Multiple objects with the same name
In Blender it is currently impossible to have two objects with identical names even if the objects are in two different collections or even two different scenes. To me this is counter-intuitive. A short example why this annoys me:
Let's imagine I want two create a scene with two monsters
Bip
and
Bop
. Each of them has
Eyes
and a
Mouth
. My hierarchy would look like this:
This structure is also most logical to everyone who writes object-oriented code. However in blender this isn't possible. However if I try to setup the same structure in Blender this happens:
Also note how even the mesh component of Bop is labelled
Sphere.001
. Yikes!
Call me overly sensitive but I really don't think, that this is the correct usage of suffix-numbering. In my opinion such appendices should only be added if there is a imminent danger of mixing objects up (which clearly isn't the case inside the Outliner in this example).
But how to tell objects apart outside the Outliner, i.e. in drop-down menus, where all objects could be selected, regardless of their location in the outliner? Easy, just use the object-path in combination with it's name as unique identifiers if necessary.
As an example the aforementioned mouths could be listed as
Scene/Scene Collection/Bip/Bip/Mouth
and
Scene/Scene Collection/Bop/Bop/Mouth
inside drop-down menus and be clearly distinguishable. Note that you should automatically shorten the paths before their branching points for the sake of brevity, i.e.
Bip/Bip/Mouth
and
Bop/Bop/Mouth
would already contain all the relevant information.
13 Comments
Structuring game objects suffers as well from this limitation. I need to be able to create bunch of Empties with different names and be able to name children of each the same way (emptyName1/mesh+collider and emptyName2/mesh+collider for example)
So true. It forces us to do so much manual work in complex scenes.
I upVote up for this request. We should be able to have the same name for object in different hierarchy without taking care of Collection. "Bip/Bip/Mouth" and "Bop/Bop/Mouth" should be possible in the same collection as well.
totally agree on that. right now I am struggling to model a city with object names like "B3B10 Window 1" (block 3, building 10, window 1). if I copy the building to use it as base for a new one, I have to rename the preffix of every object by hand, instead of just renaming the collection. (i know there are addons for bulk renaming, but its just an ugly workaround in this case)
Yes, huge pain point. I'm working with multiple objects I want to export to Unreal and currently need to keep them in separate blend files.
This is specially annoying when you're trying to access specific objects in a hierarchy.
This is really a silly limitation. Name is just a property for an object, it shouldn't be treated as a unique ID. Every object should be able to have the same name, whereas they have different unique IDs that can be accessed if needed. This is much more intuitive and makes working with a lot of objects easier, specially specially in you need to work with other tools later. Like game engines, etc.
The current method is like forcing people to have unique names to make them different instead of making them different based on their DNA.
in my case I have a set of collections which represent different objects and each collection has "alive", "broken", "dead" meshes which is supposed to be parsed and assign the corresponding object meshes to the object's health state. Creating new .blend files for every single object is way behind productivity, so I have to use ugly workarounds
i feel like blender could have tags for people who want to do this kind of thing. so the objects can have different names but same tag.
* @beenjohn * okay, that's an interesting concept... How would this tag-system work exactly?
And option to export with tag as a name I would suggest :)
Could be a way, but doesn't solve the main issue. You should be able to access many objects that are basically the same in shortest amount of time. And moreover, current method make scenes very messy quite fast.
Yes, annoying limitation...