a way for deleting (all) unused datablocks of the current blender session so that you don't have to restart blender anymore for that.

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.

a bridge tool which automatically can connect two selected groups of edges or polygons would be great.

here is an example: http://www.luxology.com/training/video.aspx?id=36

you select a few edges in the uv-editor and the move and sew tool will automatically find the uv-patch which also shares those edges. the found uv-patch will be moved/rotated/scaled to make the corresponding edges fit as good as possible for connecting the two patches. finally the vertices will be weld. many uv-editors like the ones in maya and modo have this feature.

the possibility of reusing animations on different characters without much effort (also if they have different proportions and armatures) would be a huge time saver for many projects.

i know that motion retargeting is very difficult to do but i still hope that some genius(es) someday will work on this for blender. :)

programs like xsi, maya and motion builder support motion retargeting and it shouldn't be hard to find some example videos.

also features like offered in endorphin or euphoria would be great. i am not sure if bullet already would be powerful enough for something like that?

http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm

it would be very helpful if there were the option to always make IK targets snap back to the bone they are attached too after moving them. maya has this option.

it doesn't seem like this would be hard to add (but i have no clue about the ik code)? just solve the IK and if the IK target isn't positioned on the bone anymore after the mouse button gets released then set its position back to the bone? it should be an option.

edit:
the new "limit distance" contraint is very overcomplicated for this purpose. you need a helper bone to prevent cyclic dependency problems and it's very fiddly to set the right distance.

why not have a simple checkbox in the IK solver constraint for enabling a snap back like described?

snapping should be compatible with modifiers. (or modifiers with snapping. i don't know where the problem is but currently snapping doesn't work with meshes that are affected by modifiers. modifiers first have to be applied to get it working.)

is the cursor really so important and in use so often that it needs its own mouse button? wouldn't some other keyboard short cut be sufficent? (or LMB + some modifier key but i don't know if there still are free ones?)

actually i am quite used to it in the meantime, but when i was new to blender i found the constant accidental cursor placing very irritating.

it still sometimes happens that i accidentally place the cursor. for example when i miss the transform widget.

if you do a transformation in blender and don't constrain it to an axis or plane, then the transformation happens in the plane which is parallel to the view.

it would be great if there were an option to not use the view plane, but always the global x/y/z plane which is most similar/parallel to the view plane. this can be very handy if you work in 3d views.

additionally it would be nice if the work plane could be locked to be parallel to a specified polygon for a while.

(an application who uses work planes like that is modo.)

editable comments for fixing typos. :)

currently, if you want to bake lighting (for example for game levels) you have to choose "full render" and set up some white material. it would be great if there were also an option to bake the lighting information only.

and it would be great if brecht finished the approximate one bounce GI he mentioned in a blog post once.

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.

a fbx importer would be extremely helpful. :)

if you do a transformation in blender and don't constrain it to an axis or plane, then the transformation happens in the plane which is parallel to the view.

it would be great if there were an option to not use the view plane, but always the global xy/xz/yz plane which is most similar/parallel to the view plane. this can be very handy if you work in 3d views.

(an application which uses work planes like that is modo.)

it should only be an option! i am not for removing the old way.

now that brecht is adding all this nice glsl shader stuff it would also be great if realtime shadow mapping were possible in the viewports.

this would be very helpful for previewing shadows and it would enable very fast rendering of high quality opengl previews or playblasts.

machinima means doing movies in a real time environment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima)

since blender is a 3d content creation software which comes with an integrated game engine it could be the ideal tool for machinima.

you would first build and set up your characters and the environment and then control them in realtime in the game engine and record their movements and animations. think of digital puppetry... the camera movement would be recordable too. network support like described on wikipedia isn't necessary. the characters also could be recorded one after another.

it would be similar to how recording bullet physics already works.

maybe doing something like this already is possible with python? but a good machinima workflow for non-programmers would be great. there could be node-based animation sequence and character controller editors (similar to what is planned for apricot i think). probably the game engine's character animation features would have to be improved a bit (blending of animations, mixing armature animation with shape keys for faces,...) or maybe it would make more sense to do it with one of the planned plugins for external engines.

finally animations could be rendered either with the game engine or with blender's renderer (this possibility would be another huge advantage over other tools used for machinima).