Wings 3D Development Forum - Gripes & Grumbles

feature request: parametrize vs. coordinate value

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:47:43 +0000

It is easier to make an example instead of explaining this feature:

Create a solid, e.g. a vertical cylinder.
Cut vertical edges in 4 parts, then connect.
Select all lateral nodes.
Scale Radial >Radial Y > TAB

At this point, edit "50*Y" in the text box should scale radially the cylinder lateral nodes at 50% multiplied by their Y coordinate.

This would allow the creation of bodies, shaped as function of their nodes coordinates.

wings3d_2026-02-20 20-43-03.png (Size: 44.01 KB / Downloads: 2)
For example, the solid shown could be obtained by radial Y scaling by 50%*exp(Y)

Suggestions

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:40:28 +0000

Hi all!
I'm not sure to be in the correct area to post suggestions).

Similarly to Duplicate Radial, where an object can be copied many times, Duplicate should be able to copy an object many times, along one or more axis, given a length and the number to copies required.

Text Info, the information displayed at the top left of the work area, should be copyable in order to use coordinates in other panels.

Thank you in advance!

feature request: selectable text in geometry window

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 05:46:18 +0000

Hi.
Is it possible to make "selectable" text with attributes of the selected objects (veritces, edges, faces) in the geometry window?
It will be useful for some manupulations with size/position/etc - to copy numbers and paste it into input fields.

feature request: creating cylinder/N-gon by side length or "inner" radius

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 10:43:55 +0000

Is it possible to add some options to a cylinder/N-gon primitive?

1. Make cylinder or N-gon by side length and side count. Say, I want 5-sided cylindrical prism with 1 unit length of each side.

2. Make cylinder or N-gon by radius from center to the middle of each side (not to angle vertice) - and side count, of course.

I can write scripts for plugin by @edb but it's not ready yet for current wings3d version...

Collada exporter

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:01:03 +0000

Hello. Me again.
What a possibility that you consider adding to the collada exporter, the view camera (or stored views). Blender's style, for being more specific. I think it would be very useful, at least for me, obvious.
I also take the opportunity to raise my difficulty to establish the "numerical position camera". I have not been able to decipher their behavior, nor know how to extract the coordinates of the camera or the focal point, not even from the information in the name of the saved view ("from the +z to the -x distance ...".
What does that mean? ).
Greetings and thank you very much.

PovRay Exporter

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:01:52 +0000

Hi.
When I export to PovRay I always notice distortion on glass or crystal objects. I recently found a solution using the Poseray utility. It has a method of smoothing mesh normals and then the regular povray file is exported.
Is there a way to optimize the mesh exported to Povray from Wings, without subdividing the mesh to an unmanageable point?
Is this a reason to update and perhaps fix the Povray exporter?
I don't want to sound pretentious or bold, but glass renders with such distortions are unacceptable and useless.
Greetings and thank you very much.

Some V2.3 gripes

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 06:32:18 +0000

I updated to 2.3 awhile ago, and generally like it except for a few minor things. I've been using wings since V0.8, and I really appreciate the Wings community for providing this fine tool.

OK, here is my feedback on V2.3 so far.

1 - When I am doing a manual move, rotate, or other function that takes numerical input, the new dialog box pops with auto-populated with 0.0, or whatever I did with the mouse when I hit the tab key. Old versions did this too, but in the new version, the dialog box value is not preselected. This means that I need to mouse-drag, click then backspace, or hit del a bunch of times to get rid of the unwanted value before I type in what I want. Real pain in the anatomy. In previous versions, tab popped up the dialog with the value preselected. You can just hit tab, and start typing the number you want without mousing around or hitting bs/del. This has probably tripled the work needed to do simple tasks like xyz move, rotate, etc. I doubt this was the intended behavior. I am trying to train myself, but I am so used to just hitting my hotkey-tab-value like in the previous versions. This makes it really hard to use.

2 - When I right click to get context menus, the GUI builds the menu from where the right click happened on the screen. If I r-click when in the lower portion of the screen, the dialog builds downward right off the screen, offscreen and invisible. Sub menus sometimes are completely below the bottom of the screen and unreachable. I am training myself to do r-clicks in the upper part of the screen only, but its hard to break old habits.

3 - I love the test booleans. They usually work quite well, except when they don't < save file before using>. Anyway, I keep a copy of manifold lab around when I find something that won't work with the test booleans. I just export obj, do booleans in mlab, the import it back in. Also, do we need to completely triangulate the affected area? I generally try to maintain face and edge loops in my model, and the auto-tesselation after booleans can be messy to undo. I think most modelers prefer to tesselate last. Finally, the problem with coplanar faces makes booleans hard to use. Manifold lab usually gives a decent result with minimal tesselation, and is not bothered by coplanar faces, it just crashes sometimes, but I can deal with that.

Is there a good reason we need to reinvent what was working pretty well in mlab? Wings is really incomplete without fully functional booleans. It would be really nice if it was all in one place.

Tnx,
Jim

Unclear function when using bump

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 17:21:30 +0000

When you select a plane > Bump > tab, you get an entry window. The first entry is the size of bump. But what is the %? A bevel? Maybe a (short) description would help

2023-10-26_19-11.png (Size: 51.46 KB / Downloads: 3)

Non-PBR rendering

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 17:57:22 +0000

I do quite a bit of lowpoly stuff that mostly uses diffuse, alpha, and maybe a glow map, but not PBR rendering. It would be very nice if there was an option to turn off the PBR thing, maybe in the material?

Suggestion that add an option of vertical 3D letter direction.

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 11:45:56 +0000

Currently Wings3D's 3DText plugin can create only horizontal letters.
But many 3D letters take a time and effort to re-layout for vertical position after creation with rotate or move.
so, I suggest to add an option for vertical text direction.

Each OS's native font dialog is buggy and it has complex specifications .
So I personally think it is better to perform the processing on the Wings3D side.
It may be possible in a simple way, could it for example simply changing the offset direction of the glyph position?

Also,I found many examples for it.
Stone monuments that inscribed with a haiku,tomb stone and history etc.
https://blog.mirokuya.co.jp/wp-content/u...dc9f82.jpg
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/...aption.jpg
https://i1.wp.com/tabi-mag.jp/wp-content...026801.jpg
http://k-boseki.com/img-h/asemikinenhi078.jpg

Company name plate
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/...CPJk1LRIaw

Message of the ring
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/38/1a/8f/...5a7938.png

Original Stamp.
https://image.minne.com/minne/photo/640x...69281a.jpg

Example of alphabets text is here!
Personalized Cast Metal Vertical Address plaque.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VHgAAOSw3...-l1600.jpg
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/610G...L1008_.jpg

Engraved wood sign
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Qv...SX466_.jpg

Best regards
------------------
tkbd

Comma as decimal separator

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 12:38:18 +0000

Would it be possible to also accept comma as a decimal separator for numeric inputs again? Half the world has comma in their numpads instead of period. Accepting both would speed up numeric inputs.

Older versions of Wings accepted commas from the numpad (even though wings still displayed a period).

Feature request: More configurable materials

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 19:02:15 +0000

I wanted to comment a problem that I have and that requires modifications in the Wings3D materials system.

I have been modelling for Arma 3 for a few years now, and there are two functions that do not allow the textures to work properly in Wings3D.

The first is that Arma 3, the Normalmap texture (_NOHQ) the red and green colours are inverted. In web to upload 3D models is not a problem because they add a function to invert the red and green colours (they call it the X and Y axes).

The other function that fails me is that for the Emission? texture, Metallic and Roughness, they join everything in a single texture but by colours (_SMDI). It would be possible to implement to attribute a colour channel to these materials using a single texture.

As you can see I have the textures extracted from the original but in the end it's a double work to have 2 Normalmaps and 3 textures for the shaders. Besides it's complicated to verify the final work.

The option of channels for Metallic, Roughness, etc... Ummmm could be a simple scrollable option with 5 options:

So, these are my requirements. Hahaha, kidding, just suggestions to keep in mind for future development moments for programmers and to be seen as a useful and easy to create feature.

Feature request: Isolate

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 12:32:30 +0000

So in 3ds Max there is a feature called "isolate" that allows you to temporarily hide all non selected objects in the scene and then bring them back when you end isolation.

I think this would be a really handy addition to Wings. The current hide / unhide has the flaw that it will turn objects that you want to stay hidden visible when you use "unhide all objects".

If you're like me, with hundreds of objects in the scene, it becomes a pain to manually hide things every time after you've used hide/unhide.

Wings 3D Lights

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 22:38:10 +0000

Hi fellow users of Wings 3D. I wanted to bring attention to something I've not seen even one tutorial covering, that is in the Create Menu of Wings 3D; Light. If you click Light in the Create Menu, you get a submenu that has 5 different types of Lights you can load into the work window; Infinite, Point, Spot, Ambient, and Area. Editing them is a bit different from the way you would edit a Primitive to create a model part. You don't get the scale, extrusion, etc. tools. You get a set of submenus that are specifically designed for editing lights. The tools you get are somewhat limited, compared to other applications. You have no control over the brightness of the lights that I could find, other than manipulating the color controls to make the light brighter or dimmer. That said, you can get the lights to affect models you make. I've yet to find a way to control shadows, other than creating more lights to help change their intensity.

Now so far, I've only experimented extensively one time with Point Lights, setting a stack of six in a model of a light fixture I created for the experiment. The Light Cone had to have the Emission part of its material brightened, which seem to allow the Light to illuminate the Cone more brightly. I created a lens with the material for it at full white in the Diffuse, and full black in the Emission, plus a transparency value of 0.013, making it almost invisible. As I write this, the session in Wings 3D 2.2.5 is still open, and I am taking screenshots of the model with the lights inside its reflection cone at different angles. These I will upload to my gallery at DeviantArt; and when I get that done, I will return here and post a link to each image, so that you guys can see what I am doing.

I'm still exploring Wings 3D's Lights, trying to learn all I can. If any other User here has knowledge I do not yet possess, I would be most appreciative if that person could share that knowledge here in this thread. One thing I cannot find a way to deal with is the blue radiating lines that the lights load with, such that I cannot make them disappear. It may be something that cannot be done, but I'm hoping there is a way, or will be in an upcoming new version of the program. The reason I want this is because I plan to put lights in my models to illuminate interiors, and add lights, like Headlights and Indicator Lights to the exteriors, that actually shine. Also, Lights can be used to make Thruster Glow look more real, among other great uses.

Look forward to more posted comments from me here concerning this subject. I will be sharing what I find with all of you that choose to read this thread. Eventually I want to do at least one tutorial covering Wings 3D Lights. Hey, if it is part of Wings 3D, I think it is worth looking into using at least, so that we can possibly encourage the developers to advance that part of the program!

Cheers and Stay Awesome!

Pixel art / no filter texture

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 06:19:54 +0000

Hi,
Can you add a no filter texture for pixel render like Unity or Sketchfab ?

like this :