Things I've found...

Here are some thoughts about work flow in the current SVN of Blender 2.5.

Skeleton Sketching | Constraining the sketch to a volume's centre requires CTRL held which is not explained at all clearly.

Weight Painting | Need to be able to convert mapping data to vertex data. Noise maps baked into verts of weights painted in grey scale in Photoshop (or gimp :)) to be applied and converted to weights.

Particle System | A particle system can be re-named but the name is not reflected in the modifier stack.

Preferences | Default preferences more consistent with 3rd party apps. Turntable VS Trackball for example. Another example is having to select UV over generated every time you add a bitmap to a material. If a UV exists, it should be the preferred mapping system.

Paint modes | On selection of a texture, the brush button under the texture tab should be on automatically. Brush selection on the left tool panel should sync with the texture panel on the right.

Rendering | Cannot set up a BG image in a render without post compositing it. Makes it difficult to set up a Bg to reflect into materials.

Viewport | Cannot hide the grid in non perspective views.

Materials | There is an 'add material' + button but not an 'add texture' + button.

Materials | Multiple materials (and textures) create a scroll bar but there is no way to resize the window to show all.

Materials | Animated textures don't automatically set themselves to the full frame range of the incoming clip.

Nodes | A check box to turn off colour management in the node view is needed when working in a colour managed scene. Otherwise the materials are hard to see.

Graph editor | Need to be able to drag on and off channels (the same functionality as the 'show/hide layers with a mouse drag' in Photoshop.) There is too much data to spend the time clicking on and off each lock or eyeball individually.

Sequencer | Proxy file paths are currently stored with each clip which can be painful if you have many clips to import and work with. A global proxy path would be far superior.

Entrance rendered in Blender

Here's a test render in Blender of the entrance hall. The mesh is mostly salvaged from Max but chunks have been reworked in Blender. I'm not happy with big bits of this but post it here as a WIP.


~Glenn

Old max renders with Vray

For what it's worth, here are a couple of pic of sets I built in max. They are rendered with Vray and GI. I'm pretty much rebuilding them again in Blender as the OBJ export is a little unkind on some of the mesh and I also want to learn more about poly modeling in Blender. :)


~Glenn

Riggin'

Lately I have been rigging. This is really my first rig in Blender and I have to say I've been impressed. So far I have IK/FK switching and a couple of tricks on the spine and feet which (hopefully) will make animation of my character fluid. No doubt if i ever get to animation, I'll wish I had rigged her differently.


~Glenn

Ghost in 2.5

Here are a couple of thoughts about the implimentation of ghosting in 2.5
Firstly, Ghost and motion paths should be organised the same way...

And secondly, as ghosting is turned on and off a LOT while animators work, it would be good to have one of those radio buttons beside the ghost (and motion path) titles. Currently the only way to turn it on and off is to adjust the number of steps before and after.

Do you think it would be good to combine the two anyway?

~Glenn

Cloth UI should mirror Particle UI.

The cloth UI should mirror that established in the particle system rollout like this...

Notice I have put pin in multiple times. I wonder if it's possible to pin at different points and animate the pinning on and off? For example, a woman wearing a dress (pin 1 at her waist) picks up the hem of her dress to cross a pond (pin 2 at her hand) and drops the hem once across. This is a pretty standard workflow in many other apps and I think it's well worth considering.

~Glenn

3d Spline woes

Is it just me or does...

This non scaling of the profile is particular to Blender. in other apps, the resultant mesh tries to follow the flow of the base shape (in this case, the arch) and to do so, scales the profile in the corners. Blender pops the same bevel profile in at every vert regardless of the resulting shape. This makes things like windows (above) difficult to bang out quickly.

That said, 2d does work as expected.


Here is what I'd like to see...



~Glenn