Invert Vertex Colors button is one of those missing and easy to implement features.
Unify Normals is something Blender never had, but it’s quite useful for non-manifold meshes. Sometimes for whatever reason part of the faces are flipped on a mesh. Standard functionality in Blender would flip those normals in opposite direction, but the rest of the faces would be flipped in another. So Unify Normals would randomly pick normal vector (either from normals facing proper way or from flipped normals) and make all faces to face use that normal vector. If use feels it’s still flipped, user can flip them using standard Blender’s functionality.
1 : apply transforms to multi-user objects. Right now if you try it Blender returns an error, which makes sense, but still - a choice would be nice :
apply to all linked duplicates (considering active object’s transforms)
make active object single-user then apply (this affects only the active object)
abort
2 : adding vertex group output to cycles nodes.
Right now vertex colours are a handy way to blend between shaders or textures with just a few brush strokes - however they are fixed, and although they have R G and B channels, they lack the flexibility of vertex groups : those can be modified dynamically by vertex weight modifiers, which go hand in hand with rigging.
3 : More than 8 render slots. Very useful for incremental shader/lighting tweaks, comparing versions, etc. Maybe make it dynamic ? See how Maya’s render buffer works (click to add to slots, makes number of slots grow by one).
Reminder that this is for tasks students who don’t have any experience with Blenders source code might complete in a day.
From the quick hacks project" “Easy enough for an experienced developer to do in a short time (about 30min - 2hrs).”
Some good suggestions here but they’re falling on the side of being entire GSOC projects.
Honestly Campbell I have no idea whether these are big or small tasks - from a user pov they really look like super simple things. I didn’t know any better, apologies.
Add a system that tracks added objects to the game engine, to then track their animations, allowing these objects to be keyframed.
For instance, a person could animate a turret in the game engine using logic, that adds bullets, that track in the animation system to appear in the recording, and then render out the animation sequence in cycles etc.
Things like recording changes to vertex maps could also be handy, to animate later, like foot prints or bullet impacts.
Maybe add the bullets to the main scene invisibe and have them turn visible and move, and go invisible if they are ended?
In Texture Paint mode, when you save the blend file - it should save automatically all the images in the slots, and this is not a separate function. That way the user is not afraid to close Blender or that it will suddenly crash.
Why can’t I pick a bone just like I can pick in other list boxes?
Outliner - when use box select, It’s not really selecting stuff - the user has to open a menu for this. This is not expected and really adds unneeded steps.
Arrange keyframes - The ability to arrange and control the amount of frames between selected frames.
Batch delete modifiers from animation channels. I can’t find a way to do it without going into every single channel.
Option to turn an arrayed object into duplis. When you render an array, it goes as if it’s a huge object with many meshes. Turn it to duplis and it will ease the memory and calculation.
Hope it’s easy enough and that I didn’t miss an existing solution for all of these hacks
Hello, i would like to be able to color pick from view with custom shortcut. Some time ago like 2.71 color picker was changed to pick color from painted texture (in some cases is useful so i do not want to remove it.). But i would like to have old behavior still possible.
Ive made little screenshot with change marked red. Shortcut S is for color sampling from texture, and i propose S+shift (it is not used yet) for sampling color from view.
Why this. Color picking from view is important in painting applications. You can find it in photoshop/krita/gimp etc. In all of this programs color picking from view is set by default. And picking color from active layer is like a bonus. It helps painting on multilayer images. Right now color picker forces artist to use one layer.
I hope someone will find time and add this little feature.
One cant understand how Blender works in a day, maybe something python but then they require a teacher for one day.
Teaching is nice, but if the teacher himself can write the code in an hour then there is no benefit of joining GSOC.
Maybe they could add some advanced denoise filters, if they where told where their code could fit in into compositor.
Or perhaps some additional procedural textures in cycles (maybe OSL). (i doubt the benefit for the student to learn OSL)
Like @motorsep I would dearly like some refinement to setting the normals direction. Quite often I import a large mesh and find some normals are facing the wrong way for whatever reason. Often this seems to come about with remove doubles. Usually they are too numerous or scattered or in difficult areas to select so that manual flipping is not practical. If you try to recalculate them inside/outside you just chase them around and never make any progress. So yes please Unify Normals .Perhaps in edit mode select a face initially that you want the normal of to be the correct direction and then extend the selection to an area of interest and then apply the magic unify button to that. …or… like ‘C’ shortcut face selection with the mouse, paint the normal direction over the mesh
@freen, great suggestion and a good level of complexity for a beginner (so yes, this will be added to the quick hacks project).
The only issue I see with it is we will end up wanting smooth normals - so as an object moves between faces its rotation doesn’t jitter,
thats a bit more involved but something that could be done separately (even a separate quick-hack).
Instead of listing feasible projects in replies…
I rather go over this list, pick out the ones I think are good candidates, add them to the quick hacks-project - then post links to each task here.
If other active Blender developers think I miss some good suggestions they’re free to add quick-hacks too, the important part is that these are reviewed by people who know the area well and whats involved.
Also some of these tasks aren’t entry level projects, but are worth adding to our to-do list,
others are GSOC projects by themselves (already included one suggestion in the GSOC ideas page).
.Perhaps in edit mode select a face initially that you want the normal of to be the correct direction and then extend the selection to an area of interest and then apply the magic unify button to that. …or… like ‘C’ shortcut face selection with the mouse, paint the normal direction over the mesh 
