Whether or not you can blend 15 materials together into a bitchin' normal map doesn't really let you get more work done.
Indeed. Being able to quickly render portions of scenes that don't have emission maps or volumetric effects doesn't really let me produce good renders quicker either.
I don't do much high end rendering with C3D -- most renders take less than 60s for me. That said, area render seems to me to be something that would be easy to implement. (c3d already renders in "buckets" ... just rendering only the buckets that overlap the rectangle you dragged would be good enough).
The reason I'm in favor of the new shader system is that every small request for things like emission maps has been responded to with "there's going to be a really cool new shader system which handles all that".
Isn't it a chicken and the egg thing?
I want to work fast. But if I can't do what I want to do at all, being able to do it faster isn't useful.
I want feature x. But if feature x is really slow or painful to use, I'm still not going to be happy.
Here is some of what
Blender 2.46 has added over 2.45 (you know how much I despise Blender, but...) while the UI team has been (we hope) working hard on fixing Blender's appalling interface.
- Objects aren't aligned to the view when created (simple but huge improvement in UI), aligned to global coordinate system instead.
- Blurred reflection AND refraction/transparency.
- Area Lights (all types of lights can be area lights)
- Ability to burn bitchin' normal maps
- New particle system (with physics, hair, space warping, etc.)
- Free form cage (lattice) deformations
- Adaptive sampling (all those sample based render techniques like blurred shadows and reflections can reduce sample rates when rendering areas of low detail)
- 3d "onion-skinning" features (being able to see animation across time).
- Pose manager
Quite a few of these features take Blender from behind c3d in functionality to ahead of c3d in functionality (e.g. no area lights to any light being able to act as an area light). It's a shame Martin can't simply sell an alternate UI for Blender ;-) Maybe one approach would be for c3d to be thought of as a front end for Blender to some extent (add read/write .blend or collada files). Then a lot of features could simply be implemented by pushing stuff through to Blender.
If you look at the wish list, every non-UI thing is already present in Blender (although Blender's volume lighting is restricted to spotlights). And all the animation features anyone is asking for are in Blender too.