Allow us to change the camera used in each rendering node.

1. With the radial menus, make them customizable by the user. Allow us to change the menu items on the fly, how many menus are available and hierarchical menus.

2. I hope when you talk about the node api, you mean you will make each of the nodes an individual dll. This will allow users to program their own nodes without having to download all the code and recompile it on their machine. Then can then upload and allow others to download the node files to use. If this is what you are thinking, you could see a very big explosion in the nodes available.

3.With the render export api, is there any way to incorporate the rendering engine into the nodes? You can pick a node, the pick a rendering engine to render that node with. For example, you could use the Yafray engine with one node and the Sunflow engine with another then composite them in the same node network.

4.Construction history. Can you do something like Maya has, have a node based construction method? This seems like it would give you far more flexibility.

The interface recoding I think will be very important. The macro, tutorial, and keymapping stuff alone will have a ton of possibilities. As mentioned, the tutorial feature will be amazing for new people. I played around with the OpenCanvas painting program that someone mention in another post, which can play back the steps of a painting and it is an amazing resource. There's also the advantage of small size instead of tutorial movie files.

I don't think people have to be all that worried about the interface. I really doubt there will be a totally new out of left field type thing. More flexibility would be nice.. current functionality is good, but things like being able to overlap windows if you really want to would be cool. People don't all work in the same ways. Some of the newer macromedia/adobe products are nice in how you change where everything is, even detatching toolbars and such.

And this way people could make more familiar interfaces if that's what they're most comfortable with. With the understanding that they'll have to adjust for tutorials that use the default interface. But the tutorial recording could help again. If done right, it could be based on recording the functions themselves and so work for any interface setup.

Certainly it is interesting also if the refactor is made so that even alternative UIs are possible, like perhaps some different 'easy mode' for casual users even, although apart from experimenting that is also a problematic road .. already almost everything and certainly all the basics are in the menus, not only accessible via memorizable hotkeys like back in the dark ages :)

~Toni

I use blender for professonal reasons to visualize 3D reconstructions of biological structures. With time, a lot of researchers were quite impressed of this work and of course they were interested in blender. I recommend them to use blender too, but usually they don't feel comfortable with blender, because it takes them too much time to find all this shortkeys and functions, which are much more easy findable in other progs. In other words, one can save that money fore the time to learn blender and therefore buy something else. This gives a very bad reputation for blender, which I think can be rapidly changed with a more logical UI, because blender is very good and much better than its reputation.