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Wishlist Backlog

Justin edited this page Mar 6, 2020 · 2 revisions

Wishlist items made a reality:

  • Undo/Redo support. (8/12/2016)
  • Physics. (8/12/2016) Allow mesh sequences to work with physics. Currently they crash Blender.
    • I found out that rigid body physics actually works. In "Rigid Body Collisions" set Shape to 'Mesh' and Source to 'Base'.
  • Smooth Shading. (9/14/2016) Right now, if you want to enable smooth shading on your mesh sequence, you'd need to do it for each individual frame. I'd like to add a button (not sure where it would live) that would automatically set the shading setting on all frames in the sequence. The button lives in the Mesh Sequence Settings panel for each sequence object.

Here's a wishlist for the future (in order of how likely they are to be implemented):

  • Import Zipped file sequence. In addition to pointing to a directory with a bunch of .OBJ/.STL/.PLY files, point to a .zip/.tar/.gz file that contains the geometry files.
  • Reload Mesh Sequence. If you've updated the mesh sequence in your other software, you should be able to re-load the mesh sequence into its mesh sequence object without having to reapply any materials, transformations, or animation that you've previously created.
  • Orientation import options. Allow the user to specify the forward and up axes before importing the sequence.
  • Animate the progression through the sequence. It'd be cool to have the ability to animate the frame number for a sequence. This way, you could have the sequence play for a few frames, stop, then start up again later.
  • Low memory mode (low speed): Currently, the add-on needs to have all frames imported before running the animation. This means that all the meshes need to fit simultaneously in memory. It'd be nice to have a low-memory mode where each frame is imported as it is needed, and discarded when it is no longer needed. This would make real time playback extremely slow, so it would be really only be used at final render time.
    • I discovered this old blenderartists thread about deleting things from memory: https://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-222667.html. After a quick test, it seems to actually reduce Blender's memory usage. It's not perfect (I went from 74.8 MB in an empty scene to 301.3 MB after importing a shape to 149.3 MB after a hard delete), but it could reduce memory consumption considerably. I think it's worth a shot.
  • Duplicate sequences with different material settings. Right now, if you duplicate a mesh sequence and apply a material to one, the material is also applied to the duplicated sequence. It'd be nice to allow duplicates to have different materials.
  • Auto-decimate objects. This would be a companion feature to the low memory mode. The script would load each of your frames, decimate them, then export them as new files. Then you'd animate with these low-poly frames. Once everything's all sorted out and you're ready to render, it would load the original frames one by one (and hopefully still avoid running out of memory).
  • Maya, C4D, 3DS Max. Create versions of this addon for other major 3D animation software.
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