Hi all, I emailed all of the main durian artists about their wishlists or items that would have made their life easier - both in their core area for Durian, but also in other tools they use in Blender. Here are the responses I've received back so far. Ton had asked if we could have items of gsoc that are a bunch of smaller items. My thoughts are we could place most of these as pick 15 or so of these to work on for a gsoc project.
Anywho here are the items, some are stuff that needs to be brought back from 2.49b and earlier. (Note that I included Ben Simonds by accident when i was sending out emails, but I figured he is similar caliber so it doesn't hurt anything to have his wishlist in here also). It might be worthwhile to contact the top 100 or so blender artists and get similar lists from them. I know we have the blenderstorm and such, but I think feedback from hardcore users is a bit more valuable in some respects. LetterRip ********************* Dolf Veenvliet vector textures David REVOY Paint Texturing ( Brush dynamics : as random brush bitmap mask rotation , best painting performances ) Video Editing ( adding text directly in VSE, or using *.svg template ) Beorn Leonard ANIMATION: - a waveform in the timeline. This would make lip sync animation sooooo much easier. 3D Max has it, Maya has it. This is a really important feature for us spline monkeys. - Action groups. Allow putting separate armatures and objects into the same action by adding them to an action group. (I know this is contentious, just putting it out there again) - The ability to select by keying set. Makes it easier to quick select and push/relax a pose in layered animation. - "View by keying sets" in the dopesheet. The ability to group channels in the dope sheet by their keying sets, with summaries displayed for each. Duplication of channels across keying sets doesn't matter. Channels that aren't in keying sets can sit below in an "Ungrouped" group. This would keep the dope sheet cleaner when you're doing layered animation. - No ungrouped channels in the dope sheet and curve editor. I don't quite know how this happens, but sometimes you end up with a bunch of channels down the bottom of the dope sheet that are unattached to their object. This happens not only with custom sliders, but also for basic things like location and rotation. It gets messy and can slow you down. - the ability to bake NLA sequences to a single action for final polish. Campbell added this feature for me during Durian (spacebar>Bake Action), but it doesn't work properly when bones have animation in more than one action strip. and/or - the ability to see the final result of the NLA stack while editing an individual action. The lack of the ability to polish is why I very rarely use the NLA; it's just about impossible to get professional quality polished animation out of it. - the warp modifier. This was added by Campbell for Durian, but doesn't appear to be in trunk. I used it to animate Sintel's blanket in the cabin scene. I know you can achieve the same results using other methods, but I found it really quick and intuitive to use. SEQUENCER/COMPOSITOR: - the ability to do GL preview renders from the sequencer. Among other things, this would complete the toolset for using the VSE for previz of multi camera scenes. IMHO, much nicer than the camera switching with markers method. - the ability to render reduced quality RAM previews from the sequencer and compositor. For quick tests, just like in After Effects. The maximum length of the preview is determined by available RAM. of course, this will only be useful for the compositor if we can - finish and integrate Joeren's OpenCL compositor code. ...and my final beef... OUTPUT CODECS: Blender is still unable to output a video file with sound that can be played in anything other than vlc. This is mainly an issue when rendering GL previews of animation as most of us always do final renders as image sequences, but doing quick GL previews is a standard part of the animation workflow. At the moment there are far too many options for codec/wrapper combos and most of them don't even work in vlc, let alone other players. BTW, vlc has the same problem - too many illegal options. Since Blender is not really intended to be an encoding program I would suggest restricting the options to a few that actually work and can be played in vlc, quicktime and windows media player. If users want, we can use a dedicated encoding program after rendering (e.g. avidemux, quicktime pro, autodesk cleaner) to convert to whatever exotic format we want. This has long been a noob confuser, and I reckon it's better to do a couple of things well rather than a bunch of things badly. Jeremy Davidson Clear user transforms - a great little button in 2.49 that did a clear locrotscale on every bone in the rig (even hidden ones). would love to have that back. Less armature dependency loops - i work around this stuff alot but the two main ones that would be great to have are; seperating loc rot scale channels (possibly too hard to do, too much coding) and spline IK. Been banging my head against a brick wall with that one the last week or so. trying to get around it with multi armatures and layers and layers of bones copying all different channels but i can never get it quite close enough. Jonathan Williamson Mesh modeling/Retopology: pen tool to quickly draw polygons without the need to fill faces manually. An example can be seen in Modo's Pen tool here: http://www.luxology.com/common/qt/LuxQT.aspx?u=http://video.luxology.com/modo/301/video/PenTool.mov&w=1280&h=780 and another in Topogun via the SimpleCreate tool: http://www.topogun.com/media/videos.htm Mesh modeling: Bevel tool: Mesh modeling: Edge bevel tool with sharp corners to preserve topology: http://www.luxology.com/common/qt/LuxQT.aspx?u=http://video.luxology.com/modo/301/video/EdgeBevelSharpCorner.mov&w=1280&h=780 Mesh modeling: Native Bridge tool: Crouch has implemented this through his Loop Tools add-on here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?148728-LoopTools-for-Blender-2.5-new-version-March-25th or Modo's tool can be seen here: http://www.luxology.com/common/qt/LuxQT.aspx?u=http://content2.luxology.com/modo/videoVault/Bridge_Tool.mp4&w=640&h=480 Mesh modeling: Better Rip tool. Namely need to be able to rip multiple selections at a time and more consistent behavior when ripping. An example of multiple selection ripping can be seen here: http://www.luxology.com/common/qt/LuxQT.aspx?u=http://content2.luxology.com/modo/videoVault/302Preview-EdgeSplit.mp4&w=1280&h=720 You can almost think of it as a combination of the Rip and Split tools. Mesh modeling: Better Loop Cut tool that allows cutting based on selection, even cutting edges that are perpendicular to each other: http://www.3d-coat.com/uploads/pics/rtp_split.gif Retopology: Slice tool for quickly adding loops: http://www.3d-coat.com/uploads/pics/rtp_slices.gif Retopology: Paint Stroke tool for adding faces based on intersecting strokes: http://www.3d-coat.com/uploads/pics/rtp_strokes.gif Interface: Proper Units system input. Currently when using the imperial system all input is converted in normal Blender Units. For example, if I switch to Imperial units and then translate my selection along the X-axis by pressing X > 1 to move it one unit, it should move 1 yd (or ft or inch) but instead it moves 1.0936 yds. This makes the Imperial system in Blender next to worthless. The Metric system works no problem since the number of minor units per major units is the same. Interface: Prevent unit conversion during input. Currently if you switch to Imperial and input 3 ft it will display as 1 yd. Normally this is not an issue but many times you'd like to always display units as inches or feet. This also applies to Metric. Ben Simonds Bevel tool in edit mode. I gather this will come back with bmesh, but I use it all the time, and at the moment that means I do most of my modelling in 2.49 before importing to 2.5. Object ID Masks: Are terrifically useful, but it is a pain going through all the objects in a scene and assigning an ID value to them. It would be really nice if there were a way to automatically assign object ID's, for example one per object, per group, or per layer. Also if ID's could be assigned to materials within an object, that would be brilliant. It would make composting much faster if that kind of stuff could be done automatically, with the user only having to go back if there was a specific object they wanted to set the ID for. On the same note, if user could assign a range (1 to 5) or a list (1, 2, 5) in the ID mask node, that would be great. I know it could be done with multiple nodes, but it would keep the node layout much cleaner. Render improvements: I'd love to see the tile cache for raytraced AO/Bounce/Environment light from the render branch integrated into trunk. Currently though it produces very artifact-ey reults (at least last time I checked) unless samples are set very high. Also enabling more/smaller tiles than currently possible would be good to help with this. Any other improvements to blenders raytracing/GI would be fantastic. Compositing: The Depth Blur node currently give incorrect objects for parts of the scene in front of the focal plane. Within the outline of the object they blur correctly, but the object still has a sharp outline, where it should be blurred. Layers in texture paint mode, maybe with support for .psd .xcf or .ora files or some other format that supports layers. This would be great for more non-linear, non-destructive texturing. P-Tex. Tooltips for tablet users - when using a drawing tablet, it is difficult to keep the cursor perfectly still for any length of time, in order to bring up the tooltip for a button. In zbrush this is solved quite elegantly by having the ctrl key bring up a tooltip when the user moves the cursor over a button. Something similar in blender would be great. A Surface-Based mesh deform modifier. I'm not sure if this one is possible, but it would be brilliant. The idea would be to use the surface of one mesh to deform another. This could be used for example to rig a high-density sculpted mesh, using a low density mesh retopologised over it's surface, or to deform an object in a similar way to using a planar lattice modifier (only one point thick), but with arbitrary topolgy. Soenke 1. HUV sampling When you look at a render result in the uv/image editor, it is possible to sample a pixel with your mouse, showing RGB and other stuff. It would be great to additionally see HUV and being able to choose a sampling area. Within that area blender would average the different color channels and shows the average result and not the result of a single pixel. Kinda like the pipette within photoshop. 2. A lens flare system for lamps. The current lens flare system is very inflexibel. Besides being not for lamps, it's not even possible to control the color or size of a single flare. There are methods, but they always eat time. 3. programable shaders 4. Texturable specular highlights Being able to asign textures to specular highlights and I don't mean specularity maps. At the moment specular highlights are circles and instead of that having a texture would enable to make it for example square (like a reflection of a window). The perfect solution would of course be to only use raytraced, gloss reflections but that's insanely slow and a bit noisy. 5. Split the material option 'traceable' up into: cast ao, mirrorable etc. This would be mostly useful for optimizing render performance. For example, sometimes you want an object to cast raytraced shadows but not getting reflected by mirrors 6. First and second derivative for f-curve editor Being able to see speed and acceleration of a f-curve is something that I miss.. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
