What would you like to see Blender 3 to feature?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Blender 3 is of course a long way off, but I thought it would be a good discussion point to ask people what features they would like to see in Blender by the time it reaches the big 3.0? Keep it tidy and easy to search through and who knows, we might see some make the features lists soon. :wink: Here’s what I would love to see:

Modelling

It would be great to see the functionality of the Wrapit 3DS Max retopologizing script replace/be developed as part of the existing retopology toolset in a future release of Blender. It is an amazing tool that dramatically cuts down the time needed to create a low-poly mesh, or to create a clean new mesh for sculpting purposes. I think it would attract a lot more people to start using Blender as part of their pipeline like the unwrapping tools did.

http://matt-clark.co.uk/wrapit/
http://matt-clark.co.uk/wrapit/pic.php?o=174

http://www.matt-clark.co.uk/wrapit/gal/arm.gif



Procedural Generation

I think procedural generation could be as big a part of Blender as physics/fluid simulation has been over the years. There are many little side-projects individual coders are working on like generating buildings and cityscapes but it would be great to see the best of these integrated into the main trunk with some tweaking from the people at the Institute. It would be quite tricky to design a good system for Procedural Generation, but I think it would be a great addition to Blender. By procedural generation I mean buildings, trees etc.

Simulation

I would love to see a crowd simulator developed for Blender. I know one developer had a go at developing one a few years back…

…but I think that project’s dead. It would have been great to have had one developed internally at the Institute to do crowds in ‘Sintel’, which I felt the city shots were really missing, but never mind. It would be great to see a nice feature rich crowd simulation tool developed for a future release of Blender. Maybe even one that is lightweight enough on processing to work within the BGE. I think it would attract a lot of new users, and would open up a lot of opportunities for freelancers/ amateur film-makers as well.

Game Engine

I would like to see some new developments in the game engine. I feel as if development of the GE has fallen by the wayside, which is understandable at the moment while 2.5 is being finalized. I think tools like Unity have greatly overtaken the BGE, which is a pity. I would like the BGE to be able to handle bigger triangle counts/shaders/lighting networks, but it is quite good in this respect a the moment. What I would really like to see is a nodal system for creating playable or non-playable/ enemy characters in-game, one that looks much like the compositor. Like at the base node, you designate the entity as a player character or NPC/enemy, or physics object, and work down from there (health, detection, behaviour, plugging in animation, etc). I would like to see that replace the current 2.49 set-up.

And of course once the 3DS comes out and homebrew techniques developed for it I would like to see an ‘unofficial’ exporter for that :wink: Who doesn’t want to make games with highish specs (3DS is capable of 15M triangles, apparently) in 3D with touch controls? The potential of using the BGE and the 3DS’ cameras for Augmented Reality would also be almost limitless.


Just some ideas anyway. :slight_smile: Would like to hear everyone elses.

2

Pretty much everything you find in 3D apps. today. Only the rendering part would primarily be very comprehensive plugins for external engines unless Farsthary and others get BI to the point of being like where engines like Thea, Vray, and 3Delight are today.

Is it possible, I would estimate Blender 3 being at least 5 years in the future yet if the current versioning paradigm continues, factoring in the increased momentum Blender 2.5 is starting to bring to the project as a whole.

3

Those are some good ideas. Not the usual ones.

I was going to say we need someone to finish up the render branch, which would seem like a no-brainer, but it also looks like nobody is actually going to take up the task of getting it done.

4

I wouldn’t call the render engine a no-brainer, if it were it would already be in trunk… besides the renderengine I would like to see Joe’s bmesh branch and Lukas’s particle branch to make it’s way into the next version of blender. Nurbs would be nice to but I haven’t seen any life signs the past months…

5

Provide links so we can all see what you mean :yes: This guy Luka’s is working on some nice new particle engine? Is Joe’s branch of bmesh different to the main one?

Oh dear, lets make it 2.7 then shall we? :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Joe is the current developer of bmesh

7

Hi

Blender

BGE

  • A option to give a actuator specific joystick input resolution. A current resolution is 256.
8

Okay, if you want to do it that way but then you won’t be able to make a ton of truly ambitious requests.:wink:

9

http://phonybone.planetblender.org/

10

Everything should be multi-threaded, of course.

11

libmv :

http://code.google.com/p/libmv/

12

Should have great compositing feature compared to Nuke and AfterEffects including 2D/3D tracking

13

I really want to see video textures in the game engine.

14

There’s already video textures in the Game Engine, see the VideoTexture module (now under a different name in 2.54)

15

Finish VSE. That probably won’t be until Blender 5 or 6

16

Here’s some improvement ideas I thought of adding into the video sequence editor.
I’d like to see hue/saturation/value, gama, brightness and contrast, invert, RGB Curves, Sharpen, Blur (pixelate, gaussian, and motion), Glare, Soften Skin, Difference Key, Chroma Key, lens distortion, polar coordinates, edge detection, and emboss.

Additionally I noticed when a video is lets say 640x480, and you wanna rotate it to 480x640 it cuts the bottom part off.

Example

Original:
http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/983/original.gif

Rotated:
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4623/rotated.gif

The only way to get it to look right is either cropping it, or scaling it on the Y coordinate plane as seen below.

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/2931/rotatedy.gif

17

Vector SWF export will be a great.

18

NO - no functions from 3DMax that is bad NO

…

I think Blender made jumps in the modeling, interface and animation system.
It is about time that material and render engine get a boost.

Ton somewhat said the next project will be about maybe that area.

19

Try the composting system, I know it can handle most but dunno about soften skin, lens dist, polar cord, edge detection…

BTW, you couldn’t find a more appropriate video than that to embed in your post? :confused:

Randy

20

We get back to the focus of Blender development, that is make a tool that encourages users to build from the ground up. Rather than clicking a Do Effect button.

A combination of 3D view and compositor gets you a long way to these VSE type effects, it’s just that the integration of the different tool groups is clunky (you can’t easily get Nodes into VSE).

Basic colour correction (strip basis) is already in the VSE. Curves sharpen and blur are in nodes just like keying etc. And soften skin is a keying technique. Lend distort is in nodes too. Polar co-ord can be achieved with wrapping video to a subsurfed plane in 3 view.