Dear Santa... (wishlist from a 2D-3D generalist)

Hi all

I am going to leave my imagination fly and ask for stuff I don't see in FF right now. I can imagine some might have been asked previously, but I can't read all the posts so... here I go!

General ideas
- Animation (of course! haha. Too many years waiting for a time line and the possibility to key the parameters (and why not, tweaking the animation curves! Asking is for free!))

- Option to upd ate an obsolete node. It would replace the old node with a fresh version of it, and se t it up (reconnect everything and put on the same values)

- Batch application of different filters from FF (command line and XML files suck a bit). I have seen it pretty requested.

- As the filters are very light, why not saving snapshots? How many times I got excited, did a few changes and forgot how everything was 10 min ago? haha. So the idea would be saving something like Photoshop snapshots. Would also be awesome if we could compare the result from different snapshots.

- Pause the render (maybe is there and I still don't know how to do it), and/or thumbnail generation

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Ideas coming from Nuke:
- Caching the renders (until you leave FF). Now you preview the final result until is finished, then you preview something else, and if you want to see again the final result you have to render it again. In Nuke, once something is rendered is cached in the hard drive, so if you preview it again is instant. Only if it detects it has been any change would re-render it. Imagine the boost in performance... if you are tweaking the last 5% of the flow of a filter the render of the final result would be blazing fast. 95% would be already cached, so every time you want to see the final result it would read that, and then apply just the last segment of nodes.

- Grouping nodes (and why now, the possibility of uploading useful groups to a potential new library of groups)

- Disable nodes (so the flow skips that node)

- Possibility to drag a node to a connection line (if doable, it could connect automatically "Source" and the output)

- Multiple Previews (in Nuke you sel ect a node, press 1 and you preview that one. Then sel ect another node, press two and preview that other one. Then, by pressing 1 and 2 in the preview window you change from one to the other)

- Renaming nodes, so we can identify better what they do

- What about an align? I know there is like a snap to the grid, but due to the fact almost every node has a different size, everything looks messy. If you could select some node, press or click on something, and then get all in a perfect line... that would help us being clean and neat when we work

- More steps when zooming. I find we should have at least 2 or 3 steps in between every zoom step. Right now is quite dramatic. Fr om here you see all the nodes big, next level... you can barely read the text.

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Ideas fr om Softimage:

- Render region (if I only want to test a small portion of my image why should I re-render everything? Great for slow filters)

- Curvy connection lines. It makes all more pleasant to see


Well, this is it for now. If I think of more suggestions I will post them here. If you have any doubt about these ones feel free to contact me

Thanks!

ALZHEM, something of the above has been implemented in the 4.0 beta coming out this week. I guess it's the shortest period between somebody expressing a wish and developers implementing it

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(command line and XML files suck a bit).

As a UI type command line rocks beyond all doubt. It provides all the functionality of the graphic version, and on top of that it allows you to write your own front-end to the renderer, like Totte did.