Why is it named BMesh?

Being new to the community, there could be some history or in-language being missed here. But I am a big fan of “call it what it is” naming and have been wondering if BMesh passes the test. It added functionality to “EditMesh”, so was it meant to mean ‘Plan B’ Mesh? Is there a better phrase we could use for sake of on-boarding? Some ideas:

AdvancedMeshEditor

  • Fine if there are only two Mesh editors, but otherwise vague

LowLevelMeshEditor, MeshComponentEditor, or MeshElementEditor

  • More descriptive if I am interpreting the purpose correctly

I suspect the name is not because it was “Plan B Mesh” but rather because it is a “Boundary Representation”.

See


https://archive.blender.org/wiki/index.php/Dev:Source/Modeling/BMesh/Design/

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Ah. That’s a good name. Perhaps expanding it to the full “BoundaryMeshEditor” (if only in the documentation title) would be descriptive enough.

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Or ‘B’ as in ‘Blender’

Speaking of bmesh- I was tracking down an unrelated bug the other day and ran across a lot of ifdef’d out references to bmeshes faces with holes, and peeking at the old design spec for bmesh it looks like there was originally a plan for having faces with holes that was tabled in favor of getting bmesh out the door back in 2.63. any idea why there was never any movement on that after 2.63 shipped? any chance it could come back some day?

Who knows? It is possible that some time hole support could be added. It would certainly make some things easier, like knife and boolean, that need to do special things to connect holes to the rest of a face. (Though there’s another thing that would also have to change to make things easier: there is currently a rule that no vertex can appear in a face more than once.)

But I would guess the chances are slim, mainly because there would be a huge amount of work to make sure that all of the algorithms that have assumed no holes get update to work when there are holes. It is unclear that anyone will regard the benefits to be worth that amount of work, at least when compared to other projects that would have a bigger payoff.

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You know, I don’t think I ever asked Geoffrey why it’s called BMesh; I always thought it was “Blender Mesh” myself. I’m halfway tempted to send him a message on LinkedIn and ask. It’s probably either “Blender Mesh” or “Boundary Mesh” though.