Which feature would you like to see in 5.0?

Which feature would you like to see in 5.0?

  • New material system (shader tree)

    Votes: 27 54.0%
  • Particle/Instancing system

    Votes: 8 16.0%
  • Booleans with N-Gon support

    Votes: 5 10.0%
  • Area renderer

    Votes: 4 8.0%
  • Bevel tool

    Votes: 5 10.0%
  • Movie textures

    Votes: 1 2.0%

  • Total voters
    50
  • Poll closed .
Which feature would you like to see in 5.0?

What feature would you consider most important to see in 5.0.

Many thanks in advance for your vote.

By,
Martin
 
I voted for the shader tree. My logic is:

1) Particles and instancing would both be great. (Heck, I'd like a "duplicate" command which leaves the new copy selected.) But without the shader tree, motion blur, and volumetrics, particles are not going to make me want to do pre-rendered animation in C3D anyway. Instancing is nice but can be worked around.

2) Booleans with n-gon support. Not a huge deal since I can do this in Silo, and also not nearly as useful as the shader tree.

3) Area Render (which should also give you Shift cameras after a fashion...) would be lovely, but should be easy to implement. If not, well, voting for it won't make it easier.

4) Bevel Tool. I would hope we get this without needing to vote for it, but Silo has it in the mean time.

5) Movie Textures. Far less useful than the shader tree, and not worth doing unless the shader tree is done. Oh, and really it should be very easy to implement.

The only feature which would give me pause relative to the shader tree is missing, and that's the ability to edit keyframes across the entire hierarchy.
 
Unfortunately, I don't really feel a pressing need for any of the things above. Better booleans and N-gon support would certainly be nice, as would bevels, but I don't really need them.

What I do need however are improvements to animation as discussed in this thread. The inability to edit and add joints to a weighted skeleton is forcing me to switch to other applications for that, even though I'd rather work in Cheetah. As is the inability of easily mirroring weights. And as podperson has pointed out, not being able to edit keyframes for many objects at the same time, and not being able to copy and paste keyframes, can also make Cheetah unnecessarily clumsy for real animation work.

Now, I realise that from a marketing perspective introducing completely new features such as a shader based material system and particles are probably more attractive than touching up existing features. But I hope that you'll have the time to look at some of these things as well. They would take Cheetah from being able to just barely do animation, to being able to really compete with the big guys at it.
 
Is this a trick question? Martin has been talking for ages about the new materials system, so I'm guessing it will be in v5 whatever we vote for.:wink:

(Who knows, perhaps these are ALL features which Martin is already planning for v5? Well, it would be nice to think so...)

Seriously though, I'm voting for area rendering, since it will impact most directly on my workflow, and because I don't really know what a shader tree is!:smile:
 
Shader Tree -- quick explanation

There's currently a special marble shader and a special wood shader and so on, but what if you wanted to use the marble shader as the transparency channel for a custom material? Well in C3D 4.x you can't do it, but in pretty much every serious rendering engine you can (this was pioneered by Pixar and imitated by pretty much everyone else).

So you can build shaders out of other shaders, themselves built out of other shaders. Hence "shader tree".

What are the benefits? Well, if you're annoyed by some limitation of the various special shaders ... well, be annoyed no more. You can just plug procedural marble / wood etc. into the diffuse / specular / emissive / transparency / reflectivity / etc. channel of a shader and so forth.

It also means that you can get (say) anisotropic or SSS properties and combine them into shaders rather than just making the basic shader incredibly complicated OR having to build a huge number of special case shaders.

So that's what a shader tree is.

Improved Animation functionality. Yes, I agree with what Tolm said. I just don't know if Martin has the time to do that much work, or whether he'll sell enough licenses to make it worth his while. (Let's face it, if Martin called version 4.5 "5.0" and charged upgrades, many of us would happily pay. I sure would. And 4.5 has fewer new features than 4.4 or 4.3 did.)
 
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No, of the above, particles serve no purpose, and movie textures fall to the same category. An area renderer would be slightly more useful, but not a priority.
I had one job that needed better boolean support, but thats gone now. Im a maybe on this as right now I dont need it.

Bevel yes
Material shader system, well if it means seeing bumpmapping in the editor, and 2UVs at the same time in the editor(usually using a multiply or similar blend mode for the second set), then yes. Absolutely

I do like the idea of a dopesheet for animation.

AC
 
Material shader system, well if it means seeing bumpmapping in the editor, and 2UVs at the same time in the editor(usually using a multiply or similar blend mode for the second set), then yes. Absolutely

Since it probably doesn't mean *any* of those things necessarily (quite a different matter) ... what do you think?

I think saying particles and animated textures serve no purpose is a bit harsh -- they're just not very useful until a lot of other things are added (like motion blur, luminance maps, and so on).
 
I am a litle curious about what Martin gets out of this poll, because we pretty much know for sure that he will implement the material system, the particlesystem and booleans with n-gons. Have a look at the news statement from the cheetah3d webpage a little while ago:

"Buy Cheetah3D 4.x and get free update to Cheetah3D 5.0

Purchase Cheetah3D 4.x after the 24th Jan. 2008 and get a free update to Cheetah3D 5.0 once it is released this summer. Cheetah3D 5.0 will offer a brand new node based material system with many different shaders and procedural textures, new powerful boolean operations which also support N-Gons, a instancing/particle system, and many more.
So don't hesitate and get your copy of Cheetah3D 4.x plus the free update to Cheetah3D 5.0 for
just 129 US$."

So if I had the chance to vote again I would vote for bevel.
Maybe ROI was right, this might be a trick poll? I guess the only answers that Martin gets from this is that he has made a good choice to implement the material system! So the poll would be much better if the 3 features mentioned above was excluded from the poll and we had to vote on one of the 3 that are left?;)
 
I wish people would vote for productivity enhancers like 'area render' over things like new material systems and such. Just my opinion, but the time spend waiting for renders -really- adds up. Whether or not you can blend 15 materials together into a bitchin' normal map doesn't really let you get more work done.
 
I am using Cheetah primarily for generating highly complex (text extruded with edge bevels, wrapped around a 3D open lattice, and then intersected with the lattice, for example) single mesh geometry, which I then export as a STL for 3D printing.

I am having major troubles with the Boolean operations; lots of dropped faces and missing geometry.

I often am using spheres with 250 x 250 polygons, applying a pretty complex displacement map, and then attempting to boolean this object to other geometry. Pretty disappointing results, which results in me having to modify my design for the software's limitations. Never a good thing.

I really NEED better Boolean operations, and it could be this single issue that forces me to try out other solutions, much as I don't want to.

Thanks for asking, Martin!

Cheers, Chuck
 
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I nearly voted randomly as all my priorities are currently on a better animation system and an improved render manager.
 
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.
  1. Objects aren't aligned to the view when created (simple but huge improvement in UI), aligned to global coordinate system instead.
  2. Blurred reflection AND refraction/transparency.
  3. Area Lights (all types of lights can be area lights)
  4. Ability to burn bitchin' normal maps
  5. New particle system (with physics, hair, space warping, etc.)
  6. Free form cage (lattice) deformations
  7. Adaptive sampling (all those sample based render techniques like blurred shadows and reflections can reduce sample rates when rendering areas of low detail)
  8. 3d "onion-skinning" features (being able to see animation across time).
  9. 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.
 
I voted for the new material system.:smile:

I would like particle effects, but I would rather have the new material system.

I don't know what an area render is; I'm guessing you would draw a rectangle on the screen and it would render it(or something like that), but I would rather have the new material system.

The Bevel would be cool, but I would rather have a material system.

I think a Preview render(like in Blender) would be neat; you just have a little box you can drag around, and it renders that section.

My guess would be that since Martin already bought that boolean plugin thingy(anti programmer jargon at work), we are going to get that anyway.
 
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.

That's a funny idea but first Blender is under the GPL which doesn't allow me to use their source code. And second even if it would be allowed I would never even consider to use it.

I once had a look into the Blender source code a few years ago and what I've seen didn't impress me too much. It looks like everything is written in C while Cheetah3D has a nice object oriented ObjC++ core. I think developing with my core is way more efficient. But I'm probably baised on that point.:wink:

Bye,
Martin
 
Hi,
some more notes on the material system. Maybe that explains it a little bit better. New material system doesn't just mean mixing two existing materials. This feature covers also:

-build custom materials
-build reusable material libraries
-blurred reflections/refractions
-full alpha channel support (for icon rendering)
-shadow materials
-multi layer rendering
-bump map backing
-anisotropic materials
-SSS
-volume textures
-volumetric fog
-importance sampling of BRDFs
-prepared for displacement mapping
-coatings
-fresnel effect on metals
-and more

All these things are difficult to handle with the current almost 6 years old material system. But the new material system can handle all this stuff easily. Maybe not all in 5.0 but it will be prepared for all this stuff and more.


Bye,
Martin
 
That's a funny idea but first Blender is under the GPL which doesn't allow me to use their source code. And second even if it would be allowed I would never even consider to use it.

I once had a look into the Blender source code a few years ago and what I've seen didn't impress me too much. It looks like everything is written in C while Cheetah3D has a nice object oriented ObjC++ core. I think developing with my core is way more efficient. But I'm probably baised on that point.:wink:

Bye,
Martin

No, You're not. Objective C is a great language.:)
 
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