Org:Institute/Open projects/Apricot/Community features wishlist

Community WishList

collected from ogre, indygamer, blender and apricot forums.

CRYSTALSPACE

• real time shadows
• splatting
• skinned rag-doll physics
• blur you see when looking through steam or fire
• meshes with layers or glow around them
• GLSL support

PAINTING TOOLS

• Using a tablet and paint is a serious PITA compared to any other program. Its like having a pen that still works like a mouse but with incorrect pressure stacking.
• proper undo
• be able to see the paint brush
• multiple axis
• mirror painting
• layers
• cut and paste
• move/scale
• unified brush system (same brush for sculpt mode and texture painting mode)
• create new brush directly inside blender
• add a "brush" path in the user preferences\file path menu
• make straight line while holding shift (like sculpt mode smooth stroke)
• possibility to edit the fall-off for smooth stroke and normal painting
• painting normalmap in real-time
• draw my texture images directly on my 3d model in the 3d view after unwrapping. It's somewhat possible now, but needs some love.
  • integration with gimp?
  • projection painting
• multiple layer painting
  • Ability to 3d paint, while keeping hidden faces... hidden ( not sure how to explain this clearly, I mean, if another object hides part of the object I'm painting on, I'd like to have the choice to see it or not. As it is now, in texture paint mode, the painted object always shows through other objects)
• keeping the edit mode hide/reveal settings in paint mode.

ANIMATION

• For doing simpler leg setups i would find it extremely helpful if there were the option that iktargets can automatically snap back to the bone they are applied to if you move them too far.
• Easier to reuse animations on different characters (also with slightly different proportions or armatures) but i fear this is one of the more difficult things to implement.
• A better way to preview an action, currently the Start/End frames of the scene are used for preview (Alt-a), but it would often be better use the start and end of an action instead when doing character animation, a function like "Play Back Animation between Markers" or so would be good, where the user could place markers that show the start and end of the action.
• Improves in the way the IK responds, the handling of it and rotations when you have a complex rig with many constraints, would end up in speed up of all sort of projects. Anything that would help in picking your ik targets in a fast way, and to handle it naturally.
• Flip vertex group name and shape anim while applying mirror modifier !
• "Nice to have" would be something similar to the biped skeleton / footstep tools. To have a ready-to-go skeleton that fits a lot of characters and the ability to have walk animation cycles created automatically save a lot of time.

SCULPTING

• Paintable mask that can be used to hide unhide geometry. Maybe we could use hold-ctrl left click / drag over and area while in sculpt mode, then when you let up on ctlr the geometry you didn't paint the mask over will disappear.
• Extruding new geometry through paint able masking while in sculpt mode, also we could load image texture as mask to paint over.
• When in sculpt mode if you could add or subtract multires levels with shortcut keys for example c,v
• Software work around that can speed up interactivity with very high definition models, can automatically step down the Multires level when you rotate/navigate the view, and after step the geometry back up for you to sculpt.
• Very direct approach to baking maps, at this point I've tested the normal map baking procedures in blender both tangent and worldspace and the approach has far more steps then is needed. From the sculpt menu I should be able to click generate normal maps from an object at it's highest multiress level and the normal map baker should automatically use it's lowest level as pow poly base, of course the tool would assume you have already unwrapped the mesh. Also an option could be included to set the range of the normals ray tracker and how far it will look for high definition geometry that has protruded beyond the lowpoly base mesh.
• Instead of holding down the shift key when in sculpt mode to switch from drawing on geometry to subtracting geometry we should simply use left mouse, right mouse. Also this method could be adopted to pinch/inflate, draw/subtract, smooth/flatin and would be much more efficient then the current keyboard method or navigating the blender UI

Masking

zbrush has both masking and hide geometry. Masking is extensively used to remove the likely hood of painting or sculpting in an area you wish to leave alone. It can be inverted for working the opposite area you originally masked to make a faster workflow when working on contrast.

Lazy Mouse

Used in sculpting and polypainting to keep lines smooth.

Slash

It gives a sharp edge as detail it is mostly used for adding detail in hard geometry (such as bricks, cracks, wood grain etc), hair and creases in cloth.

Project

As you can see in these vids project is important in the way that it can add specific geometry to your current mesh without having to destroy part of it to add it in. The painting part of this tool is and added bonus when working on original characters when it comes to producing a direct likeness of an actor or model it will be invaluable.

Cavity mask

Important for adding color as highlights and lowlights to a texture. It works by depth of surface similar to using the dry brush and inking painting techniques to add detail color to a miniature. It is controlled using a slider for depth info and a curve to define the hardness of the edges.

• Moving the averaging menu to the sculpt properties widget would be small a workflow improvement.
• Faster renderer/sculpting mode (working with a million of polygons can be really annoying)
• improve 3d painting BodyPaint 3D, ZBrush, and Modo are enormously ahead of us (among others) in the painting department. The first and simplest thing would be unify the painting tool working methods - sculpting, painting in the 3D interface, and various 2D painting methods should all be able to use the same tools and methods preferably styled after the sculpting tools since it has the best hotkey, pen tablet and interaction methods and it has best brush methods. After that I'd like to use much larger textures for 3D and 2D painting. Then it would be extremely nice to be able to paint different channels (spec, color, diffuse) and paint different layers. Other useful things would be painting across multiple objects.
• Image based scult (like modo)

MODELING

• Improved retopology tools - many artists are switching to a 'sculpt first - then retopologize - then detail sculpt' the current best tool for retopology is topogun. Retopologizing is creating a new mesh topology over an existing mesh. Some tools allow you to retopologize your existing hipoly mesh and have the sculpted details baked into your new mesh automatically. +1
• Being able to edit a multires mesh - silo allows you to add delete and extrude parts of your base mesh, even though they are 'multires' - currently in blender you must delete or apply multires before you can edit the mesh. (see LetterRiip post at http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12567)
• A merge verts brush, much like the box select brush (double tap B) that welds all the verts together in its selection area.
• Efficient Tri strips when converting Quads to Tri's (http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11542&highlight=)
• n-gons, for edge and verts chamferin'.

UV EDITOR

• easy way to transfer uv from high to low poly
• loop select for selecting lines of UVs, like alt+rmb for vertices in edit mode

• Merge islands when I find that a seam would be visible because of normal mapping
• Re-scale or even distort unimportant islands
• Highlighting in the uv editor islands that share borders with the current selection
• For "pack charts" be able to choose an "island margin" as well
• faces selected in uv editor outlined in 3d view
• Group islands that should have the same "material" in the texture so the texture layout can be more logical
• Auto UV Mapping would be amazing... like the UVLayout tool by headus http://www.uvlayout.com

BAKING

• Antialiased baking
• Better support for baking normals, ambient occlusion and other things one might want for textures.
• Baking the single bounce indirect illumination
• Radiosisty baking (texture based)
• AO baking affected by smooth options (there are hard edges in shadow map right now, even when they are smoothed) THIS ONE IS NOT CLEAR
• More high poly to low poly baking options like ambient occlusion or diffuse color (or anything)

BLENDER PYTHON API

• additional menus
• access more of blender interface through python
• draw mode flexibility

BLENDER-GE INTEGRATION

• property editor
• node editor for realtime shaders
• contextual help (hover help)
• customizable interface
• custom object types, the last time I used Blender as level editor I used Emptys with special names to mark spawn points, enemy positions and such.
• materials looking the same in GE as render
• real time preview .... over the network!

GAME EDITOR

• improved workflow for light mapping whole levels (and preview them without much effort)
• better navigation on big levels
• be able to set collision box in the 3d editor (and see it) - NOTE - Could use TexSpace for this --Ideasman42 18:20, 12 March 2008 (CET)
• realtime IK/bones preview in the GE
• multiscene-management TODO : DEFINE PROBLEM
• automatic refresh of changed image file.
• global exporter scale
• better support for interior modeling: a way to auto-hide backfacing polygons when modeling the inside of a building or level, since they have the tendency to get in the way
• easy sound implementation, possibility to set spatial position
• better physics support
• more flexible walkthrough camera modes
• a embedded version management interface (svn) as alternative to raw file-browser would be cool (in the direction of asset management)
• blend in a "ghosted" model as reference for getting the scale and orientation right might be helpful in some cases.
• Material system will be more unified for rendering and the Gameengine or exporting to external engines.

COMPLETE IDE DREAM

• better (free) static code analysis tools like CodeSonar or Coverity Prevent
• Advanced image manipulation capabilities / image editing (2d drawing and manipulation software, would be nice to remove gimp / krita from pipeline)
• The idea is to have blender for all art related / development stuff. Like from starting a project: design documents (text or mind maping), 2d story board (animated)....

OTHER

• improvement of the File->Append or Link, Blender can be not only modeling application but also complex level editor
• A window that shows Poly count and poly Budget that you can leave open...much like the one in max.
• A tool like polyboost to improve the workflow when working with low polygon models and high definition models would be very nice in blender. http://www.polyboost.com/features.htm
• Smoothing of Tangents before baking, as in zBrush to avoid nasty seams in game engines.
• Rays travel along smoothed normals but tangents get calculated via solid normals. This would be a good option for smoothing groups.
• "Save as Directory" checkbox in the save dialog could make things much easier (for version control).
• "Export Library" function that works like an inverse of "Load Library" and allows to export pieces of a .blend to a new .blend file, would make some tasks easier then having to delete all unneeded stuff manually.
• be able to use VSE or other sequencer to arrange sounds in cutscenes

distribution:

• integration with the Nvidia texture tools and Cuda would be great...Thus allowing users with new GPU's to take full advantage of them within Blender. (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/texture_tools.html,http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html )
• An icon for the brush alpha in the brush tab of multires as a reminder for when you come back to a project and cant remember what alpha's you have loaded.
• Blender's coordinate system be expanded to perhaps an infinite design plane, or at least a floating design plane if an infinite one can not be accomplished.
• bevel tool (it can't select individual edges, and the other bevel script screws up pretty bad 70% of the time), and also, when selecting faces, it would be cool if it acted like in Modo, where you select two along a line, then, using the arrow keys, you selet the rest; it's sort of like the Select Loop tool and Control+NumPlus... That would save me some time.

Stuff that directly doesnt apply to us

MISC USEFUL STUFF

• Options for selection of Blender units, Meter/centimeter and feet/inches would cover all the bases for modeling.
• Layers naming, reordering or in general customize layers

UV Editing

• view uvs of multiple selected objects in uv editor
• I'd like to see more "space-ship" friendly features in the areas of UV-mapping, multi-res and 3D paint.

CRAZY STUFF

• web plugin
• a mode to support assembling models like vehicles/spaceships/buildings from components, similar to lego. (saving groups of components as new components, defining snap points).. components would be reusable, and it would save trouble with uvmapping (once the components are mapped)
• a crazy feature would be to be able to draw b-spline lines on the object's surface, and stroke it with the active brush...Sort of 3D vector drawing. but, ok, this is a bit crazy
• The ability to create save and load colour swatches (?¿) would be welcome.
• The ability to 'import Blender' from any Python script. - (Not possible without major changes)
• Premade animation armatures, rag doll templates

REJECTED (Stuff we dont want)

• direct support for Gimp/XCF files Non standard format, gimp should support OpenEXR or Similar
• Editor to manage multiple light baking etc, light manager? Just use layers or a new scene and link in the objets you want to bake
• The orientation is properly flipped to account for differences between Blender's axes and OTHERPROGRAM's axes (handedness and axis problem) This needs to be delt with by each exporter, there is no good general solution since there are rotation orders, bone up axis, camera up axis, etc.
• uv relax (that helps to keep the same texel in all mapped faces) Needs a better explanation
• raster editing part also (to remove inkscape from pipeline) We should not aim to recreate all tools in Blender, better to improve interoperability
• tools for fonts edition and integration Font tools should not be apart of Blender unless they are specific to 3D text, or using fonts in blender in a new way, be more spesific
• mind-maping module This is outside blenders scope, try freemind or start a new project
• An intuitive eraser would also be nice. The current one leaves a color ghosting effects behind which can make painting transparency nearly impossible. This sounds like a bug and is probably graphics/OpenGL driver specific
• make fbx exporter work on macbook pros Report a bug, it should work
• Better mesh exporting API. The current one doesn't keep vertex sharing and thus produces over bloated mesh data. Current mesh API does keep vert sharing between faces

EXPORTERS

• improve verse
• exporter defaults get saved with ctrl+u
• export to direct x
• working collada exporter that does more than static meshes
• exporter for w3d
• like helping the author of the b3d plugin with lightmaps export, or provide lightmaps export in other formats, but hopefully the most used. Luckily, there are always formats that tend to be most used,(md5, b3d, x, md3, md2, OBJ, ASE , FBX, collada ) like I have seen many engines and tools already importing lightmapped levels in *.b3d format.
• import and export script for MicroStation (.DGN).
• Better import of Collada and FBX formats in Blender (with armature animation)
• custom object properties support for the fbx exporter
• instancing support for the fbx exporter

RENDERER

- better integration with yarfay, shaders, particles - final gathering/global ilumination based on photons maps

BLENDER UNRELATED

• improve opengl preview
• background images assined independently to 6 ortho views
• easy way to demo (and edit) glsl and hlsl shaders

Blender Game Engine

• logic brick improvement
• better message brick
• near sensor is buggy
• logic bricks fixed (generic logic bricks stuff)
• ipo actuator needs work
• velocity collision controller
• BGE api incredibly awkward
• More sensors and actuators (with some IA blocs for example)
• Possibility to use more complex tree of logic blocs (sensors => controlers > sensors > controlers > actuators > controlers > sensors > ....)
• when it comes to BGE is that we have to revert to old versions of concepts in order for it to work in BGE. It'd be great if things like the armature or subsurf modifier worked in game engine on the fly without having to convert it to the old, dirty way.

THINGS WE ALREADY HAVE (or at least planned)

• An option to automatically generate a heightmap from a plane.
• UV editing in Edit Mode
• Repeat textures outside the 0..1 area in the uv-editor. (helpful for mapping tiled textures)
• baking approximate ambient occlusion
• The ability to export double sided poly's (for grass planes and leaves etc) would be a godsend
• make it so geometry or empties can link to python scripts
• cross platform viewer
• set smooth/solid working on certain edges/faces
  • smooth groups? --> edge split modifier is the solution they say
• easier ways of setting edges smoothness/hardness -> fast and interactive
  • Easier ways of setting edges smoothness/hardness.. it must be fast and interactive. (yes yes you can use the clunky modifier thing but it's clunky.. and slow.. pls don't get offended)
  • My two biggest problems were tools like smoothing groups, hard/soft edges, etc. I believe Blender now has this, but it doesn't seem to be hooked into any export thing.
• scripts per object
• meta data
• headless-less mode for running scripts and do batch conversion, having the interface pop-up can get a little annoying when doing command line stuff (Xnest helps somewhat).
• easily search for any game object, asset or script, and reuse with simple drag and drop.
• built in shaders and fx to drag and drop
• Stretch visualization green for non stretch red for too little space blue for overstretched for UVs.
• lasso selection in the UV editor
• Non-uniform scale in the uv editor
• Weld selected vertices if the distance between them lies within a certain threshold
• baking hipoly->lopoly
• DDS support (Note, no support for loading compressed textures into OpenGL memory or cubemaps), they work like other images.
• Only do heat-weighting on visible bone (or something similar) WKey when in Pose and Weight Paint mode
• A Thicken tool. See Mesh Scripts menu
• A better decimate tool, that keeps UV's intact and has enough decency to keep a good mesh flow See Mesh Scripts, should be converted to a modifier
• correct handling of transparent textures in the viewport (options for back to front sorted drawing and for alpha testing) Alpha clipping option in OpenGL prefs
• Being able to change the format to save images in the save dialog (now it can only be done outside). Now in the save image header
• target weld would also be nice or just redoing the snap tool so it's possible to use proportional edit with it. See automerge in the Mesh menu

POSTPONED FOR BLENDER 2.5

• Custom hot keys
• integrate scripting in core ui