Hi! I’m a long-term user and a huge fan of Silo. I really hope that you guys keep working on this project, it is by far the best 3D modeling tool I have ever encountered(and I’ve tried them all =).
I wanted to send you a few feature requests, the most critical things that would improve my Silo workflow, hopefully you guys will consider them:
1. Better Linux support.
Native version isn’t necessary(even though it would be nice), Silo works reasonably well under wine(or Steam Proton), but it does have some issues I’d like to see fixed.
- After opening the file manager(to save or load the scene), all of the keyboard hotkeys stop working. Switching focus to a different window and then back to silo fixes this(most of the time).
- Selecting faces/vertices with MMB(to select all the way through the geometry) takes unreasonably long time(up to a minute even for simple low-poly models). Every other kind of selection works great.
- File manager doesn’t have a “go to the parent directory” button, making navigation very inconvenient.
- Silo crashes from time to time. Sorry I can’t be more specific, overall it’s surprisingly stable under wine, but it’d still be great if it’d crash less often.
2. Renaming multiple objects at once.
If I select multiple objects, I can’t rename them all to the same value.
It’s a pretty essential feature I’d like to use very often, I wish it’d exist.
3. Snapping gravity/strength setting.
I’m using Silo to build modular levels(among other things) for my game, and it’s very important to have good snapping for that.
Overall Silo snapping works pretty well, but it’s “strength” is very weak, you have to get very close to the desired value for the snapping to actually work.
That makes it pretty hard to use. I really wish there was a way to increase snapping strength(I’m talking about grid snapping specifically).
4. glTF export
glTF is this new 3d file format everyone seems to be excited about, and my game engine(Godot) really prefers to work with that.
I really wish Silo would have support for glTF export.
5. Better scene management with Scene Editor
If I want to build a complex scene/level in Silo, a good scene management is very essential.
The current Scene Editor is really lacking, it’s painful to do even simple things, like adding a selected object to the group.
More powerful features and better UX(with hotkeys and drag and drop) would be amazing.
I understand that it’s a big ask, but this is the biggest piece of functionality missing from Silo that prevents me from using it for so much more.
To give a specific example, I can’t even use it to model collision geometry or my models - for that I’d need to put them into a separate group that I can conveniently hide/unhide from time to time, and to export them all with a specific naming schema. And because of the scene editor and renaming deficiencies, it’s borderline impossible to do this in practice.
6. Better numerical editor
It would be really nice to be able to select multiple translate/rotate/scale values(for several axes) and edit them at the same time(like in maya/blender). It would also be great to be able to drag over the value with my mouse and ctrl/shift/alt to change it with different levels of precision(ctrl+LMB changes it by 0.1, shift+LMB changes it by 1.0, etc)
Sorry for the long message, but I hope you guys will find it useful. I love Silo very much, and will keep using it and recommending it to everyone either way, but I really hope you guys could take my suggestions into consideration!