My Blender Wishlist

Support Basics & Interface
1

After having used Blender for year, on and mostly off :slight_smile:
I’m in the process of actually getting my first useable model done.
And the experiance i had while doing so lead me to desire for certain features which i thing would improve blender in general s good deal.

  • Non blocking paint select

  • faces as area lights

  • glow effects -> like the afterglow plugin, but integrated

  • snap to grid, vertex, edge, …

  • useable bevel, integrated, not as script

  • better boolean, less messy

  • booleans in edit mode
    especialy helpfull when one has a large object and needs to boolean a small
    part of it, like a window in a starship hull.
    The object/object method used currently makes it basicaly useless for that

  • lamps as parts of objects

  • renderman support

  • multiple shaders per face, uv maps, etc

  • cut/copy/paste objects/vertices/faces, etc

  • more render modes,
    ability to set global render modes, without having to alter the material
    -> wireframe, solid, textured etc

  • LOD for the 3D view, helps with high poly count scenes

  • wireframe thickness

  • layers
    dynamic layer amount
    layergroups
    naming layers and layer groups

  • lamps effects for all, own other layers, not just all or own layer, but
    for choseable layers too, like layer 1,2,3,6,9

  • multipass rendering, specularity, shadows, lights, etc

  • multi monitor support

  • adaptive subsurfacing in render

  • outliner, right click on entry, brings up proberties window

  • repeat last command, sorta like VI’s . command

  • render option size, 125% 150% 175% 200% -> tohupuu3 has it

  • keycommand for selection inverse

  • mental ray .map format support for big textures
    allows for reading only the needed parts of a texture to be read from disk.
    helpfull for large textures.

  • save/loadable textures,
    loading and saving from inside the material editor
    texture images, shaders, colors, mapping etc

  • scene wide wind effects, not just per object
    example, defining a direction and force of the wind across several objects, like a scene with multiple trees and flags etc

  • tuhopuu 3 style edge highlight for selected vertices

  • wireframe, or semi transparent display option for the lamp centerdots
    they get massiv in the way of small details if in the area covered by the lamp dot which makes it impossible to see anything underneath them.

2

beveal is alresdy intergreted,and I dont think Blender will support Renderman enytime soon

3

damn I’m great typist

4

The current bevel in blender isn’t really usefull though… since it bevels the whole object instead of just the selected verts/edges/faces. This and better snapping tools are at the top of my list too ^^

5

  • faces as area lights
    use emit in yafray

  • better boolean, less messy
    the ones in 2.40 are bad?

  • multiple shaders per face, uv maps, etc
    avaible in project orange build downloadable from blender.org forum.

6

… since it bevels the whole object instead of just the selected verts/edges/faces

To only bevel faces or edges, select them and run the Bevel Center script from the 3DView menu (Mesh->Scripts->Bevel Center)

7

Better than they were in 2.37 but they still leave a mess. Assuming it works a lot of times you are left with meshes that are missing faces that if the operation were to work as one would expect would be there. This results in a lot of time spent trying to close meshes up. I wouldn’t complain except that I tried booleans in XSI to see if this issue haunts other apps out there but theirs worked flawlessly. I use booleans a lot especially in a recent model and it’s quite frustrating. Still though, wayyyy better than they were.

8

SoftWork:
Yes the bevelscript work great, but you kinda want this to be built in, with easy access to it (hotkey etc).

And one more thing to add to you wishlist Auralis, the ability to change the keyboard shortcuts =)

or is there a way to do this? (besides editing the sourcecode and recompile i guess)

9

Auralis - I haven’t got a lot of time to answer this so i’ll pick up only on a small part of this …

  • renderman support
    Well yes it’s there but not 100% but then again the free/open source renderman solutions available since blue moon have been poor, blah, blah, blah. If you can afford the real Renderman - you even have to question why you want this. Better request would be for blender to support procedural shaders, i.e. a shader API.

  • multiple shaders per face, uv maps, etc
    You can!! Set up your UV coords, add image texture, map input to UV and map to whatever you want - displace, colour, etc. Add as many textures as you require.

  • cut/copy/paste objects/vertices/faces, etc
    You can!!! Admittedly there isn’t a copy buffer but I would rather the memory went in to an undo buffer. 3D takes stacks loads of memory! The context in 3D modelling is so different from word processing the methods have to differ but with select, vertext groups, duplicate (linked/copy), etc. there are more than enough tools to do the job.

blah, blah, blah There is the ability to light an object with paint, parent lights to a single vertex, booleans: big improvements in this release, etc., etc., etc.

There seems to be a way to do most (not all) of what you are wishing and I’ll be the first to admit that the education resources are uncoordinated but they are there. The issue is not ‘I want/wish …’ but ‘How do/can I …’

Blender is powerful enough to reproduce something every bit as good as ToyStory (no comments about volumetric shaders please :wink: )

Stick with it - blender is one of the most flexible tools I have used.