Most popular ideas this month

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

When you render - you do not see the current state of rendering... in best cases you see last render time and current part-number...

But what about current render state in percent (for image or animation)? Or current render time for current frame. Or estimated time for frame / animation?

Look at this screen - wow!
http://images.gamedev.net/features/reviews/modo202/5-shot-glass-render.jpg

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

multi-threaded fluid simulation
multi-threaded cloth simulation
multi-threaded preview render
multi-threaded playblast render

another nice update for the preview renderer would be (as seen in modo) to render like a progressive jpeg. so the longer you wait the clearer the render gets. this lets you have preview open all the time on a seperate view and constantly see your changes

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

True support for Ngons, allowing a much faster box modeling work flow for those who choose to use them. I can see possibilities of benefits for architectural modeling as well as organic modeling.

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.

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.

Other 3D apps I’ve used can control the density/transparency and colour of the shadows. This is such an extremely valuable option I can’t believe its not already in Blender!

Caustics are the only real way to make a shadow of a transparent object look more photo-realistic. This would be a great advancement for people working with transparent materials.

It would be really great to be able to see particles/halo textures in raytraced reflections & through transparent materials.

The idea is to be able to pause a render and then to be able to resume the render later, either during the current Blending session or at some future time after having exited and restarted Blender.

The render state could be kept in an external file (e.g. example.blend.renderstate) while render image could be maintained in its own subdirectory (much like what was done with particle caching) so renders could be continued not only on one system but multiple systems if necessary (assuming in this example the same version of Blender is being used on all systems involved).

That last part could also offer potential benefits for advanced renderfarm applications. One example being where a custom (i.e. Blender-specific) renderfarm with potentially multiple different systems (render nodes) could, upon finding calculating an opportunity (either predetermined via benchmarks before production time rendering or through realtime performance checks) for faster rendering on a newly available node with faster/higher computational capacity (e.g. multicore system/more RAM), terminate the slower render node (while not losing its progress by virtue of a rendestate) and then advance the job (blend file) to the better node with renderstate information so as to resume the render.

Just some thoughts :-)


Thanks for considering,

RobertT

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)

If an object/material/texture property is animated, (for example there is an ipo curve for Material RGB), then on the panel where the user usually sets that property (Materials panel) is grayed out or a darker shade as a visual cue.

If the user changes the property by moving the slider or entering a value, a popup window asks them if they want to establish a new key, or ignore the entry.

see http://wiki.blender.org/Requests

I know that's in a Blender plan already, but just for the record... :)

Currently whatever renderer you use, Blender becomes unresponsive until rendering is complete.

Cinema 4D is the closest (interface wise) to Blender (total customization).

When one renders in C4D, i can still continue to work on the project, and the scene simply renders in the background (with the penalty of render speed) but overall productivity increases 10fold as I never (nearly never) stop working on the project.

currently you can achieve roughly 8 million polys on typical hardware, zbrush and mudbox can both achieve a couple of orders of magnitude more detail sculpting. Perhaps Kais adaptive subdivision ideas can be used for this or possibly this research

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~rms/pubs/SurfaceTreeEG08.html

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)

An infinite plane is a plane that spans an infinite distance. This would be very useful, especially when making landscape scenes with Blender.
After trying Bryce 5.5, I found that the infinite plane feature was the one I used the most. I would love to see something like this in Blender!