It buggers me that suggestions can no longer be posted at the Blender Development section, so I’ll just mention mine here if it’s no big deal to anyone. I feel they’re something worth considering of and also fairly simple. If I had scripting experience I’d do them myself. But, as I cannot do that(atleast now), here they are.
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After seeing the Fluid Bake in action for the first time I had an idea that is already present in the Maya software. What if a flame or an explosion was baked with a similar script from a mesh? The particles, as good as they are in Blender, still cannot produce a fire that looks physical enough. The stuff I’ve seen looks more like a yellow cloud than a real life’s physical fire. This could be expanded in, let’s say, an action scene made in Blender by adding a colour map of the usual orange white yeallow to a giant fireball that was baked from a mesh object to expand like real fire. This idea has been in my mind quite long now.
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In all of the CGI animation seen in movies and television this far one significant obstacle has been left to be solved. That obstacle is the very thing that makes computer animation stand out from real life, even when it’s still, and that’s the substancial lack of depth. Why is that? Well, it’s detailed, but not detailed enough because it misses one cricital component, micro detail. It is simply too clean. My idea concerns a simple addition of a bump map. But that isn’t the main part. This bump map, instead of being placed on the surface of the model, would be located on the color map texture itself. That’s right, the image in the model instead of the model itself. The bump map also needs to be deep and large enough in volume to not mix clumsily with the model’s own bump map to give the color map this microscopic depth. Why not stamp small detail with the color in Photoshop? Well, even though I also like the idea of a “Stamp Tool” like ability to add detail along the color in Photoshop(something I originally had in mind) that type of method still strains the size of the image. That creates a risk of the color map becoming oversized. That’s why I believe that adding such a bump map would be practical in the 3D program itself to keep the texture’s size normal. I’m not sure how big of a task this would be, but, with enough inspired aknowledge about the controversial parts in making it happen, I believe it is possible.
These are simply ideas that I desperately wanted to present for the updating of Blender and I hope this is good enough place for them. I’ll let you decide.