I also posted this over at blender.org, but since there’s alot of people that don’t go there, thought I’d post it on here as well to see what people think.
"While I’ve been working on a very high poly model the last couple of days, that also has some very complex procedurals. I’ve come up with several features that would make unwrapping high poly models much easier, and make procedural textures much more powerful.
Uv seam tools
#1, Select along seams: ability to select all the verts of a single seam. This could speed up creating, and editing seams immensely, and is something I feel is definitely needed.
#2, Select one side of seam: ability to select everything on one side or the other of a seam. Would make unwrapping a mesh for specific purposes MUCH easier, and MUCH faster.
Procedurals
#3, Merging specific texture layers: ability to make specific texture layers only affect specific other texture layers. So perhaps layer 1, would only affect layer 4, but layer 6 would affect all layers. This would allow for MUCH more powerful procedural textures.
I personaly feel that all three of these features would be immensely helpful, and become very powerful. Those are the three main one’s that I’d really like to see right now. But one other that would just be incredible, at least for the game developement side of things, is a normal map generator. I’m sure that this would require a large amount of coding, and may be a bit to advanced for the flow of things right now. But should be possible with some work. It could work by, taking the uv cords of a mesh, then percieving the depth of a face, say from a particular camera veiw, then converting the mesh into the same shape as the uv cords, but still keep the depth. Since as you probably know, a normal map works by percieving the depth of a face, or the distance from the camera, then coloring it in such a way that a game-engine, such as the Torque Shader engine, or the amazing Doom 3 engine, can then take that color-shading, and fake the depth of a object. Thus allowing you to “fake” the details on a low poly model.
I may just be dreaming, but this would be a incredible feature, that could revolutionize blender in the game-developement community.
I hope some of you will at least take these ideas into consideration "