From BlenderWiki

Greg's Feature Wishlist

This is my personal wishlist, nothing here has been approved for anything, it's simply a place to keep my thoughts. The goal is to pick one of these every now and then, discuss it with others and developers, and write an addon or patch for it if there is interest apart from my own.

General/UI

• List (vertex groups, bookmarks, materials, shapekeys...) sorting and other display options like filtering. Also ability to drag+drop to reposition items in a list.
• More interactive outliner (drag+drop parenting + sorting and manual positioning of items)
• Global Grease Pencil (not needing to select a certain object to view the drawing, but visible all the time no matter the selection)
• Show scale legend in corner of 3d view (orthographic only?) as a quick reference of size (eg. a line with "5 BU" or "3cm" written above)
• Maintain aspect ratio option for when changing resolutions (render resolution, new image options...)
• Hide 3d cursor option for when showing off stuff but can't use "Only Render" view option
• Display render time of animation, not just of last frame
• Show estimated render completion time for animation
• Reset to default value (right click on property) broken or incorrect in many cases
• Automatically increment names nicer when duplicating (figure out the user's naming convention and increase)
• Remove material slots that don't have any faces assigned
• Maya-like 'History' - allow changes to operators that were previously run, like increasing sphere subdivisions a while after adding it
• Snap to curves or grease pencil
• Custom Material Preview - piece of render or specified scene.
• Adjust Material preview's UV scale+position
• Angle based auto-smooth/flat shading
• Custom curve for proportional edit falloff
• Input specific value for proportional edit distance
• Option to disable viewport camera movement when going in and out of local view
• Hide grid in orthographic views (option)
• Operator to rename object data, material, texture or particle system to match the object name (make addon? would be easy)
• Edit Bookmark's name (often in a project folder structure a folder will have a name like "Textures" - when working on multiple projects, the bookmarks will have the same name)
• Consistent use of progress cursor - either always percentage, or always frames. Where it's used currently:
  • Playblast/openGL render (frames)
  • Baking

Cycles

• Separate+Comping HSV for Cycles nodes Thanks DingTo!
• Fac input slider for Add shader (surely implementation doesn't get simpler than this...) Not so simple apparently, and for some reason devs don't want to do this.
• Cycles display number of samples after render completion in the case of Progressive Refine mode (after canceling, you can't see how many samples it did)
• Cycles ambient occlusion node (not a shader, but a node that gives out a b/w value)
• A node that gives you coordinate difference (distance) from a specified object. Could be used for example as a texture coordinate to slide around the texture, or to change colours based on distance from a lamp.
• Attribute node could be used to get Properties of the object - this is ridiculously useful (I use it in other software) since it allows you to change material stuffs on a per-object basis, maybe you like the generated texture coordinates of all objects except one, or you want to randomize colours a bit but keep precise control over what is what colour, or you have a million objects with slightly different materials.... you get the point. This can be done using object/material index, but this means only two maximum properties per object, and then cant use indexes for render passes and stuff properly.
• Show UI overlay in viewport render - i.e. object outlines, manipulator, wireframe overlay
• Material editor - a separate editor for managing materials, textures, files etc

Text Editor

• Collapsable classes, functions, loops and other statements in text editor

Video Sequence Editor

• Show cache like Clip Editor

Meshes

• Show how much each vertex moves for a shapekey (numerics or coloured mesh display)
• Numerics (Edge length, face angles, face area) as colours (numerics or coloured mesh display)
• Edge length display for all edges, not just selection (or a specified set of edges)
• Bevel in edit mode
• Select vertex path with Ctrl+RMB

Modifiers

• Smart beveling for boolean modifier (to make more pretty intersections, add a loop/inset on both sides of the corner)
• Better hooks (control precise vertex influence, like weight painting)
• Apply modifiers on objects with shapekeys - if only the Mirror modifier (mirror shapekeys then or something)
• Redesign of modifier display (gets a bit messy... perhaps eventually node based modifiers would be awesome)
• Ctrl+1/2/3... also change subsurf divisions for Render, not just View Discussed with devs, idea rejected
• Rename "Clipping" in mirror modifier to "Sticky Edges" or something. Probably no big deal
• Exporting option to apply all modifiers except subsurf
• Solidify modifier - add loops in rim
• Shrinkwrap - project mode, choice of local/global axis.

Rigging

• Weight paint 'through' a surface
• Bone relationship lines visible in edit mode
• Proportional edit for bones

Painting

• Mirrored texture painting (both while painting, and after to copy from one side to the other)

Defaults

• Default bezier curve straight (am I the only one who gets tired of straightening that darn handle every time?)
• All Edges display mode on by default (why wouldn't it be? hiding edges on flat surfaces just confuses people)