the formatting, but this isn’t it. I’d rather stay on topic here on whether we want to display this information while in Object Mode. If the answer is “yes, but only if the format changes” then your answer to this question is “no”.

#15

Selected polycount is definitely useful for gamedev and other poly restricted workflows.
There are few addons/workarounds that does that in non optimal way, so having it build in will be definitely helpful.

It is consistent with current Edit Mode. And being consistent is one of 4 UI principles.

I haven’t saw any user comment about current edit mode spacing, and your patch will have exact same behavior.
For me it is no brainier: Yess, add it please!.

There are few RCS proposals that proposes same way what you did:

and this one, that also proposes additional things:

1 Like
#16

Thanks. Fixed and I updated the build links in the first comment.

How it shows “Sphere” above the stats? That’s showing which object is active. That’s how it works now. Unless you mean something else.

I think I have this working better now.

Fixed.

2 Likes
#17

Yes, the active object,
Side question, Is it possible to deselect an object so that the active object gets cleared so that it does not keep showing the last active object, cause when you deselected it still displayed the last active object ?

#18

I don’t. The program tries really hard to always have an active object even when nothing is explicitly selected. By design, but you can get really weird behaviors, like when there is one object selected but it is not the active one. And the active one is not selected. There has been some discussion about changing this, but no idea how that is going.

1 Like
#19

Perhaps this topic could be another point to further that discussion wherever it might be :slightly_smiling_face:

#20

Here is task regarding that:

https://developer.blender.org/T82359