Well, as you can see by my post count, I´m fairly new to Blender.
While I too would like to see some minor UI additions/optimizations I´m a bit saddened that that topic seems to have drowned out the enthusiasm for planned and up-coming tools I remember from reading these forums over the last years.
So, now that we have Freestyle, Cycles, motion-tracking and bmesh (All I´m VERY thankful for, as I´m for Blender)…what additions can we expect over the next 2 years?
I don´t mean Blender´s roadmap, that´s easy to research, but cool stuff coming from other geniuses.
Hehe, don´t flame me with “program cool stuff yourself”! I´m just trying to get a light-hearted look into the future that doesn´t obsess with UI stuff (which is legit, but come on).
I personally would love to eventually see something like WETA´s collision based skinning/muscle system make its way into Blender. Or other alternative and more accurate skinning systems than what most 3d apps offer now.
Read the GSOC results
Read the blender coding docs and todo lists
Read the threads on these forums
These things may happen or may not, nothing is set in stone, nothing is guaranteed.
If you want something particular, it’s up to YOU to take it in hand and do something about it
Don’t worry, Richard is just too busy to actually read the posts, don’t take it personally
The beautiful thing about Blender being open-source is that absolutely ANYTHING can happen and the features often come completely unexpected. I guess the features I am looking forward to the most is Ptex support, Cycles volumes, Bi-directional patch-tracing in Cycles and most of all the Viewport FX project.
I don’t think a WETA-system is feasible to make in Blender but maybe something like CAT for 3ds Max
There is one user creating something a bit similar to XSI’s ICE. Basically, node based modeling/modifier like workflow among other things. Not sure what the status on that, and I know he has a video floating around somewhere on these forums.
I think is a good idea to keep track of them so they don’t get lost, even if they are on hold or abandoned. If we know about them, maybe we can fund them, support them some way, or maybe even encourage or fund someone else (in case the developer lost interest) to continue them.
Intel’s Embree raytracing engine whose highly optimized algorithms increase render power by up to 300% without any reduction in image quality!
Cinema 4d demostration video:
Super agree. Not only for FX, but faking a high fps on animations would be awesome. Integrating optical flow into the motion tracker would be a highly interesting.
Optical flow would also confer inter-frame access, so that Blender could perform cumulative effects too. Like Noise reduction! As the edge detection is much better you could also do awesome keys too.
Cycles is already using embree for certain parts (i think for BVH creation?) not sure if it is being used for BVH evaluation as that needs code which works on both GPU and CPU, not just CPU.
