Features For Animators Blender Should Add or Fix:

Features For Animators I Think Blender Should Add or Fix: NOTE all of these would be viewable live in the viewport*

-Easy XGEN/Pixar-Like Hair/Grooming: I’d like to be able to produce Pixar-ish, clean, fur effects at the click of a button. Have quick one click presets for different types of fur. Good Examples: Kung Fu panda, lotso the bear from toy story, that yellow bird from toy story, the incredibles characters hair(the smooth and shininess), PIXAR itself could be a preset for hair and fur. If Possible easier to use than xgen.

-Easy Pixar like eye generator with Presets: so there’s realistic eyes, Pixar eyes, toy story eyes, dragon or snake eyes, long eyes flat eyes, black pupil only eyes, cartoony eyes, etc.

-Self HDRIS: make it so you can set the hdri each mesh has with one node. And if they don’t have the node they have the worlds environment hdri node.

-Viewport Blending Modes(for images, videos, meshes and other imports) : make it so if I were to import footage of for example white text on a black background or smoke on and black background, that I could set the blend mode to make the background transparent with the focus visible. Currently the alternative to that is a long process of making your videos png sequences and importing as an image texture.

-More Quick Action Presets: For example quick one click hose water or water system, more quick smoke presets but actual ones people use,

-A REAL-TIME SMOKE SYSTEM for all pc systems: Similar to if not the same as embergen

-A built in Mixamo-Like animation library: you would be able to create your own rig animations or mocap and save them as presets to apply to rigs/characters. Would be helped by a new much easier auto rigging system. (Mentioned below)

-A NEW auto rigging system: ik fk rigging for a more elastic feel overall but simpler to set up. So essentially like a skeleton pops up on the right and you drag and place a green ball on the joints and limbs/ some parts of the face for instance and click for the system to automatically rig it with ik fk ready immediately for animation.

-Onion skinning for animation. You can see some frames back and some frames forward. (The past skins can be bad quality I just think this would be a great feature for animators)

-Presets For Movie-Like Smooth Camera movements

-More Smoke VFX options: A lot of detail is added currently in post for what cannot be done in Blender with ease or without lag. Smoke simulation and furthermore, smoke animation in blender is pretty much a guessing game without a great computer. An addition for smoke IN ADDITION TO real-time smoke simulations like Embergen, the ability to change the colors of smoke, the glow or emissive properties, the dust, particles, debris-like objects that move within the smoke. You need like 6 particle systems for that currently and again a great computer for the smoke.

-Quick Grass(the currently built in particle hair system is not great for grass. Currently some of the best ways to achieve good grass are very long processes and don’t include the use of the actual particle hair from blender. Particle systems? yes.

-A VFX MESH: The idea is that the mesh is transparent like a lense but it’s like a video effect from a video editing program when you look through it. The edges can be feathered out automatically somehow so you can places multiple, or simply so the effect is seamless and blends well. So for example, a vfx mesh or circle is placed by smoke or fire. You could set the vfx effect to Heat Distortion and when you look through the area behind the vfx mesh is effected or in this case distorted like heat does. So like a filter. Another good preset for the vfx mesh would be Gaussian blur. So literally the meshes or whatever scenery is behind the vfx mesh is blurred. This includes light. (I may include a diagram to better explain.)

-EEVEE Height maps: height maps don’t work In viewport or rendering in eevee. Only in cycles

-Optical Light Flares: could be a part of the VFX mesh idea. So you put the vfx mesh in front of a part of something with light or that is emissive and you can create a light flare. And by doing that you can copy and paste a couple if you’re going for a very shiny or movie-like look

-Easy Spark Effects: a one click spark poof or sparks that you can set the level of and animate them in the timeline

-Quick Liquid Effects: the liquid doesn’t have to be colored automatically but maybe like presets for splashes or squirts, drops, pouring, and more

-STARTUP presets: on startup I think there should be a list option for the usual blank project or preset scenes. If you’ve ever played Minecraft they let you set the world type like the type of biome, the type of grass, terrain, the height, etc. I think being able to do that with a few clicks before you even open the project would shave off some middle and post production time in Blender. People might start saying oh that’s that template blender grass or mountains but with options to tweak I think it’s easily avoidable. And if it looks Pixar or movie like I don’t think people would care.

-An EasyPreset System: it’s very difficult for many to get into coding, so for those just looking to make quick presets of their hard work in blender to provide for others like them, or make reproducing that project simpler on themselves, an easy preset maker system where it goes through the steps you took from startup and asks if you want to include them and packs it as a preset for anybody to import and enable with it’s own button on the blender interface.

-MeshToHair: Using the new Pixar like fur system, mesh to fur or hair. The mesh could have hair on it or become hair overall for people who usually sculpt hair

Note all of these effects would all be real-time and viewable live in viewport. *

These are just some of my ideas as a young animator, sculptor, and texture artist.i Hopefully all of them can be integrated soon, as I’m currently looking into Python or other coding languages to see if I can integrate them myself but it would be great overall to see them in blender no matter who does it. Thank you.