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  • Published 22 Jan 2023

"Selected only" OBJ export as default

As someone who works with many third party applications and exports/imports from/to Blender a lot, I was always wondering why Selected only option is not set by default? I think that in majority of cases, whether it's exporting a model to Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Rizom UV, Unity/UE etc, an artist rarely wants to export the entire Blender scene, often containing different WIP files and other junk. Let's take each case I listed above and examine what kind of exports are usually performed.

  • With Zbrush, which has quite a weird and unique importer, you really want to separate all the files you are importing in to avoid any potential issues, so you use Selected only
  • With Marvelous, you usually send a lightweight version of your model to speed up the simulation. Even if you send anything else than body (let's say hair or armor pieces), you still send in only the specific objects, so you use Selected only
  • Same with sending models if you want to unwrap them in other application. You send only the models you intent to
  • Even in case of sending a huge scene to a game engine, you still wanna pick which objects will be exported and which ones weren't intended for real time

Maybe I'm simply judging from my own experience and perspective, but it feels like that cases where sending selected objects prevail over the ones where an artists works with a small Blender file containing only the essential objects.

So maybe set it as a default or, like someone suggested previously, at least make Blender to remember the last export/import settings

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Development Status: Open

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happyotter
22 Jan 2023

3 Comments

advanced8888

use_selection: BoolProperty( name="Selection Only", description="Export selected objects only", default=False, You can go to addon folder and put True . )

In file init .py And then it will by default always export only selected objects.

amandeep

I made a free addon last year that allows you to set default parameters for export/import functions. It's available for free on blenderartists. Here is the link to the latest version: blenderartists.org/t/free-script-sundays-free-add-ons/1336843/83

You can check some of the posts above to get a better idea about it.

softyoda

Can you please help it to be integrated in the vanilla blender, I usually don't work on one single version of blender, or one single computer, it is hard to manage all addons implementation on every machine I get...