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  • Published 3 Dec 2024

Empties - display as ... NOTHING

Currently, empties have a bunch of options to be displayed as box, circle arrows, etc...

...many option to add visual pollution to the viewport.

But no option with simply no icon , to make it a pure container, to make it "empty" for real.

Empties with no icon should be the default option, not the missing one.

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Development Status: Open

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XYZS
3 Dec 2024

6 Comments

XYZS Author

I like the fanboys downvoting requests that make perfect sense, talking about a missing option... You know, Blender is not your mom, if you want to keep the flaw intact, it will die out of competition sooner...

XYZS Author

That is really a basic flaw in Blender. They think of the complicated options before thinking of the simple way it should be. I am not shrinking the size to 10^-4, it's too much of a dirty trick, but thanks for the suggestion.

Lauloque

You speak about it as if it were a showstopper but I don't think many people care about what empty objects look like, let alone having them invisible yet interactable in the viewport at all.

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Lauloque

Wouldn't hiding the empty be the same?

WickedInsignia

Unfortunately that also disables the ability to move/scale/rotate them in the viewport, unless done numerically via the properties.

Lauloque

Yes, Blender does have this annoying behavior of not wanting to select nor affect hidden objects from the viewport. Which IMHO is its own issue that should be dealt with.

Alternatively, you can turn down the empty size to a ridiculously small value (sliding is soft locked at 0.1 so you have to click and type manually). It's not zero, but it can be set to a size below a single pixel on the screen, and remains selectable, and thus can be interacted with like any object.

demo image

(The yellow dot is the selection's origin, but nothing is visible it is weren't selected)

But then it also means sometimes you'd click somewhere hoping to select something you see, and get that "invisible" empty instead.

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