Here’s what I hope to be a little to-do list for the developers. Not like those noob-rific lists of giant leaps for man-kind demanded noobishly.
For example, on my wishlist is the ability to render an animation and the audio together. I actually don’t know if that would be hard or not, but I assume it would be one of the easier things to do.
You can already do that if you choose FFMPEG as output. Not sure if it was in 2.45 on all platform though, but it’s definitely in trunk.
Martin
I wouldn’t normally post in one of these, but…
I was just thinking today that it would be cool to change the background colour in the UV/image editor. That way, if you’re viewing the render result while working with nodes, you could see the image with the same background colour as you would ‘frame’ it with in the final. Would make it easy to present work as well, to a client for example, without first saving the image, opening it in an external app in full screen, etc.
I think blender needs to ask you if your sure you want to exit when you press the exit button
I’ve accidently pressed it many times and lost lots of work.
Like that?
@Theeth: Oh… thanks. That can’t be lossless, though, can it?
@blenditall: You mean changing the background/sky settings as a post-process? (like the way you can mess with nodes without re-rendering)
No, but if you’re rendering to a lossless format, you might as well render to individual frame images, mixdown the audio to wav (blender can already do that too) and compress/merge audio and video at once.
Martin
maybe it’s just me, but when I minimize the render window and expand it again, the window becomes black and only newly rendered areas are shown. Really annoying when you’re trying to see how a long render is doing.
might be nice to have a fix for that
Just some quick ideas from the top of my head:
Nodes:
Materials:
Colorband:
Other:
variables in file output paths, like %f for blend file name, %s for scene name, %### for three-digit auto-increment number with leading zeros, maybe %m for render-method (F12, “render” and “anim” button), and also for all the info available for stamping. Option to auto-save renders. Would make it possible to automatically save all your F12 testrenders to one dir, your final “render” renders to another etc., without accidentally overwriting previous renders.
autodetect number of CPUs and set number of threads accordingly
“edit mode” for lamps/cameras, to interactively and visually set things like spot angle, Clipping, DoF Limit etc.
highlight what would be selected when hovering over objects, edges, vertices etc. Maybe make the highlighted item “super active”, overriding current selection and enabling “click-less workflow”: Just hover over an edge/object/node/whatever, use g/s/r/x as usual. No RMB needed, no loss of selection state (probably needs in-depth discussion, though)
backface culling/z-buffer clipping option for wire materials (with optional “occlude background geometry” hiding other objects, too?)
Some of the above can already be done to some extent, but I believe that software shouldn’t require workarounds for simple things and as little trial and error as possible while setting parameters.
a quick thing i’d realy like would be if blender could save your last 5 to 10 renders to a temp file, and then give you the ability to switch between them in the render window. this would allow you to see the result of any ajustments made more easily. (a bit like Maya has now)
maybe even have some small thumb nails of your last 5 - 10 render next to two larger compareing windows to wich you could assign which renders you wish to compare.
(but a simple slider like maya would do fine)
@HD: I second that idea, and it could be done with my “filename variables” and “auto save renders” idea and a “flipbook” enhancement for the UV/image window that lets you load and step through/play image sequences (with variables in their name):
I´ve posted it before - but I do believe in repeat-brainwashing :D:
Little - but very useful feature:
Nearly one year ago a german blenderuser created local ambiantlight. Unfortunatly he never had time to finish his work, but I was electrified by the possibillities local ambiant light offers. It fills the gap to simulate GI in Blender.
His unfinished work:
https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=6321&group_id=9&atid=127
Alltough I have to admit that this might be not a “little”, but significant feature…
Some examples made with ambiant light lamps. First picture with normal lamp setting
Second with local ambiant light
Third: Lamp setting
relative to cursor mouse wheel zoom in/out
Okay, I have a really tiny feature, I would like to have:
When you right click on a window border it should not only say “Split Area” and “Join Areas”, but also offer you “Swap Areas”, so you could quickly change the position of two different window types.
Might be useful for a blenderfile you get from another user and you would like to arrange it your own way.
MD
If little then little:
It is in the trunk but it doesn’t recenter the view on the mouse position which would render the feature really useful. Right now, if you want to MW-zoom at the edges of the 3D area it is likely that you’ll see only part of it without panning.
Wrote about that on the funboard but the dev still doesn’t seem to get to read it or just doesn’t get it at all.
Jean
On windows at least, Blender saves a backup file whenever you exit. Go file | recover last session, and it should open whatever you were working on last. Very useful, and eliminates the need for that annoying popup that other programs have asking if you want to quit.
Whenever I click recover last session, it comes up with something I was working on the day before. I don’t know if that function loads the quit.blend file, but if it does it must not work right every time.
I think a confirmation would be nice anyway if you could disable it. For example, all of my relatives and family members most likely think all programs have a confirmation before exiting, so they might exit Blender when I leave the room for a while, thinking they could save the changes before exiting. (insert horror music) Of course, I’ve learned to save almost constantly now, but for others this could be a big problem.
You can! User Pref->Theme->UV/Image Editor->Background