Random ideas

When You want to use Displacement Modifier with RGB->XYZ, only one strength value is availabe, and you can set one strength for three X,Y and Z, so if you want to set different strength values for each of these axis, you must add 3 diffrent displace modifier,
this little change can help to prevent using displacement modifier more than needed.

In addition to the current node system it might be useful if one there to have a set of nodes which were aware of the x-axis location and have time_variable settings like one have for effects in the sequencer window, in fact on could completely replace the sequencer with time based nodes.
see http://matthaus.woolard.googlepages.com/blender_node
for more details

I can never figure nodes out and this could help. Not sure how effective this idea would be, but I have a suspicion that node pros use the same formula for success every time.

*Idea acquired from python templates

In some newer games like the upcoming Star Wars the Force Unleashed they have integrated a new physics system(Digital Molecular Matter)for handling the behavior of different materials like wood, metal, glass and many more , so that the material behaves like it would in real life: wood breaks and splinter ,metal bends and gets dented ,glass cracks and shatters etc.

Perhaps you could assign the the material physics to vertex groups so that you can have different material physics and smooth transitions between them on the same mesh or it could be applied with the standard materials instead(perhaps putting the settings into the DYN tab) I don't know if they are good options on how the system should be handled in the Blender ui just suggestions i thought up writing this.

Anyway here is a video showing it in action: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bE4k9Vmcp5g unfortunately I couldn't find the longer version i have seen earlier so it only shows wood breaking.

Unfortunately i have very little coding experience and know that this is a very large undertaking but i thought i should at least mention it.

:)

Maya does it, 3Ds max does it, XSI does it. Why ? Because it just works better than going to NLA editor and move dots around. You can skip alot of going back and forth from IPO to the NLA by having it all in the IPO Editor.

Multires should (optionally) smooth UVs also. Subsurf handles the smoothing perfectly, so where's the problem?

I think the object naming system in Blender is a bit awkward, so it could do with a very small change. When you duplicate an object or separate a part, the new objects are given names ending in .001, .002, 00x.... That seems to make sense, but you would like to have ALL objects ending in a number, and not to have "box" then "box.001" (which is a SECOND box, not the first, as the name suggests). Of course, you can give your ORIGINAL object the name "box.001". THE PROBLEM IS, WHEN YOU DO THAT, YOUR DUPLICATED OBJECT WILL BE NAMED "BOX" AND NOT "BOX.002", WHICH IS NOT VERY CONVENIENT. I believe this change is easy to implement, and it would make such a difference!

Did you guys see the layer-manager of the new Cinema 4D R10?
It has by far the best layer-manager out there. I would love to see only the half of the features of their layer-manager implemented in blender.

Take a look a this:
http://www.c4dcafe.com/reviews/r10/images/layerbrowser.jpg
http://www.c4dcafe.com/reviews/r10/layers.php

What do you think?

Now there are many architects try to use Blender. But Blender don't have enough tools they needed. One of the most important is Measuring Tools with snapping ability.

It should can measure distance/angle precisely because it has handles that you can snap them to any vertex in the screen.

And if you press Enter, the information (a line joining those vertices and the text about the value) will not deleted on the screen (just like normal text command and a simple line).

Or if you press Esc, the information will disappear. Sometimes you just want to know the distance/angle, not to put it as 3D objects.

Many architects will appreciate if Blender has this tool.

it's not always convenient or helpful to hide a mesh, or part of a mesh. sometimes one needs to see sub-objects of a mesh in order to work around them. it would be great if one could "freeze" selected/unselected verts in edit mode so that they are not translatable or selectable while working on surrounding subobjects.

I and many others i think would love to have real midi import functions , real audio to ipo.




I know there are scripts for that , but are not really accurate.

I may be asking too much , but if you would integrate midi , it would be cool to add LFO's , some kind bpm clock would really rock.

Midi can be tranlated to ipo's or trigger actions.

Do you think this could be implemented in blender ?

Thread in blender artists http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78403&highlight=midi+import+sc ript

Right now it's really hard to reuse the output of material nodes in some cases. Best example is a bump/normal-map, but here are surely more cases.

Consider the following scenario:
* You have a nice image-mask for some part your model (for use in the material node setup)
* You now transform this mask into a different one using a material-node setup.
* You now want to use the new mask for (e.g.) bumpmap - without baking the resulting mask this seems to be pretty impossible.

There where several suggestions already how to solve this, but the only ones I remember are
1) to add a "Texture Output" node to the material node editor which can be used in the material as a texture again. Not perfect but it shows how it _could_ work.
2) There was also a talk about a new "texture nodes" mode or something along this line - that may solve this as well.
Suggestions are welcome.

This is kinda hard to describe, so if you have any question please leave a comment.
I'll try to come up with a quick example image to show the problem better I find some time.

EDIT:
I've found an old thread of mine which shows an example of the problem (first node-setup image in the thread)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78265

Werner

for exporting data to game engines it would be great if the fbx exporter supported custom properties (the ones you can set in the logic buttons window). support for instances would be nice too.

It would be nice to be able to save particle settings, such as for hair, and settings for cloth, as custom presets stored with Blender.

make blender by default cover the start bar and get rid of the title bar (at the top)...

those are valid workspace pixels for people with small monitors!

[zbrush, and i think modo, do this]

if i could line up some renders (a selection of short animations, many views of the same complex scene, etc) and export them to the 'render waiting list' I could then go and finish off some other work without constantly having to check back and see what blender is doing.

Folding@home has a tidy little applet which works folding proteans for stanford university (google it- find the cure to cancer while you browse the web & fiddle with polygons) the program has a little progress bar which sits in kpanel and lets you know everytime you finish a unit, it then sends the results off and downloads the next workunit. Something like this would be perfect, if you could set it so when you press the 'render' button it adds it to the list waiting -anytime you have spare cycles on your cpu it uses them to render its way through the list and output the results to a directory.

ok so this is already sort of possible with blender but thats all the more reason to open it up so it's an easy and quick function to use.

The real reason i think this is important is because i (and i bet i'm not the only one) often set blender to render something, surf the web for a while, go back and move the camera to a new angle and set it to render again but this time i get so engrossed in reading debian changelogs that an hour passes before i remember to go and move the cam and start the render again -by this time i've forgotten what i was doing in blender and accidentally start the render without turning the sun back on or with half the building i'm about to render invisible - thus wasting the last render my computer will do that night because I'll have fallen asleep before it's done.

I propose a button that is ON by default under or near the buttons for actor,ghost,rigid body etc, but it can be turned OFF -->so that the view doesn't become so cluttered when you have Physics Visualisation turned on in the game menu.

Then you can see how the physics are being calculated on the selected objects only. It gets impossible to see after you have more than 5 objects on top of each other.

Not sure how hard it would be to implement.

It may not seem very useful, but it would be nice for if you often doing same project that take several days.

paste the link into your browser for the mock up new menu
http://blenderscripts.googlepages.com/blenderscriptmenu%27s
A mock up of a greatly expanded Python Scripts Menu to better reflect tools & their categories.
To provide Blender users with a more defined list of functions callable via python.
my comments.
These Categories can easily be filled with existing scripts & functions.
As Blender gains more functions, more consistent definition of functions is needed.
With many scripts falling into similar categories it can be confusing to find the right tool for the job.
Many current bundled scripts are in probably the wrong category.
If defined better than my mock up, other functions could be called from these menus also.
So it could serve as a proxy or test Blender Function menu also.
Additions, Subtractions, Comments, Ideas, are all most welcome.
thanks,
Brendon.

Ok... I've been wanting this forever, enough actually to script it in python.

Basicly it's the normal "selection to cursor" but relative to the view angle.

For a more detailed explanation of the feature and a python script example see:
http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/python_scripts/selection_to_view_cursor