Y - axis, finally UP?

@Jason van Gumster: Good day Jason. I´ve been wondering if you´re an active developer on the Blender team?. I´ve not read about you. And certainly you seem to specifically stop / question / make strange ubiquitous inquiries on anything I post, even though I back up my posts with proof of concept / reality / real-day-to-day actions for CGI production. I´ve clearly written why it is necessary for Blender to be integrated in a "more traditional/propietary" studio workflow. "Y" up request is a long due one on Blender forums.

@3dcinetv: I admin this site and I've been around the Blender community for a long time. I'm not a Blender developer (though I've had a few patches and add-ons), but I've seen just about every feature request for Blender under the sun and I know enough about Blender's codebase to understand if an ask is simple or difficult.

Y-up has been asked for many times, you're right. But just as many times, there have been responses and explanations just like mine. There simply isn't a universal standard for which axis is up in DCC software. And most software also doesn't give the option to switch.

@Jason van Gumster: explain UV "Y" up.

@3dcinetv: It's not really relevant to the discussion or the points I brought up, but I'll bite. You're looking down the Z-axis in the UV Editor. When you do that, Y feels like up.

@3dcinetv: There is logical explanation, it's top view projection of 3D Cartesian coordination system (like most 2D projection in mathematical or any engineering approach). I'am mechanical engineer and I can't really stand y-up approach in most of 3D software's. I can see where is idea come from, but I think this is not Blender problem, but the problem of other software's.

@bagylender: I just read from you "most 3d softwares" <- though in the beginning of this post it is mentioned "y is not a dcc standard". But I´ve presented facts, and cited cases where "Y" is definetly needed on the original post. So what´s it gonna be, "merv"? (Citing neo): Is Y a standard on "most" dcc apps?

@3dcinetv: I've pointed out (as other people have) that there's no consistency here among DCC tools. I've also noted that making such a change in Blender would be difficult. So it would be nebulous gains for quite a large amount of work. In my personal opinion, it's not worth the effort.

If you can find a developer willing to do it, then more power to you. I'm just not personally in favor of it. There's no need to take offense or attack people who disagree with you.

Just to bring that discussion to the table, I will talk about a little example from my experience with Maya.

With Maya (Y up X left Z forward), when I export to (e.g.) Unreal Engine (Z up Y right X forward), i just have to select the correct axes in the export options. Once in Unreal, the importer asset is in the right orientation, without any additional rotation.
In Blender (Z up X left Y backward), I choose the correct axes for Unreal, but once in Unreal that asset will have additional rotations. Sure there is the "apply transformations" option, but it's experimental and doesn't work on skeletals.

When I export from Blender to other softwares, if the axes are not the same and if I can't apply the transforms (e.g. Blender's FBX exported doesn't support applying transforms on rigged models), I always end up with a rotated asset. Same on import.
Maybe there are ways around it, or maybe I'm just doing it wrong, I'm not expert of import/export after all.

But in any case... Maybe there is some work needed here.

If the importers/exporters could have a perfect management of axes no matter the content and without any guess work from the user, Blender's working/display axes wouldn't mind anyone. But most important, it will allow a better workflow between Blender and other softwares, which profits everyone.

Besides, in Maya there's an option in the preferences to switch the axes .
It's just a display option, and Y keeps being the actual up axis at all times.

But they did managed to have a nice import/export system, so maybe we could too.

* @-L0Lock- * Don't quote me on this because I'm not 100% sure myself but I believe this has to do with FBX being a constantly changing proprietary file extension that is owned by Autodesk. Because of this, implementing it efficiently into Blender is hard.

* @Craig Jones * That was the time since we work on the horizontal desk. But in this era of digital we work in the vertical screen. Y means UP in every software that not try to based itself on the plain old desk. And also in the whiteboard/blackboard since ancient times

Z is just arbitrary depth relative to screen. Only architect required it to be up. But now blender are not being used only for architect. Almost all artist begin their life with 2D which Y is up. Suddenly when they want to do 3D they need to wrap their head around the concept of Z-Up just to satisfied architect's useless dogmatism

This mindset make Maya more appealing

* @Jason van Gumster * Folks, there is no explanation for either axis orientation that can't be strongly argued against. 2d images are XY, Cameras always use z for depth. Cad floorplans are XY, the camera can be facing in any direction. etc. etc. etc.

It all comes down to whether or not people who want Y up are willing to commit the significant amount of time or money to make this happen. I can all but guaranty that the Blender devs will not want to dedicate this tremendous amount of time to the cause at the expense of stability, new features, and software performance. They just aren't. Bring money or development skill otherwise this argument is pointless.

@Pawel Piotrowski: 3d Cad and design tools mostly use Z up. Inventor, AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks, Rhinocerous - to name a few.

@Pawel Piotrowski: how did you "inline" the image? did you used "embed" code?

@3dcinetv: That's done with Markdown syntax. There's a cheatsheet link on the right every time you want to post here.

How does Maya accomplish being able to switch from Z to Y -- is this in the 3D view?

@brian651msp: There's a setting for it in user preferences. However, after changing the setting, all the tools are still pre-set to Y up. And opening a ma/mb file that was saved as Y up in a Z up environment introduces some really strange camera stuff. I'm not certain as to the explicit how , unfortunately. Given the strange results I can only imagine it's been done in some arse upwards way!

@LeeCWilliams: and all cad programs have z- up

@LeeCWilliams: Z up on modo? what´s that guess again? imgur.com/a/Cq4FXSX Don´t want to say it like this, but please vote Y-up.

@LeeCWilliams: How much Python experience would I need if I wanted to alter Alembic imports to allow for a different axis and orientation? Is it codable in Python or would I need to know C as well?

@LeeCWilliams: Rhino3D is also Z-up

@3dcinetv:

• Unreal is Z up.
• The "Up" Axis is arbitrary.
• The Import/Exporter and the format is what matters.
• Blender is used by real studios, for real products.
• Stop using examples that use Z up.

Now, kindly stop spreading nonsense and your own delusions: it stopped being funny yesterday.

@Craig Jones: gosh. do I have to record a video to show what many posts on the forums already are showing? (that there are problems when you want to integrate Blender to other studios)?

@3dcinetv: "The main point on Y-up is to consolidate Blender into a standardized Y-UP pipeline which, guess what? It´s a STANDARD on producing movies and videogames. "

3ds Max is THE standard for making videogames. 3ds Max is Z-up. 3ds Max works very well in mixed platform studios' pipelines.

The main issue really in your pipeline argument is not whether or not a Z-up program can play well with other software (there are plenty of houses who use a combination of 3ds Max and Maya for example). The issue has more to do with the poor implementation of FBX in Blender. Unfortunately FBX is a proprietary interchange format owned by Autodesk. Access to the format and keeping up with current iterations, therefore, costs money. If you would like to provide this money, your studio and the whole userbase of Blender will greatly benefit.

@janne.m.jankala: Never considered the 2D stuff to be the reason they went Y up. Thanks for that insight! :D

@rontarrant: Mathematicians use Z-up (it's the third dimension, check 2D plots vs. 3D plots)

* @Gottfried Hofmann * I stand corrected. Mathematicians, engineers, and architects would vote for z-up while artists, (coming from the 2D world) animators, and filmmakers would vote for y-up.

In 3D world, Depth is generally referred to for distance from you to the object far in fron of you. Like a desk’s dimension would indicate depth as the distance between the corner near you to a corner far from you on the same line. “Z-depth” term in 3D art generally means depth farther away from your point of you. This is often used for “depth of field” or for environmental fog creation. So artists view the world from these perspectives, finding logic in a world that has y-up, and z-deep.

And I would say that if at all possible, would be great to create option to reorient the world to accommodate the artists with these preferences, given the purpose for blender IS primarily to help the artists rather than CAD/engineering workflow.

@rontarrant: 1: last I checked, new added bones were Z aligned.

2 - 5 are all related to 2D images/vectors.

6: yet funnily enough, I find Z up to be more natural than Y up.

@LeeCWilliams: If you add a bone, then go into edit mode and turn on Bone (Properties) > Display > Axis, the Y-axis is up. That's what I'm referring to. You're right about object mode, though, which is what needs attention.

Frankly, I don't care which axis points upward as long as it's consistent across all Blender windows. It would, however, seem odd to have the coordinates of the UV editor be x & z instead of x & y which is why the approach that makes the most sense is to simply make Y-up everywhere.

As artists, any time we have to stop and think about how to use our tools, it takes us out of the creative mindset necessary to create art that goes beyond the mundane.

@rontarrant: Well, that's just object rotation and local axis.

and it is consistent. XY are 2D, Z is height for 3D.

See, I'm not sure about you, but knowing how my tools work helps my creative mindset.

get outta here oldster!

* @Gekigengar * Because as far as I know it is hard coded into Blender. Now the question is, are you going to spend a massive amount of time rebuilding the code and all of the dependencies for something that isn't crucial

* @Craig Jones * Maybe we should put together a Kickstarter orGoFundMe campaigne and raise money for this feature. It might get us a step or two closer.

@L. Nahuel Belich: wait. Where did I mentioned "everyone is doing the same"? - Because I didn´t wrote that; please quote me. Don´t "assume". Thanks.

@3dcinetv: Even though this is not a litteral quote case, i had quote post from you in the past in other communites and was a dead end with all kind of evasive arguments, i'm not going there again not going to lose time. As long as you keep writing things from your point of view ignoring the rest of experienced users, as this blenderhead community had been seeing a long time ago with lot of users, Im going to keep "assuming" things, time have prove me that some patterns are basically always the same. Do you want to get credibility, ok, poke developers and build a proper proposal not a wish list, you are not the only artist that work in mixed pipelines, consider that there are other priorities or alternatives, things take time to change especially with those kind of arguments that you trow in the "proposal" and in the answers to other users that kind of communication usually backsfire a lot.

you could easily send a mail to Ton or Sergey or Bretch, Campbell too, open a task in fabricator to get core developers attention, also the developers blog, if it is easy they will probably change this if its not you will know really quickly

@tedkuogame: To be fair, most people aren't saying that z-up is the way. Most are saying that there isn't a the way. Whenever anyone changes 3D software, this is one of those things for which there's not a lot of consistency and should therefore be one of those things that people should expect to adapt to (because if supporting multiple coordinate systems were easy, all applications would offer that ability).

@tedkuogame: You have greatly misinterpreted what you've read here. This is proposing a VERY DEEP change to the base code of blender. Almost all of Blender's 2,000,000 lines of code would have to be changed to give the option of y up. Even after that is done, is there still a z up option? What about left handed vs right handed coordinate systems?

It's not a "we're right and you're wrong" type of stance its more of a "do we really want to completely rewrite blender just so y is up" type of thing. Especially when, as Jason states, there really doesn't seem to be a standard. Especially when it will anger the other half of users who started out in 3ds Max, Blender, or AutoCAD (to name a few). Especially when SO MANY RESOURCES (man hours) would have to be committed to the change. Especially when there are so many other things we would like added to Blender that are new features that would make Blender more usable and powerful. Especially when changing such a large percentage of the code will inevitably result in an unstable Blender for years to come. All other blender development would have to come to a complete halt for a LONG time for this change to be made.

Look, the devs have worked on 2.8 for a couple of years now which was considered a pretty major overhaul. Switching to Y up will be an almost complete rewrite - orders of magnitude more difficult and in-depth than the 2.8 changes were. Do we REALLY want this?

@tedkuogame: I'll also add that I switch from z to y multiple times per day with no issues whatsoever. It doesn't break my flow in any way. I've been doing this for a long time now and have always just accepted that there are different schools of thinking on this point, but also that there is no point to switching to some arbitrary up axis when half of the 3d software on used in industry will still be using a different up axis.

@dpdpforlife: I will only respond to this, as I saw your comment being written yesterday. Purely for respect. I ´ll leave it off like this "Y" particles. Motion blur attributes for .abc caching. Enough said.

@3dcinetv: I don't that is enough said...because I have no clue what you're talking about. What does motion blur attributes for abc caching have to do with Y axis up? It sounds like further proof that the issue is in the import/export and not with what axis is pointing up. Max works fine with ABC and unity. Blender does not. They are both z up.

* @dpdpforlife * Now you've got me wondering how the Maya developers implemented this feature. If the up axis is 'baked into every line of code' and the rewrite would take (from what you're implying) years to implement, there's no way a large corporation like AutoDesk could talk its profit-hungry investors into spending that kind of time to implement such a small thing. And yet, the feature was implemented, so either: a) it's NOT baked into every line of code, or b) there was a profit-oriented reason for implementing it. Perhaps to gain a wider user base? How much wider would Blender's user base become if Y-up was an option?

* @dpdpforlife * Good for you. Not everyone can.

* @Craig Jones * Thanks, Craig. I did get a response from Brecht with some ideas for where to start the search within the code. If I can even get a start on a map of where in the code to make changes, perhaps from these humble beginnings a Kickstarter or GoFundMe campaign can be put together so we can find someone (or more realistically, a small team) with the qualifications to do the work. I have no idea how many people would be willing to contribute to such a fund, but it's possible a lot who would aren't speaking up because they don't need the headache of being condemned for their point of view on this subject.

* @rontarrant * It IS baked into a large chunk or Blender's code. I've seen it. I can't speak about Maya. It isn't open source. It was programmed by different people right? There was no larger internet giving people tutorials on how to program a 3d application in the 90s. Everyone was shooting from the hip. I'm sure during the development of Blender, the developers learned a variety of things that they would change if given the opportunity to start again from scratch. Likewise, when Alias and Wavefront merged to create Maya they were able to bring in their "lessons learned" and apply them to building a more robust and adaptable code base. So you may be right for may be that it's "NOT baked into every line of code" and there is an additional layer of abstraction that allowed them to make an easier change.

@3dcinetv: I don´t know if you read this last statement @L. Nahuel Belich? Another one good reason to "not assume" on my posts. I don´t avoid answers. Cite whatever I did avoid on the other forums, like you mention. That´s weird that I don´t answer. If I lost the link it´s a very different thing.

@L. Nahuel Belich: I´ll say one thing regarding the "assuming" pattern (wow, bold statement): BLENDER+UNITY. BONE rigs. Enough said´.

@3dcinetv: Being a jerk isn't going to accomplish anything. In fact, I'm voting this proposal down specifically because you're being rude.

@dpdpforlife: Is there a way to see raw vote totals instead of the differential between upvotes and downvotes? I don't have a dog in this but I'm curious if the raw data is accessible.

@brian651msp: There used to be a way for admins to see the raw database data, but there doesn't seem to be a clean way to see that any longer. For regular users, it's never been visible (though I could see how it could be informative. From the activity here and what I've seen with other proposals, my guess is that this proposal has a lot of votes, but mathematically, it levels out a bit. So while there may be a lot of interest in the topic, it still indicates that developer energy may be better spent on a proposal that greater universal appeal.

The worst thing is to read through this whole discussion and discover that a community of retroactive minds have voted negatively only because of emotional issues. This is the real reason Bleder needs 20 years to adopt the industry standard. But for purely personal and non-logical reasons we will wait another 20 years for the film and animation industry not to be denied. If you spent the time used in this discussion and used the necessary changes for programs, we would already be in version 4 of Blender.

* @deesus * To be honest I down voted this because I know the tremendous amount of work that is involved in performing what people see as a simple task. I would rather the resources be spent on new features and improving undo and mesh edit performance in high density scenes.

It's perfectly legitimate to downvote things because they will rob other projects of resources. It's not helpful to lash out at people like it's some personal attack. I responded in an unprofessional way when @3dcinetv did that. Probably most of the votes were legitimate downvotes and not for "personal and non-logical reasons."

edit: And again, there is no industry standard approach. Blender was released in 1994. Maya was released in 1998. When I read back through the posts, I just see people that are just letting their opinions be known. There are many arguments for Z-up but also just as many against it. Some people get their feelings hurt when other people have a different opinion. They think only people expressing the same opinion as theirs are being nice and reasonable. They think anyone expressing opinions opposite of theirs are being oppressive, especially if their thinking is currently backed up as in this case with Blender officially supporting Z-up. I'm not sure why that is, but there is no reason to whine about it or act defensive. That is what I responded to. Defensiveness. Z-uppers argued against changing the standard and the response was "Oh all right. wanna play like that?"

* @dpdpforlife * Sorry if I was rude, but this is a complaint that always comes back when we are choosing tools for big projects. It's not something that personally bothers me, I'm flexible and I adapt quickly. The ploblem is the silent resistance made by the groups of people hired, the long hours that are wasted in argumentation and orientation of use in the attempt to solve. All psychological wear and tear that reflects on the final result and on the delivery time. These are things that seem easy to solve when you are the owner of the company, but not when you are hired and need to reach a goal. The fact is that when someone gets a file with the axis changed that stage of the work remains to be done, people simply say that they can not and are wasting hours in discussions of who is right and who is wrong. I've worked with programming and I'm sure that adding an option for the user to choose which orientation they prefer is much easier to implement other things that were already in Blender and did not work. All this sort of argument that things were complicated were exactly the same in 1985 when I started working with computers. More than 30 years has passed and the wall between users and programmers continues to stand with people talking over it. Some things never seem to change, about 4 years ago my Blender closed every time I tried to open the settings panel, this happened on 4 computers of different configurations of a company that I worked with. I tried to help solve it, but people simply stated that my computer problem was not a possible bug and closed the discussion. This is just one example of this insurmountable wall that I hope one day falls, there is still hope because even Berlin fell.

A small addendum since you mentioned that Maya is younger than Blender. There is a good example of what I am arguing, Maya was from the beginning thought to meet the film and animation market adapting the needs of those who already worked with it. Blender did not, it came beautiful and wonderful, but imposing a new working format. Have you ever wondered why Photoshop won so much market and people do not mind paying to use it? I can tell you what I've seen over the years. Any photography professional who first looks at the program gets to use it because he speaks the same language, all things follow those Western building rules, organized in order of importance from top to bottom and from left to right. They listen to the users, I assure you that yes because when I was invited to the pre-release version 5.0 I was asked what I found of the new tools. I replied that I expected only one thing, whether it was multiple Ctrl + Z and the program only enabled 1. Two months later it was officially released with multiple crt + z and history menu.

* @deesus * You're missing the point, though. In this case, there is no standard . Blender developers are listening to users in this case. And if it were easy to support a different base coordinate system, it would have been done already.

If you have programming experience and you say it's easy to implement and maintain, then I'm sure the Blender development team would love to review a patch.

And IMHO, enhancing the import/export axes handling so that you can import/export seamlessly anything to anything would probably be more efficient and easier than changing Blender's working axes (which again, have no standard to follow anyway).

* @Jason van Gumster * I would like very much, but today I do not have more time for this. I am referring to the time I have of life and that my body will interact with what my thoughts desire. The time I need to educate and prepare my son for this crazy one. I've already dedicated 2 decades to Linux and my body still pays for it.

* @-L0Lock- * It might be the solution, but right now I think it's more important for people to be aware of the real need for it. There must be communication between people of different universes so that there is harmony.

* @rontarrant * The major difference ofcourse was how trivial the change to left click select was. That was pretty minor compared to changing all of the many things that need to be changed for Y to become the up axis. There are too many things to list that rely on the axes. It's almost all of Blender that is affected in some way by direction. Some of the things that have to be changed won't even explicitly deal with the axes but were coded with a certain coordinate system in place, so the code just assumes z is up and would have to be rewritten completely. Shaders have axes, the camera has axes, all objects have axes for rotation and scale, viewport navigation, physics, many operators and modifiers...the list goes on and on. Some things that haven't been maintained in years would have to be changed, like the tracker. First person view navigation has it's own gravity, the q and e keys move up and down, moving the mouse left to right rotates along the z axis.

It's just A LOT of work.

@3dcinetv: The UI was always going to get updated anyway. Please don't subscribe to history revision here.

@3dcinetv: This isn't really relevant. Blender already exports to Y-up formats as well.

@Jason van Gumster: Slightly tangential, but more generally I think sticky preferences* make sense, but I understand if there is no way to globally enable this without a major refactor of the code.

*(... I remember when BMesh was first out, some were tripped up by having to deselect "quad/tri mode" every single time the command was used; eventually it was made sticky which was a great help to those users. However, if some portions of the programming are indeed spaghetti-coded -- which I recall being cited as one of the reasons the internal renderer had to halt development -- I can see how a global fix wouldn't be trivial.)

@brian651msp: I'm not sure how sticky preferences (at least as I think you're describing them---basically a preference that stays set for a session) would make anything any less complex.

@Jason van Gumster: proove that on a blender rig for Unity mecanim, please.

@3dcinetv: So because an exporter needs fixed, you want to modify the core of Blender? Why not just fix the exporter?

@Jason van Gumster: Because rational thought processes are beyond this guy.

@Sebastian Villanueva: I think developers should work on something that has a real relevance not just something that you can change manually from the configuration.