Tools category

Few buttons display the shortcut with the instruction when putting the mouse over it.
Would be nice to have this always displayed, e.g. when ctrl-clicking on a button

Add a snap mode where it snaps to the surface of background geometry. Like retopo but for objects.

So you could hold Ctrl and objects would snap to the surface of terrain for instance.

It would be awesome to have a built in motion tracker , to match with real footage ,and match movements.

Rather than useing the current method of importing materials to your projects through amending it would be really handy to load and save them seperately and also to browse them as thumbnails.

Move the mesh/object modifiers to a node based system. Much more power & flexibility.

Especially when working with mirror modifier, it'd be great to be able to quickly set a location of a vertex to zero with a certain axis (usually x) when working with center vertices. This can be done with the n-menu (transform properties) but it requires using the mouse and it's not a single function (not fast, not hotkey, a menu).

Also sometimes you might want to clear the rotation or the scale on a certain axis only.

In edit mode it'd work in the object's local co-ordinates, I believe (rotation and scale are probably unusable, unless you count face normals, and that's only for the rotation angle of a face).

It'd work like this:

press alt+g
-->
menu item 1: clear location
menu item 2. clear loc X (would be toggled with XKey)
menu item 3. clear loc Y (would be toggled with YKey)
menu item 4. clear loc Z (would be toggled with ZKey)

Same with rotation and scale.

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.

Since Vertex Groups are listed in a subcategory under a Mesh object's name in the Outliner, and Mesh objects are selectable in the outliner, I thought it might be nice if an object's Vertex Groups were selectable from the Outliner.

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.

Many users don't use gestures and find them to be annoying/distracting. They are also often a source of frustration for new users.

Thus it might be worthwhile to have an option to disable gestures entirely, and possibly to have them disabled by default.

I use this setting a lot in Rhino to figure out reversed normals. Its a lot faster than showing normals and works a lot better in complex meshes. By setting the back-facing polys to red, for example, they really jump out from a white model.

When selecting faces in Circle Select mode it would be nice to be able rotate the view. Currently you have to leave Circle Select mode, rotate the view, and then hit B+B again to go back into Circle Select. Would like some sort of shortcut key combination that would let you rotate while in Circle Select.

The 'center' buttons only work for some object types (just meshes?). It would be useful if this function could be extended to all types of object.

Aligning object's origins in blender today is a rather complicated process.

For example try this and you would see what I mean.: Place two objects in you scene with different position and rotation and then try to align object A's origin with object B's without affecting the position and rotation of object A's mesh...

This would be alot easier if you could treat the orgin of an object as an "object" itself.

This is how it could work:
Select your object and click on the "edit origin" button, this would turn the object's origin into an empty-object that you move and rotate without affecting your object. Now it's easy to reposition change rotation of the origin. When your finish editing the origin you just click on the "edit origin" button again to apply the changes to the origin.

Alot of other 3d-applications have this function and it's a efficient way to control the origin of an object.

Stencil/Drill Tool
We all know the problems Blender has with booleans, since I hear they are updating that with the coming of BMesh, I'd like to suggest a stencil/ drill tool that would be similar to the ones many other 3D/animation applications have. It could operate much like the current retopo tool but would allow a direct "drawing" of vertices/polys into the given mesh. Anyone familiar with the Lightwave version of this tool should understand the methodology.

Extrude and Bevel Tool
The bevel modifier does not allow enough control on complicated objects and the current Bevel script has a tendency to complicate topography.
A bevel tool with an extrude option is needed in Blender (it would be nice to be able to define the angle at which the extrude would take place relative to the viewport by using the ctrl+middle mouse button). The bevel tool should give options on whether or not the creation of tris is acceptable. Also being able to make multiple bevels in a single step to create a "crown molding" effect would be quite useful.

The representation of information about something as complex as an area light right now is very limited. I want to be able to know where light will cease to contribute to lighting a particular surface. The easiest way to see this is by having a partially transparent polygonal cage that extends from a lamp showing where the light rays will fall. If your surface is within those visible boundaries, it receives light!

For regular omni-directional lamps, Distance, Quad 1, Quad 2 call all be represented as spheres.

For spot lights those same spheres can be truncated by clipping cones and cones can represent the light angle and softness hotspot angle

For area lights, all is true which is true for spot lights, but truncated spheres and cones must be split in to four corners of a beveled box representing the full volume of the area light and it's outward angle from that box.

Please take a look at the link below for pictures and my attempts to emulate one of these wonderful helper visualizations.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1092428

At the moment we only have a global undo. However undo levels can be quickly used up and they dont get saved in the blend file.

It would be helpful if we had a "history" function in blender just like in the Gimp. Every change a user makes gets saved and you can go back and forth through your changes.

Ideally the history should get saved along with the blend file.

I was thinking there are multiple ways one could handle this.

1. Just store the history in the same blend file as the scene.
This would inflate the file size, but there should be an option in blender where you can select that the file should not be saved with history, or that you can "flush" the history so that only the current scene is stored.

2. Have the history stored in a similar named file just with a different ending. e.g. scene01.blend and scene01.hist

When you load a scene file, blender would automatically check if there was an accompanying history file and load that as well.

If you should wish to submit your blend file to a renderfarm or host it on a server for the public. You could just provide the blend file without the history file in order to keep the filesize down.

We need to press too many buttons + save and reopen file for deleting materials and textures from the Blender scene. Simple Delete action should be enough, the rest should do Blender automatically.

As feature rich, expandable, and capable as Blender is, I still like to do the majority of my character sculpting in ZBrush. I build a base mesh in Blender and import into ZBrush for details. I would like to be able to reimport my base mesh back into Blender as a Shape Key with whatever non-destructive topological changes i've made in ZBrush (facial expressions, body mass, etc.). 3ds max has this capability with its Morpher modifier, which allows you to pick any mesh in the scene that has the same vertex order and apply it as a "morph target"/shape key. Blender's .obj import dialog has the option to import as a "Morph Target" to maintain vertex order, but I don't know of anyway to apply it as a morph target/shape key.

Blender supports 3Gon, FGon but not NGon. If you make a face with 2 holes on the center, it will have many 3Gons.

It will be nice if the Boolean Operations will try to produce NGons as posible as it can rather than 3Gons/FGons.