[Bf-funboard] more jobs

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

I've got a series of oldies here, for at Matt's list:

- Better 'mode' feedback
Editmode, VertexPaint, FaceSelect and the like are blocking modes. This  
is actually violating general UI design rules...  new users have  
problems with it.
We can't easily get rid of it, but it can be better communicated:
   - new cursortypes (all platforms! we need a designer for it)
   - the associated icon drawn in the corner of the window, maybe with a  
nice shaded backdrop.
More ideas can be evaluated.

- Particle system deflectors / attractors
Just simple force field generators. Fun!

- Scenes layering
Meaning that you can have multiple scenes rendering over each other.  
Like the current 'set', but more elaborate.

- Vertex paint should work with subdivide Mesh

- Integrate most used texture & sequence plugins in Blender
(voronoi, musgrave, zblur)

- An 'about' menu item, giving splash and a nice listing with credits  
for people who contributed

- Bringing back "BodyPoints"
This was an old pre-Blender experiment with Ika, which proved to be  
highly instable. :)
But it was a very nice system for 'yello' style of animations, with  
physics as well. And so much fun to play with! It basically is a  
toolkit which allows the user to add BodyPoints (with mass, gravity,  
inertia) and connect them with spring-wires. You can make all kinds of  
nice elastic style things with it. Add to this some simple collision  
detection, and we've got physics!
Anyone remembers the old 'Newton' demo at SGI?

- add 'Properties' to all main blocks in Blender
Both at UI as Python level. The Property system now only is used for  
the game engine.
This way a user can extend a Material with extra properties for export  
to Renderman for example. Or to control a python script with, and have  
it all nicely stored in the .blend.

- reviewing drawtypes in Blender
Now it's boundbox-wire-solid-shaded-texture
I think the average 3d card specs allow us to spice this up some.

- integrate Radiosity in rendering. Without complex subdividing (will  
make animations ugly) but just to serve a nice looking global  
illumination.

- remove the current game engine, into a separate tool
A *really* touch one to decide, since I am the biggest supporter of a  
fully integrated tool. However, there are technical reasons to do it;  
nobody codes in the engine, it doesnt work yet, it is not well  
integrated with Blender.
This also can help getting support for other engines working better.  
Plus, we can still keep a simple engine to at least be able to do  
walkthroughs, character animation tests, and the like.

Well, this board is there for difficult decisions too! Who mentioned  
raytracing? :)

-Ton-


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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org  
http://www.blender.org