Obsolete tools and features that should disappear from Blender.

Like the title says, is there anything in Blender that could be considered a ‘legacy’ feature, something which has already been superseded by another tool or by enhancements in other areas, I’ll list a couple right off the bat.


Delete Edge Loops (X-key menu) - Is there a point to this operator anymore, you could basically do the same thing with the dissolve edges operator if only it had the option to triangulate any Ngons afterward? It seems to me like it’s just a holdover from the days before Bmesh.

The ‘save’ external sculpt file operation (multires modifier) - With the recent optimizations to the drawing code and multires sculpt, and with its inability to keep a sculpt intact if it’s active and the file is recovered (even on the default cube), keeping this around may be more trouble than it’s worth. In a sense, all it’s doing now is leading to bugs and increasing the load times for .blend files.


List your ideas, is there any functionality that is already redundant or could be made redundant with the addition of an option or two in an existing tool? Please avoid arguments over the Game Engine and Blender Internal here as I’m mainly talking about obsolescence due to Blender now having a better option or due to enhancements/optimizations.

Is this thread relevant to this post?

I use the delete edge loop command every day, so it is not obsolete.

Save external saves displacement data outside the file so that if you increment your file n times you won’t end up with n times the displacement data as well (which can be heavy I’m sure you know). Unless I misunderstood ?

As for delete edge loops, yeah I think the dissolve operator basically does the same… other than that I don’t see why anything should be deprecated, unless it’s hindering further development…

Aye, likewise

The save external feature for multires displacement however leads to bugs if you do things like fetching the quit.blend file created when you exit Blender. It also brings a noticeable increase in load times for the file in question. I have a multires sculpted Dragon model with over 20 million triangles that loads fine in the recovered file if I don’t use an external file, but with the file leads to him looking like he went through a blender (talking about the kitchen appliance this time). I don’t think it’s just the quit.blend either where save external leads to bugs, I think it’s largely the same way with appending a sculpted object or or using the .blend1 file as well.

As for the idea that we shouldn’t see to it that anything is deprecated, I would see it as keeping the operator system as clean as possible (why should we have a handful of tools that do similar things when there’s already a single tool that can easily be made to do all of it, and that without much of an increase in clicks needed and with the benefit of de-cluttering some of the menus).

I believe one of the initial points of the 2.5 project even (as I remember), was ‘few tools, but many options’. The idea of having a smaller number of base operations that can do a ton of different things (compared to many tools that each do just one or two things).

I don’t understand what you are saying about the quit.blend. What is it ? I didn’t know there were displacement bugs with save external though. I imagine you reported that.

Top Bar > file > recover last session. The quit.blend is a file that Blender saves your current session to when you exit the program.

It’s not hard to reproduce the bug (add a multires modifier on the default cube > sculpt a bit > enable saving the displacement to an external file > exit Blender > re-open Blender and invoke the recover last session operator).

Ace, are you sure the quit.blend isn`t just missing the correct file path to the external cache (maybe due to using relative paths)?

greetings, Kologe

What obselete for me could be NOT obsolete for someone else!
For me the VSE is absolutely obsolete, but i know a lot of people use that part a lot.
SO who decides if something gets dropped or not?
I dont get the meaning of this discussion?!