Oh here we go again.  It's always depressing when I read everyone's requests and realise how out of step my needs are with everyone else's.

1. Freaking soft bodies.  I know everyone reads that as "better boobies", so I'm surprised it's not the top request every time.  Truth is, I want it in hopes it would solve the joint bending problems.  I'd love it if the calf could deform to the sides when the leg bends severely, or if the pec could be moved inward by the arm.  Some kind of bullet-type mesh elasticity would fix so many posing related problems.  And way better than figures with hundreds of morphs and magnets could ever hope to.

(Never mind what soft-bodies would do for conforming clothing!)

2. Shadow maps and bump/parallax in preview.  Again, it seems everyone else is going for realism and working on high-res stills while I'm trying to knock out quick serial type movies.  With smart texturing and careful lighting, the preview renderer can occasionally output some nice clips.  However, without shadows or even the most basic of emboss mapping, my best work still looks like a video game from 1998 most of the time.

3. A transmap hair generator.  I can't believe no one's ever made a specific program for this.  I want to be able to take a figures head, soft select an area and extrude double sided, non welded edges outward from it.  Once these edges were formed, they should be individually selectable so that I can continue extruding them, styling and tapering them until the hair mesh is created.  Each strand should have the same UV coords, and each hair mesh could use the same textures, ie any hair tex with vertical strands covering the whole image.

4.  Real collision detection.  This would best go hand-in-hand with the soft bodies, but not necessarily useless without.  Think how nice it would be if we could use the hand grasp dial on a cup and have each finger stop automatically when it contacted the cup's surface.

Really.  That's all that I could want.  Everything else I am already pretty happy with.