[Bf-taskforce25] Wish list 2.5!

[Martin Levasseur]

Hello everyone,

Greetings from Quebec,Canada!

If I am sending this email to the wrong mailing list, then I am sorry;
This is my first post. Could you please redirect me towards the right
list if I'm mistaken. Many thanks. Oh, and sorry for my english and the
long post... hopefully this will make sense enough.

I've been watching this thread and as a developer/musician/artist, I was
thinking about what I'd like to see in a new release of Blender to be
more efficient using it and there are a couple of things I thought of.
Maybe it has already been implemented (if so please let me know how to
do it), but otherwise I think would be great.

1- Keys handling could be a little more intuitive than using B (box) key
and RMB only.

I'm currently working on facial animation for a character we designed
with 2.49b. The text that the character is speaking needs to be adjusted
manually. Everytime the ipo goes from 0.0 to 1.0, a shape key is making
the lips move. The problem is that I have a long animation to work with,
which represents thousands of keys to play with. The feature I would
like to see with IPOs or Graph Editor in 2.5 already exists with basic
modeling in Blender, it is called "more". You can select a vertex than
hit select and choose MORE or using CTRL-NUMPAD(+) and it would
propagate the selection to the vertex connected to the selected vertex. 

In IPO mode/ Graph Editor, if implemented, would allow to select shape
keys as complete curves instead of just a vertex and would allow to
grab/move the effect and sync it to an audio scrub instead of clicking
three times, once on peak, once on left, once on right while holding
SHIFT and then move the curve (and also, with that many keys, it's just
very difficult to work with). I've tried CTRL-NUMPAD(+) and other
similar keys, but it doesn't work (2.5.alpha included). Also, It would
be nice to split the occurence of keys temporarily to allow grabbing a
curve and not grabbing the whole timeline of curves. Let me explain: if
the character makes an "Ohhh" but does it repeatedly as in "Hello how
are you today?", I would like to be able to move the "O" in Hello
independently from the whole, currently if I move "O" I move (grabx) all
the Os shapes unless I grab the three vertex points that constitute the
O curve (peak, left, right) in editor mode. Simply put, splitting curves
as sub-objects in some sort of ANIMATOR MODE, since curves should be the
basic units, not points. If not, then at least be able to select
adjacent points as mentioned above would help a lot.

2- Rendering in background doesn't let us specify size for render to
override animator/modeler settings.

When we start a render in batch mode on render farm in the background
which is a great feature, sometimes we forget to hit back 100% size in
render settings in a blend file and the batch render takes +/- half the
time to render (yay!) but doesn't have the right resolution (doh!). Then
merging the PNGs into AVIs we realize the mistake and must re-render
everything or at least all frames that were rendered at 50%. It would be
nice to override it in command line like -size 100 then it would be a
simple script ajustement.

3- Sorting "Shape Keys" alphabetically

We have some files that contain 200+ shapes. They are sorted by their
creation time, not their names (ascending/descending, etc). This makes
it very difficult to find information. Some sort of sort feature or
group (by name, by type) would be great instead of scrolling pages of
shape keys with middle mouse button. I noticed it also applies to
standard IPO curves (not only shape keys), but maybe 2.5 already has it.

I would like to hear about your opinions on this... thanks!

Best Regards,
Martin Levasseur