Interface category

When you have not saved your file, have blender ask if you want to quit when closing blender via the windowmanager. (useually cross button)
- This is common for most applications

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?

currently, if you do transformations in blender you get stopped if the mouse cursor reaches the border of the screen. most other 3d applications i know allow to continue outside of the screen. this would be nice in blender too!

continuously having to readjust the view and restarting the transformation can be a bit annoying if you want to move something rather far (or if you do fine movement with shift) for example.

Give the user visual feedback concerning the kind of unit he/she is working in. More specifically, being able to set one blender unit as meteres, centimeters, kilometers, inches, feet, etc.
Adjustments should be updated in the information bar in the 3d window (for instance when moving an object, you see how many mm or cm it has moved)
Further, when turning on display selected edge length, the current unit should be added to the shown numbers, so when you select an edge, its says 0.5 mm instead of 0.5.

As extra maybe make it possible to render the 'display selected edge length' (may be interesting for architects?)

MESH EDIT MODE
if there is a popup menu with only one setting, you can easily change the value with the mousewheel.
e.g. you select "subdivide multi"-> the "number of cuts menu" pops up and you only need to turn the mousewheel to increase or decrease the number of cuts and then push enter.
kind of similar to the loop cut function (ctrl-L)

Currently blender has (among others) a "Solid" and a "Wireframe" view-mode. Why not combine them to a extra view-mode?

(For an example look here: http://www.ag-systems.net/mxw/book_wire.jpg)

It would be wonderful if drag and drop could be used for all of the places it makes sense. This includes drag and drop video seqeunces and audio sequences on the video sequencer.

Drag and drop textures onto objects.

Drag and drop ordering for outliner, etc.

when more than one object has been selected, it should be possible to amend the properties of the selected objects using the buttons window, rather than one by one.

for example: add an object key to all selected objects, or change the material of all selected objects.

While wrangling with an annoying model the other day, I had this idea and I thought I'd share. Nothing revolutionary, but I thought it might be useful.

Problem:
When working on complex meshes, it's often necessary to use wireframe mode to reveal occluded features. Unfortunately, this view can be confusing, and it's sometimes difficult to discern the relationship of nearby or overlapping geometry.

Current Fix/Workaround:
The user has several options for dealing with occluded geometry. He can use Viewport Clipping (Alt-Bkey) to prevent unwanted areas from drawing, but he loses valuable information in the process, and needs to cancel and reset the clipping border when moving to other areas of the mesh. Similarly, he can Hide (Hkey) faces which he'd prefer not to see, but this obviously has similar drawbacks to Viewport Clipping. Last, he can return to shaded mode and disable Occlude Background Geometry, but this is hardly more clear than wireframe mode.

Feature Proposal:
An alternate wireframe draw mode that changes the color of edges and vertices based on their distance from the current view (Z depth). For example, it could color nearby verts/edges red, and fade to blue as they recede into the distance. (see mock-up linked below)

http://i31.tinypic.com/2istbb6.jpg


Benefits:
-Improves the clarity of a wireframe display by increasing contextual information, rather than by masking or hiding information.
-Accomplishes the same task as Clipping (Alt-B), while requiring less input from the user.

Interface:
The simplest interface for this feature would be to enable/disable it with a hotkey (and also a button on the viewport's header). This seems to be an adequate default behavior, however, this feature could benefit from expanded user controls, which would require a more intricate interface.

[....]

howdy,

so right now, when blender opens up, you have NO IDEA what view you're looking at. for me, this was the most profound aspect of opening blender for the first time - DISORIENTATION.

you can turn on viewport titles (TOP, FRONT, PERSP, ETC) and enable them to be default but this request is probably MOST IMPORTANT for people's FIRST IMPRESSION of blender. when they don't know how to do anything.

i think it should be ON by default and if someone, for some reason, wants to turn it off, they're probably a more advanced user and will know how to do it.

Some way of switching cameras in an animation so as to do jump cuts. Typically one wants to have frames 1-23 from camera #1 (long shot, say), then frames 24-35 from camera #2 (medium shot), and then frames 36-62 from camera #3 (close up on girl's face)... and then for frames 7500-7525 back to camera #1 for the close out. There is no way to do this in Blender at them moment. OK, there are various expedients, such as jumping the camera location between frames (doesn't work, looks terrible, eg if one does interlacing) or a script (hard to manipulate).

Give the user the ability to color meshes in a user defined color for wireframemode. The object should be highlighted with this color and its mesh should be displayed in this color in wireframe mode.

The benefits is to give better orientation in complex scenes.
Further benefits taken from a duplicate idea 329:
"Useful in rigging when you have characters with multiple controlers object, and colorizing curves and wires would help organize your scene.
For Example, left controls were blue, right controls were red, middle controls were yellow...."


This proposal is basically a different and hoepfully workable solution to my first idea to color vertex groups and groups which was flawed since objects and vertices can be part of more then one vertex-/group. (See http://www.blenderstorm.org/qapoll/ideas/idea/101/)

So each object, vertex can only be part of one color group.

In several modifiers, constraints etc. you can select object they're affected by (for example Armature, MeshDeform, Mirror and Lattice). It would be more natural to click into that textbox and then click on the object you want to select.

They both say the same thing, but one has Loop cut added to it.

Add support for line breaks in tooltips - at this way you can format longer descriptions - and describe some options (if needed)

Make a node system to control particles/physics

its now possible to connect particles into others particles systems, so they get more complex...

a "particles nodes" make easier to work with an complex particle setup

It would be nice little thing to have "dirty" status of scene layer showing up in the little layer buttons. Make it have a black dot or something to mark that "There is stuff on this layer".

Why: Well i tend to throw stuff that i am not editing onto layers not used or activated. This helps me to stay focused on one thing and not fiddle around with everything.

Simple and small improvement?

Do you know that if you resize a image without gamma correction - you get wrong results? You can't belive it? Do a test here: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

For 3D, this is much more important then you think... but wait... Blender do not support it !

Yes you can add gamma correction to final image via gamma node, but you can not correct colors and textures before rendering automaticaly...

What we need is a global number value gadget to set input gamma correction value... or/and custom gamma correction for colors/images

Read more here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=305727
http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/tone/index.php
http://highend3d.com/3dsmax/tutorials/rendering/vray/147.html
http://www.gijsdezwart.nl/tutorials.php

ala-zbrush

hold a key (eg. shift) while looking around in the 3d viewport to snap to the closest orthographic view (front, side, top etc)

makes for an extremely quick modelling workflow and almost voids the use of the numpad keys to change views

Change the look of handles for IPO curves.
Now it's a bit messy, handles and points in curves look the same.