My Blender 3D Wishlist
February 7, 2009 Category: Thoughts
Blender 3D is a great open source 3D program. I love this software. However, there are a couple of things that I hope that it can do better. Below is my wish list. If future versions of Blender can fulfill this wishlist, it will be perfect (to me). I guess human greed knows no bound.
1. True Global Illumination. As of this writing, Blender’s Internal Renderer cannot handle true global illumination. When ray tracing was first included in Blender, it was a very welcoming inclusion. Later, stuffs such as Ambient Occlusion was also included. Although features such as HDR and Ambient Occlusions are useful, they are not real hardcore Global Illumination systems. In the current version, Blender cannot handle effects such as Caustics and true colour bleeding. There may be hope that future versions of Blender will be GI-enabled. Someone appears to be developing Photon Mapping for Blender! Check out this link for a better idea.
2. Ability to work with advanced NURBS curves and surfaces. As an Industrial Designer, NURBS is the rice-bowl tool for engineering and prototyping ready modelling. How great will Blender be if it has tools simliar to those of Rhinoceros or Alias Studio. Only when Blender sports advanced NURBS manipulation tools for projecting curves-on-surfaces, trimming and blending of surfaces, will it be a serious contender for Computer Aided Industrial Design.
3. The ability to import IGES and/or STEP files. This one is related to the previous wish. IGES and STEP are the de-facto export format for accurate surface-based 3D models. Currently, I use Rhinoceros 3D as the intermediate tool for controllable tessellations of NURBS models that were created in Mechanical Engineering CAD programs. If Blender can directly import these formats (especially IGES), it will integrate better with more engineering and 3D CAD programs.
4. Easy-to-use and pre-included Material Library. Most, if not all major commercial 3D applications have the ability to create and save materials in a library. Blender can do that, but it is not as user-friendly as the other programs in this aspect.
Hmm, I hope somebody from the developer’s team is reading this. 