[Bf-committers] Blender adoption

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Hi list,

My company is developing games and is currently evaluating Blender as a
possible choice for creating and animating meshes. However, after our
graphics peoples quickly dig through the blender edition features, it seems
that there is still some weaknesses when compared to 3DMax or Lightwave.
Main comments are about the editing controls : the mouse-and-keyboard
combinaisons are quite different from the one implemented in other 3D
software are not seen as improvment. It's also difficult in the first place
so find some "hidden" features (hopefuly the 2.3 book seems to help here).
We still have a list of "missing and needed" features but they're maybe
explained somewhere in the book.

As for myself, I'm more concerned about the lack of customization that the
python scripts offers : the API is nice, but quite small. There is no way (I
think) to rebind keyboard keys on specific python actions, or simply to
capture and filter the keyb/mouse events in edition and animation modes :
this could enable a wide range of interactive plugins. I would like to know
if such features are planned, how difficult it would be to implement in the
current blender sources for an experimented hacker, and if such patches have
chances of being merged into the CVS tree. I'm also interested in the
ability to write plugins that could "draw" objects directly in the plugin
window in order to develop edition-custom-mode plugins.

-- I'm not sure if here is good list, please redirect me if I mistake

Best Regards,
Nicolas Cannasse
www.motion-twin.com