one way or the other, and while I think the more in Blender, the merrier (tho lately more worried on formats in blender/char animation, keyframes handling workflow) , still, if you can access a Windows, or surely Wine (recent version even allows PS CS2!) , you then can use the very useful tiny tool (I was involved in suggesting some of its features , long ago.Which where added, happily ):

http://www.bottomap.com/Software/A4B/A4B.html

another one:

- the possibility to repeat textures outside the 0..1 area in the uv-editor. this would be very helpful for mapping tiled textures.

<edit>
- custom object properties support for the fbx exporter
- instancing support for the fbx exporter
</edit>

Last edited by kakapo on Fri Feb 01, 2008 4:14 am; edited 1 time in total

Another request:

A tool like polyboost to improve the workflow when working with low polygon models and high definition models would be very nice in blender.

http://www.polyboost.com/features.htm

Well i thought about some things for the baking feature(Some have been discussed but not clarified):

-Smoothing of Tangents before baking, as in zBrush to avoid nasty seams in game engines.

-Rays travel along smoothed normals but tangents get calculated via solid normals. This would be a good option for smoothing groups.

Hi! Sorry for late answer but it was too much information to handle before Apricot has actually started

About the mind-mapping you propose. I guess that'd be nice. I don't think it'll be possible to do it (given the quantity of tasks at hand), but as we're also thinking about revising node support for several other tasks (logic, animation trees, and materials), i guess that could eventually be easily done using it.

thx for all the wishes

Pablo

Dread Knight wrote:

> Also i will like a mind-maping module Thing about it... Some features from pencil software integrated ... and more on the text editing capabilities. The ideea is to have blender for all art related / development stuff. Like from starting a project: design documents (text or ming maping), 2d story board (animated).... hope you get the ideea... I could make a design document for the "mind-maping" viewport/feature/tool.

Hi all!

First a lot of thanks for all the feedback, it is incredibly valuable. I made a list and now am trying to merge similar requests and classify them, so expect some kind of list soon.

I hope it will help to get a picture of all the stuff that would make from blender the perfect game editor .

Pablo from apricot team

caedes wrote:

Hi all! First a lot of thanks for all the feedback, it is incredibly valuable. I made a list and now am trying to merge similar requests and classify them, so expect some kind of list soon. I hope it will help to get a picture of all the stuff that would make from blender the perfect game editor . Pablo from apricot team

Just another request! A feature to "remove" elements from geometry, just like and Editable Poly in 3dmax.. that is removing vertex or edges for example, but without making holes in geometry and preserve UVs, I asume Ngons should be implemented for that but I think it's time to get it in blender

Donno if it's to late but:
Armature bone weights.
Instead of using normal weight maps where a vertex can have 1.000 influence from sevral bones why not make some new weight map function that makes the total sum of a vertex' weights sum up to 1. This helps when painting weight maps.
Etc. when u paint on Weight map 1(WM1) it increases the weight from 0 to 1 an decreases the wight on weight map 2(WM2)
if several wight maps are on a vertex the weight maps that aren't painted loose weight.

The old weight maps function still exist and should be able to be used to armatures if u want.

Hope I'm clear about this :>

EDIT: Some info about the tangent smoothing.
A video that shows what i mean:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/video.php?v=1070

It's to avoid this:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462/web.06s/asst/project3/normalmap/seams1.png

Mariolink aka. Ikee

again if not too late, in no particular order:

- antialiased texture/light baking
- lod (level of detail) node in scene graph
- ability to have a background image associated with a particular camera i.e. when you switch to a particular camera view, the background image changes to a predefined image - great for modelling from arbitrary (position and rotation calibrated) images
- 'Quads Contrained Rectangular' in the UV Editor > UV - doesn't work well - often collapses a slightly skew quad into a line rather than rectangle.

metalliandy wrote:

5) A window that shows Poly count and poly Budget that you can leave open...much like the one in max. I find the current poly count (top right corner) flawed because it counts Quads only. (i know you only have to divide by two, but it would be a nice addition )

To expand this, if I may. It would be nice if the tool counted both tris and quads for all scenes, current scene, visible layers, groups, same types, selected and active. The Outliner Display options. Of course, choosing which of each of these is shown at one time would be nice also. I don't always need all that information though sometimes I may.

(sorry for the necrobump) Blender NEEDS better smooth grouping. If we want Blender to be considered a professional game development tool it sadly will not happen unless it incorporates 3DS Max style smooth groups, without that it's pretty much dead in the water (there are ways around it but the cause 'issues' of their own); the sad fact is that many Pro dev studios use Max for environment art for precisely this reason.
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kat wrote:

(sorry for the necrobump) Blender NEEDS better smooth grouping. If we want Blender to be considered a professional game development tool it sadly will not happen unless it incorporates 3DS Max style smooth groups, without that it's pretty much dead in the water (there are ways around it but the cause 'issues' of their own); the sad fact is that many Pro dev studios use Max for environment art for precisely this reason.

No 3DS Max implementation of hard/soft edges is rubbish. Have a look at Multigen or Maya to see how easy and elegant it is in other packages.

fobsta wrote:

kat wrote: (sorry for the necrobump) Blender NEEDS better smooth grouping. If we want Blender to be considered a professional game development tool it sadly will not happen unless it incorporates 3DS Max style smooth groups, without that it's pretty much dead in the water (there are ways around it but the cause 'issues' of their own); the sad fact is that many Pro dev studios use Max for environment art for precisely this reason. No 3DS Max implementation of hard/soft edges is rubbish. Have a look at Multigen or Maya to see how easy and elegant it is in other packages.

"Elegance" is a personal preference, I'm not really interested in that kind of discussion ("maya is better than max"). I mention Max smooth groups simply because Max is the de facto content tool used by the game industry itself and as this is a discussion about Blender in that context it would seem to me to be more appropriate to take on board features used by the most commonly used applications.

Personally I don't care *what* method(s) is/are used so long as some form of 'smooth grouping' is implimented and can be exported to various game compatible formats; obviously that also means the import/export scripts all have to be updated as well.
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kat,

you can already mark hard edges it gives the exact same end result.

LetterRip

LetterRip wrote:

kat, you can already mark hard edges it gives the exact same end result. LetterRip

I know, but AFAIK it's not 'game compatible' yet, ie. the data isn't exported out to the various modelling formats; wither that's a export script or Blender update issue I don't know (smooth 'groups' need to be exportable rather than being used as an interpretive 'slice and dice' that splits the mesh up into subsections - vertex count matters in games [as you may know])...

[EDIT]Just been playing with the modifier again, and yes, it does what's needed; on big models I find it slower to select edges (they're not always 'looped' so more often than not need to be individually selected) than selecting faces would be, but, if the 'group/edge' info can be functionally exported into a usable external formats then edgesplit modifier is more than adaquate for content creation for games.
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