A rather controversial hypothetical discussion which I dont want to get negative.
I`m just curious if the whole thing was left in your hands what would you do with it?
I can only think of two things personally.
1 take everything that requires 10 steps to do & reduce them to 1 or 2.
(Im pleased to see this happening with things like add smoke/fire etc option now)
2 I think I would focus on core stability & stop adding new features for a while. so it could deal with bigger numbers like zbrush & everything worked well. I would be hated but there are enough external renderers to say put cycles on hold for a bit.
I’m with Tyrant. Kill off everything. We just need basic modeling with no modifiers, one light type: spot, blender internal, ditch the compositor and VSE. Particles, smoke, ocean sim, just drop those.
In all seriousness, if I were in charge of Blender, I would probably be doing what the BF does now. Blender is skyrocketing in terms of popularity, features, and acceptance by professional users. We are very close to having a product that not only competes, it beats a lot of the other tools out there. Keep up the good work guys, and thanks.
Please just dont post one line feature requests, thats not what this was meant to be. theres a thread for that somewhere. atleast try to be constructive.
1 take everything that requires 10 steps to do & reduce them to 1 or 2.
(Im pleased to see this happening with things like add smoke/fire etc option now)
You should make a list of ‘10 step’ things and what one or two steps you think they could/should be reduced to.
1.) Add an option for baking with an averaged cage 2.) Add modeling tools to B-Mesh: Native circularize ( like “Circle” from LoopTools) and Vertex Slide 3.) An option for Loopcut (STRG+R) to stay “on” so you do not have to hit the key each time again 4.) Bend modifier should work a little bit more predictable 5.) Buffer shadows for lamps other than spotlight would be nice (possible?) 6.) Offsetting UV islands for baking and while I am at it a 3DSMAX style straighten option 7.) A proper and reliable network renderer 8.) A warning before you close Blender. It´s the user´s fault but it happens … Would have to make up stuff from now.
Honestly, I think Ton, and all the developers and people who gave their time so far to the Blender Foundation, have done an outstanding job, even a miraculous one. The successful refactoring of Blender 2.4 into a completely re-written 2.5/6 is quite amazing seeing that even experienced companies like Newtek completely lost the ball in that regard (remember “Core”?).
If in charge, I probably would focus on looking for ways how to improve the ‘marketing’ (for lack of better words, since it is open source) side of things, so as to strengthen and double, of not triple, the momentum Blender currently has.
I would work on improving the CORE API of Blender to get better use for your hardware (get Blender to use all available system resources) as well as implementing some smart algorithms to get better viewport performance with a heavier polygon count (a la Zbrush)
(Related to the core changes) I would give Blender a better support for plugins (maybe with a SDK :P) and write a complete documentation.
When all that is complete I would contact existing VFX houses and get a small part of their crew to produce something with blender along with their existing pipeline and give back feedback on what they would like to change (kinda like the open movies but more “real production” focused)
I would release only one official release per year (but keep the repository the way it is so that people can still build “nightly builds” and share them as they do now) to keep the legacy versions short and help the plugin developers maintain their plugins more easily.
The main target would still be keeping Blender free and open source, just better suited for production work. That is my dream scenario for Blender (that will most likely never happen)
I’d buy the Mango team a unicorn and program Blender to make ice-cream and sprinkles come out of your monitor because apparently everyone in this scenario is the owner of Blender AND a wizard.
The thread is more about another “what i want to see in Blender”.
The problem is that not every user of Blender use what i use for it (modelling/sculpting), some even don’t use it at all, just launch it for rendering in Cycles.
So in the end “what i want to see in Blender” would only serves my usage of it.
And that’s why i think the Blender Foundation is actually making a good job at it, as they don’t only focus on a specific area to then please only a fraction of the Blender users, but they try to develop every area of Blender with their limited ressources.
I’m not sure me in charge would have been able to lead Blender to what it is currently if i only had the limited ressource to focus only on what i am the most interested, it would be probably specialised only on one or two area, but wouldn’t be a capable application for the other ones.
If i were in charge of blender, i’d try to get this in class rooms all across the world. Right now major game developers support their ‘friends’ suites and that’s one area where blender sometimes falls victim. Right now we’re pushing it but there’s but so much free software can do without enough exposure (especially since there’s so many more strange programs that came out in the last few years).
I love what’s being done here and think there could be some minor improvements although some of them are basically me resiting change but Blender is an amazing art software.
Edit: On second thought… there are enough of us to host local classes for beginner artists of all types. In my part of new york they killed major program funding so the kids don’t have diddly squat to do but many have potential to do more. Maybe volunteering time would cure the above.
