Merge by distance
When no element is selected, the function should act on all elements of the model, just as in photoshop no selection is treated as acting on the entire bitmap
When no element is selected, the function should act on all elements of the model, just as in photoshop no selection is treated as acting on the entire bitmap
4 Comments
That sounds like a risky unwanted operation.
Blender relies heavily on the "Select something, then apply an operation on it" paradigm. Most tools (if not all of them aside <active tools/gizmos>?) are designed around it.
And, for a tool that can bring drastic changes like this one, I don't think it's a good idea to make it operate on "everything" when nothing is selected. I foresee users complaining about destroying their meshes seemingly for no reason, people working on multiple object at once crashing Blender and the click of a button, ...
Besides, if this would be implemented, it would be then expected to work with any selection-based tools.
this has worked very well in lightwave modeler for decades, and saves a lot of work in situations like this when you want to merge vertexes that are in the same position. As I wrote above, it's the same principle as in photoshop, no selection and selecting an option, makes the default action area the whole model, not nothing. From the user's side, this is quite logical, you don't select an option in order for it to do nothing
We made an addon for batch operations like that (remove doubles, unhide mesh selection, clear custom normals, triangulation, tris to quads) applied to a selection in object mode. But acting for the entire scene is not safe enough.
You always have undo from that. Blender's main problem is forcing the user to behave in a non-intuitive way, because still more power is held by programmers than UX designers. For example, doing separate by selection, blender still uses as active the element from which the geometry was separated, instead of automatically switching to separated. For some reason undo in delete modifier does not work. Why doesn't TAB in the outliner work to switch modes, when that key is not used there for anything?