Features Blender Should Steal

Here are some of my thoughts.

yep. Animation layers, ghosting frames would be nice things to have in blender.

As for built in content i’d prefer to have blender as light as it is right now, without tons of garbage inside. But i won’t mind if additional content will be distributed in form of addons or bundles separately.

Personally speaking I would like to see a mesh fusion like tool for Blender. :slight_smile:

Zremesher/instant meshes, either from the zbrush version or the open source stand alone app https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes, both produce far superior results than the current remesh modifier.

Photoshop style paint layers. I think there are a few addons that give a bit of this functionality, but I would love to see it in default blender :slight_smile:

How about normal hotkey editor with ability to resolve/remove conflicts, + color coded fields for visualization of recently made changes?


It’s a nice idea. It’s already possible to check for duplicates by typing the shortcut in the search bar, but it’s less convenient than this mockup suggests it could be.

I’ve asked the developers about this in the past. The difficulty here is that because each editor can technically have different sets of hotkeys that do different things, it’s not necessarily an easy task to automatically determine what is and what isn’t a conflict… at least not the way that the system is currently coded.

Couldn’t you just check for conflicts within each editor then? :cool:

I think the hotkey customizing part could be a lot better too. For example it would be nice if you could set a key for a certain operator software wide, all at the same time.

To my understanding, not the way it’s currently set up (and making the hotkey editor aware of editor contexts is apparently non-trivial).

This seems slightly more feasible, but then operators would then need to somehow know what their similar operators in other editors are. For simple basics (translate, rotate, scale) it’s fine, but when you go beyond that, there’s huge potential for things to get messy… especially if somehow you also add in conflict detection with this.

I’ve asked the developers about this in the past. The difficulty here is that because each editor can technically have different sets of hotkeys that do different things, it’s not necessarily an easy task to automatically determine what is and what isn’t a conflict… at least not the way that the system is currently coded.

I will be ok if it would be possible to move that bulk of potential conflicts onto another assignment globally with one click at least for a short time, to be sure that they won’t interfere during testing. if hotkeys from different categories can be filtered and displayed, why they can’t be replaced by one click? at least majority of them to remove some hassle.

imo hotkey editor requires some attention, it isn’t easy to find what you are looking for, especially when there are lots of items with similar names like dozens of those “call menu” or “context toggle” lines, hard to track changes, items that may be assigned to the same button, but they are named differently in editor, in some cases commands assigned to Rmb in other they are assigned to some “Action” button etc.

Operators have idnames so this shouldn’t be a problem. For example Translate is called transform.translate (bpy.ops.transform.translate). So you should be able to loop through all keys, find the matching idname and replace the key of all of the instances. You can probably do this now though, I can test this later. You could also do it by operator name but I’m not 100% all operator names are unique.

please steal the undo system. The blender undo system is driving me crazy :slight_smile:

Why? The only thing I find annoying is that if you use the text editor Undo can remove things you wrote which is usually not what you want.

if i change the editor it sometimes deletes the complete undo history, because every editor seems to have it’s own history. If i for example change the editor and edit some thing and change the editor again everything i did in the last editor is lost. This is driving me crazy;)

That doesn’t happen for me. Are you using Global Undo?

One thing with Blender’s undo is that the code has no idea how to elegantly handle a situation where you Ctrl-Z back to before a session where an object was edited (sculpt mode or edit mode).

So when you do that, you lose all your work from that session (what should be done is have Blender keep a sort of copy of the edited object resulting from the last sculpt/modeling session). When you Ctrl-Z back to before the session and redo to a point after it, the edited version should reappear with all the new info intact.

The history stacks for sculpt and edit modes should be kept around too (so you can redo, get your edited object back, go into edit mode and undo some operations there if needed).

Yup, this is my problem:

  • Edit a bunch in Edit mode
  • Go back to Object mode to get a sense of things. CTRL-Z / CTRL-SHIFT-Z back and forth a few times to really see the differences
  • Go back to Edit mode — whoops, all undo history is gone now :frowning:

Beyond that, Blender can also look inward first to improve before heading outward. A better organization of its Add Ons wouldn’t hurt. I hate enabling my 4 critical add ons and only using 1/10th of what each has to offer, due to either poor organization between them or because Blender itself doesn’t add the, sometimes fundamental, capability native out of the box.

If looking outward, I wouldn’t mind having the ability to add 2+ edge loops at once AND then slide outward toward opposing edges simultaneously to get a matching offset from each side of the face I’m working on. Makes getting matching soft corners on objects during sub-d modeling easier and faster.

Having a non-destructive ‘edit poly’ modifier on top of a subdivision surface, may also be useful…

Have you tried the yPanel addon?

Thank you for this ! i sometimes i just open zbrush to use his decimate or zremesher, this little soft is really awesome !
Apparently Modo dev have implemented it

  • The ability for floating windows so that developers can create addons that are not stuck to some tab buried in the UI.

  • Procedural primitives that can be forever tweaked if you go back to them (segs, chamfers etc) until you tab-edit it.

  • Improved spline editing, like Illustrator paths. The current system is fiddly, handles and points look the same etc.

  • Faster dope sheet, duplicating or sliding keys can get very sluggish as I think it updates the scene instantly as you move keys about.

  • approx render time for animations in the render window header. e.g. “Alexa, what is four minutes and twelve seconds multiplied by nine hundred in hours”

  • Distributed rendering on LAN, ability to add WAN machines to it by IP/Port

  • Lights that have an include / exclude object list without resorting to more complex scene management.

  • Built in support button that you can “Ask for help” from either “Free Volunteers” or “Paid support”. This then Saves a backup of your scene, optionally opens up a screen sharing session with voip or a chat box.

or…

  • Build an IRC style client into Blender which users can join official rooms, private rooms etc. Make it more social right in the app itself. Pick any MMO game and copy that system. Studios and Indys could have a private and a public room etc. Blender.org could have a news room, developer room, sponsors room, WIP room that allows image thumbnails that download if you click them, a paid support room etc.

  • Better render engine support for third parties so they do not have to compile their own Blender copy.

  • A “How do I” search box that brings up user submitted mini tutorials for results like “Create an ocean” or “Remove noise”. Users can submit a training video to a Blender.org managed database with details like “Author, email, Blender version, keywords, video file, title” Videos should be under 3 minutes. You would get a massive collection in no time.

Cheers