UI: Ability to modify multiple elements at the same time without "alt"
Blender is not behaving like most of the other creation softwares and OS. Most of them offer a useful, standardized way of selecting and modifying multiple elements at the same time.
Current status: working partially with the alt key, but not for materials, not for modifiers => unclear, unpractical, misleading workflow.
Solution: when multiple objects are selected at the same time, any modification (scale, modifier, texture...) should apply to ALL ITEMS.
CMD/CTRL Key should be used to select elements not following each other (impossible for now, as far as I know, the MAJ key being the only modifier for multiple selection).
3 Comments
One of the first mods I made to the Blender keymap (about 5 minutes after starting to use Blender seriously) was to set up CTRL to do multiple selections. In the keymap editor find the select function, duplicate it, choose the extend option and assign it to CTRL. I agree it should be the default, but agreeing on sensible defaults in any open source community is going to be. . . difficult . On the other hand Blender is blessed with a powerful keymap editor. Not taking the time to learn to use it is really to short change yourself.
What you mention under solution isn't really a solution. You're essentially saying "it should work" there. But how would it work with multiple modifiers of the same type, multiple node-based materials, etc? How do you make sure the behavior is predictable, so the user knows exactly what will be changed? This latter part is important since it's easy to mess things up without noticing otherwise. There's just a lot more to it than covered in this post.
Look at the way other softwares do it; when elements with, let's say, different modifiers are selected, then none of these shaders are displayed and a label like "multiple shaders selected" is shown.
If all of the selected objects have the same modifier with the same value, then the modifier is fully shown.
If all of the selected objects have the same modifier with different values, then the modifier is shown with a greyed out /empty field.
The user knows exactly what will be changed because that only changes the parameter he's changing.
I don't get why that would be so tricky. It's a basic feature in all content creation softwares.