Well, they're running out of things for the still image crowd. With Luxrender and Octane in the wings, that kind of deals with the Firefly limitations. We haven't had any real indicators that the old rigging system and new rigging system conflict, so backwards compatibility isn't an issue. With the new joints and weightmapping we have the chance to move forward a decade or so.....and the two forms of rigging can be used in hybrid fashion, so the options there have increased. Unless you want to get into static effects, that pretty much leaves the animation systems.

 

Kinect is a nice toy, but that is all it really is. A single unit won't do any kind of acceptable mocap job; all the apps out there recommend at least 2. And the granularity of the capture data is so rough that you could easily spend the same amount of time you would have manually keyframed a sequence in just cleaning up the errors.

 

What they should do?

1: Add gizmo's to the pose window, making it possible to actually use the mouse to move a figure part without wrecking things.

2: An improved IK system; being able to designate any point in an IK chain as a temporary 'end' would make animating a lot easier (stick a pin in the elbow of one arm during a ragdoll toss by Poser Physics. That elbow is the end of the IK chain until you unpin it, so the forearm and hand is unaffected by the kinematics.

3: Add an actual animation 'room'. A configurable setup designed for animating needs. A better dopesheet, scaling of the fonts on same. A low res window at the bottom of the dopesheet that shows XYZ trans curves for the selected.

4: An enhanced graph editor. The extra curve controls would be an excellent tool. The ability to have say, up to three graph windows side by side, so you can see 3 different motion curves; either XYZ of one part, 3 seperate morph animations, whatever is selected in each window.

5: A more robust collision detection system, with the ability to set an offset, so that 'collision' of body parts leaves enough space between the parts to avoid trapping dynamic cloth in a joint and crashing the sim.

6: Some form of soft body physics. As there is no chance we'll get a Maya style muscle system, any soft body setup would have to work in zones, and be limited to the more apparent soft body parts.

 

The latter is more dream that hope atm, as it would require an entirely new figure construction (but on the other hand, we have people who are working on figures that have -no- morphs; just bones and weightmaps. Add more bones that end at tissue mass proxies, and the body proxies to keep things from caving in, and you would just have to have a collision/skin clothifying system.). But if they could do it, such figures would have the potential of dethroning all the others (if they were flexible enough to accept a lot of reshaping for figures). 

 

Oh. And the Euler angle flip toggle from Messiah. That can fix so many problems......