gmask
11-12-2002, 09:58 PM
Read the list and add features and list your top 2 features out of each category. Then go the the link in my signature below and submit your favorite wishes to the feature request form.
Credit for building this list goes to Russel a bunch of other folks.. I'm just the messenger please don't kill me ;-)
|Modeling|
* Better Proportional Modification Tool that has the performance of weighted deformers.
* Face extrusion along a curve.
* Increase poly proxy interaction speed to be on par with hierchcal mode.
* Edge Tools:
o Connect edges.
o Select ring.
o Select loop.
* Insert isoparm like feature to add edge loops.
* Bridge Faces.
* Improved Booleans.
* Tri-Rail 2+ Tool: it would be the next step from Birail 3+ tool. It allows for selecting 2 or more profile curves after which you push enter and you’re allowed to select 3 rail curves.
* Illustrator-like curve creation/modifying tool (EzCurve integrated).
* Generic Character creator for background character with limited visibility.
* Resist implementing MEL tools please...new functionality should be implemented thru API. This makes the API more robust and MEL automatically benefits with new commands/nodes and everything works faster. For example, Integrate Extrude Vertex and Chamfer Vertex as true polyModifier nodes (like Wedge Face). No more Mel script hacks...I can write my own thank you.
* Add direct vertex to vertex connection to the polySplit node. This allows the Split Polygon tool to split diagonal faces across their
shared vertex.
* Interactively weightable polygon components (proxy mesh) A|W could add new vertexWeight, edgeWeight attributes and a proxy attribute (similar to intermediateObject) to the mesh node (and polyTweak node) that a smooth proxy node would respect.
* Sub Division creasing slider, instead of three different modes.. that is really annoying.
* Snapping Like in Rhino...snap to center, midpoint, tangent, normal, parallel, intersection, projected line etc (too many to list).
* Volume Selection with Attenuation. For example...create a deformer (wave, cluster etc) with an empty deformer set and parent it to a sphere and put the sphere on a path. Any components that become enclosed within that sphere as it moves on the path automatically gets selected/added to that deformer set with attenuation/falloff determined by their distance to the volume center. Deformers (such as Lattice, Sculpt etc) and dynamic fields already understand volumes of effect. Having the Volume Selection in a separate function/node and presenting that to any context tool, deformer, field etc really opens up the number of things you can do.
* Multiple object Booleans, and Improved Boolean operations, disappearing models is not COOL!.
* A better and larger Shader Lirbary, A mental Ray Shader Library
|Paint FX|
* Create geometry from PaintFX. It could be polyginal witht he brushes texturs mapped to them automatically.
* Render the hardware particles using PaintFX brushes
|Animation|
* Vertex-weighted Blend Shapes. / blendShape nodes with paintable deformer weights.
* Better Kinematics: use ik/fk simultaneously without need to switch, set any joint as hierarchy root at any time to pose the skeleton, ability to select/manipulate joints and bones separately (use ik on joints and fk on bones).
* Fast trimming Tool. Something that a lot of high-end places have is a image based timing tool.. imagine you create key poses for your animation and play blast it. Then, in this playback tool you can start shoving the timing around.. Inserting frames, removing frames, etc.. all in real time. Then, when you're done you save your changes and those offsets are put into Maya.
* Parent Constraints. Sure, you can fake it with point/orient constraints.. but they don't deal with offsets that happen when switching a parent from one thing to another. I'd like to be able to have my object still be keyed on its own. I just modify what the parent is. It's a bit of a research project to make it really work, but it could be very useful.
* Muscle Deformation System.
* AttrCollection integrated into Maya.
* A sort of on the fly blend shape or some solution to easier muscle deformations without having to resort to more blend shapes.
* Skinning envelops for initial soft or rigid bind adjustments.
* Use peripheral devices like the mouse/joystick/midi as a motion capture device.
* In the Graph Editor have the ability to create keyframe loops from a subset of keyframes of the original anim curve (like in Maya Fusion).
* In Trax, displaying weight / time warp curve on the clips (the curves should be drawn on the clip bars).
* In Trax, have 'synchronization' between clips and their anim / weight / time warp curves.
* In Trax, when dragging a clip on the timeline, it's weight curve should be 'dragged' (moved in time) together with it as well.
* The graph editor always shows the 'original timing' of the anim curves of a clip, even if the clip is offseted/scaled in the clip editor. An option should exist in the graph editor to see these actual offseted/scaled versions of the clip's anim curves.
* In Trax, controlling clips with the time warp curve is not very intuitive, as clip curves are expressed in frames, but the time warp is expressed in percentage. An option should exist to allow 'frame-based' editing of the time warp curve.
* Function to de-compose one clip into multiple clips, based on groups of animation curves (for example, extract anim curves of an object, from a clip into a new clip; or extract selected anim curves from a clip into a new clip).
* Editable Ghosts would be good, then you could edit its future.. while looking at its current state to make sure anything funky doesn’t happen.
* Color usage in paint weights function instead of grayscale. The grayscale is to hard to read when the values are low or high.
|Rendering|
* Ray Diffuse (Dirt shading) refined and incorporated in stock rendering engine.
* Blurred Reflections.
* All particles types capable of Hardware/Software rendering.
* Faster Ray-tracing engine in general.
* Better Fur/Hair.
* Global Illumination. <- They did add Mental Ray
* Radiosity baking.
o Bake radiosity and texture map.
o Save as single/dual texture map for easy integration into Viewpoint or Shockwave3D scene.
* Tighter Render Man integration or RenderMan as default renderer.
* Render regions in viewports.
* Toon rendering engine; including Object outline; lines on hard edges; gradient shadows (also banded shadows; like ink fills).
* Sub-surface scattering material (Pixho.com has a nice method), but convert it into one node (speed reasons)
* Velvet material (like the one in Nachos and Cheese plugin @ highend3d.com).
* Next Generation Toon Shader.
* Depth-of-field support in multi-pass rendering.
* Hardware renderer should use an off-screen OpenGL buffer for rendering so users could use the desktop while rendering sequences.
* Like the above, Playblast should also use off-screen OpenGL buffers.
* Full support for all features of RLA and RPF file formats
* A built in node based compositing solution or tight integration with After Effects or a compositing program that is actually supported on all the same platforms as Maya.
* Clipping maps so that you can use a single map that is seperate from transparency and specular to make part of a surface invisible. Is this allready possible in MR?
*PNG file format import for textures
|User Interface|
* Do simple arithmetic (3.14/1.5+2.6*7.3) in any intField or floatField such as in channelBox, Attribute Editor etc.
* Middle Mouse button scrolling !!
* Ability to create your own hotboxes and assign them to any hotkey as you can popupMenus
* Movable UI elements.
* Buttons that have left, middle, and right click commands (button -c "print LEFT" -c2 "print MIDDLE" -c3 "print RIGHT").
* Fix the popupMenu -enable flag so that you can set the enable state of the popupMenu. Then you
can have multiple popupMenus on the same control and you can set which popupMenu you want enabled for what ever
context you want. I hate having to add/delete popupMenus or change the popupMenu's -pmc flag to get this functionality.
* Fly-out tool/shelf buttons.
* Tear-off menus in hotbox.
* Ability to create floating menus (torn-off) directly.
* Marking menus in 4.0 currently buggy; starts shuffling items about when gets 4+ entries.
* Highlight selection while dragging marques.
* Explorer style scene management. Layers in folders; folders with various attributes.
* Ability to sketch in background plane; useful for outlining poses; referencing out proportions and the like.
* Context sensitive menus! (Menus similar to RMB Marking Menus, but contains tools which can be used)
* Drag and drop UI builder to easily link attributes to custom interfaces for quick character controls.
* Rounding snap for 'virtual' value slide, mmb (eg adding alt mod would snap to 0/5 on whatever decimal grain your sliding on ..ctrl/shift/none), and the ability to bump between boolean/enum/discreete values. Some compat attribs can’t be slid jointly too, frustrating.
* Studio Tools style shelves, including rollout functionality.
* Command to query the position of the mouse and query which mouse button is down/pressed. This would help with building dynamic menus. For example, you could calculate which zone the mouse is in so that you can create/enable the popupMenu for that zone on the fly.
* Ability to map mouse buttons as user sees fit.
* Construction Planes like in Power Animator/Studio.
* Add Attribute, Edit Attribute, Delete Attribute should be consolidated into a single UI.
* Every editor should have a button that locks their mainListConnection.
* Auto-scroll for Attribute Editor when expanding new (frame-)layouts.
* Folders in Hypershade – Good for putting shaders into folders like, House, outside, particle materials, main character, would be very useful.
* Hypershade creates a lots of large empty areas when re-arranging large shader networks (too much distance between nodes).
|Dynamics|
* Particle events other than collision (penetration, volume entry/exit).
* Particle Inter-Collision, fast code(not faking with per-particle fields)
* Don't split the particles into HW and SW, make them capable of rendering in both Software, and the Hardware render buffer, very annoying!
|Scripting/API|
* State machines.
* Event routing.
* Other cool stuff that would make agent creation for flocking and crowd simulation type stuff easier.
* Polygon API properly exposed thru MEL (consolidate polyEvaluate, polyInfo, polyListComponentConversion, polySelectConstraint etc to more closely resemble the API).
* Improvements to the Script Editor:
o Numbering lines.
o Store commonly used pieces of code (Menu).
o List of commands like the Expression Editor has.
* Real-time 3D engine implementation.
* Even more extensive MEL hooks.
* Ability to compile expressions into fast nodes.
* Ability to script the ctxEditMode so you can move or rotate the transform tool's manipulator pivots for example: manipMoveContext -e -piv 0 2 0 `currentCtx`.
* Since the ‘ls’ command has an -objectsOnly flag so that components and attributes are ignored...there should
conversly also be -componentsOnly and -attributesOnly flags. Its such a pain to not be able to determine if
selected items are components or attributes with a single ls command.
* You should be able to query the top left corner of any GUI item...not just windows. This way you can position
windows relative to a given control.
* Ability to create your own manipulators in MEL without resorting to API or crazy hacks.
* It would be nice if sets could optionally store and return its members in the order you placed them in the set.
* Formatting, like italic for comments, bold for main functions, colors used for different procedures.
|Mapping/Texturing|
* Port over all poly mapping tools to subds.
* Better integrated texture painting functionality. Allow ability to paint on 2d representation of UV's inside of Maya and have update on model in real time. Ability to switch texture channels on the fly and paint in 2d editor.
* Texture/Shader sampling command/node: given a UV and shader/texture -> get the color, lighting/shadow info at that UV.
* Auto UV mapping over distance/span of faces. - This would automatically lay the map out by allowing you to select the faces you want mapped, the seam/ split if the sides of the texture connects, and map out the UV texture determined by the distance of one point to the next (If they can map the points in 3d space and make the geometry "live" and build on top of it, then why not this as well?).
* Multiple UV sets for displacement/bump mapping.
* In UV Editor, snapping options should work in all modes (not only world space).
* Ability to snap multiple UVs horizontally or vertically in the UV Texture Editor (like the cv's in the modeling view).
* Polygonal UV editing should be enhanced by allowing all existing tools to operate in UV space also (like deformers, etc).
* NURBS texture parametrization editing in the UV Texture Editor.
* Poly UV mapping given the ability to create an UV map based on a 'wrapper' NURBS surface.
|MISC|
* Support for import/export adobe atmosphere and Maya RTA.
* Supports for OpenGL 1.3 and higher (OpenGL 2.0) Viewport rendered bump channels come to mind.
* Integrated Compositing environment.
* Foley Studio functionality.
o Multiple Speaker / Receiver Nodes which can be placed anywhere.
o Key able volume.
o Sound groups: A node which contains attributes like density, distortion etc, and objects can be connected/placed in these groups, those objects will interfere with the sound wave (like a wall dulling the volume and clarity of music in another room.)
* Good Flash exporter. One that solidifies colors per setting in the global render (This way if you had a detailed animal model with multicolor fur, it'd turn the coloration solid, instead of trying to make a mark for every strands differentiation).
* Better integration of file referencing.
o Have options when saving files to automatically split out animation per file based on what reference node it's attached to. For example, if you load in 2 characters as references & animate them, the animation curves are saved in the scene file. Instead, you should be able to save them out individually as well.. so they're more easily accessible for other animators.
o Also, have the referencing NOT BREAK if something like an anim curve was hooked to before, and isn't there. It should pop up a list of "problems" and have the user choose how to re-connect things.
* Better documentation for ALL the nodes (yes including those undocumented ones .
* Partial collapse of history.
* Ability to bind mouse buttons.
* Copy and paste nodes throughout dependency graph.
* Selection Priority attribute on transforms for user defined per-object selection priority ...maybe I want a particular locator to have the highest selection priority in the character or scene.
* TAB key should be added to hotkey list....would be perfect as a contextual toggle key...for example, it can be used toggle the state of a stateManip if there is one in the current tool or node etc.
* Noise deformer.
* Help out 3rd party Renderer developers.. Brazil - Vray etc..
* Less annoying watermarks in the Maya PLE. There is really no need for a watermark in the GUI.. it makes actually using the program difficult. The watermarks in renders are too strong make them like 10% opaque.
* Add the contents of the Maya Living FAQ to the standard documentation It should be the first thing a new user sees
Credit for building this list goes to Russel a bunch of other folks.. I'm just the messenger please don't kill me ;-)
|Modeling|
* Better Proportional Modification Tool that has the performance of weighted deformers.
* Face extrusion along a curve.
* Increase poly proxy interaction speed to be on par with hierchcal mode.
* Edge Tools:
o Connect edges.
o Select ring.
o Select loop.
* Insert isoparm like feature to add edge loops.
* Bridge Faces.
* Improved Booleans.
* Tri-Rail 2+ Tool: it would be the next step from Birail 3+ tool. It allows for selecting 2 or more profile curves after which you push enter and you’re allowed to select 3 rail curves.
* Illustrator-like curve creation/modifying tool (EzCurve integrated).
* Generic Character creator for background character with limited visibility.
* Resist implementing MEL tools please...new functionality should be implemented thru API. This makes the API more robust and MEL automatically benefits with new commands/nodes and everything works faster. For example, Integrate Extrude Vertex and Chamfer Vertex as true polyModifier nodes (like Wedge Face). No more Mel script hacks...I can write my own thank you.
* Add direct vertex to vertex connection to the polySplit node. This allows the Split Polygon tool to split diagonal faces across their
shared vertex.
* Interactively weightable polygon components (proxy mesh) A|W could add new vertexWeight, edgeWeight attributes and a proxy attribute (similar to intermediateObject) to the mesh node (and polyTweak node) that a smooth proxy node would respect.
* Sub Division creasing slider, instead of three different modes.. that is really annoying.
* Snapping Like in Rhino...snap to center, midpoint, tangent, normal, parallel, intersection, projected line etc (too many to list).
* Volume Selection with Attenuation. For example...create a deformer (wave, cluster etc) with an empty deformer set and parent it to a sphere and put the sphere on a path. Any components that become enclosed within that sphere as it moves on the path automatically gets selected/added to that deformer set with attenuation/falloff determined by their distance to the volume center. Deformers (such as Lattice, Sculpt etc) and dynamic fields already understand volumes of effect. Having the Volume Selection in a separate function/node and presenting that to any context tool, deformer, field etc really opens up the number of things you can do.
* Multiple object Booleans, and Improved Boolean operations, disappearing models is not COOL!.
* A better and larger Shader Lirbary, A mental Ray Shader Library
|Paint FX|
* Create geometry from PaintFX. It could be polyginal witht he brushes texturs mapped to them automatically.
* Render the hardware particles using PaintFX brushes
|Animation|
* Vertex-weighted Blend Shapes. / blendShape nodes with paintable deformer weights.
* Better Kinematics: use ik/fk simultaneously without need to switch, set any joint as hierarchy root at any time to pose the skeleton, ability to select/manipulate joints and bones separately (use ik on joints and fk on bones).
* Fast trimming Tool. Something that a lot of high-end places have is a image based timing tool.. imagine you create key poses for your animation and play blast it. Then, in this playback tool you can start shoving the timing around.. Inserting frames, removing frames, etc.. all in real time. Then, when you're done you save your changes and those offsets are put into Maya.
* Parent Constraints. Sure, you can fake it with point/orient constraints.. but they don't deal with offsets that happen when switching a parent from one thing to another. I'd like to be able to have my object still be keyed on its own. I just modify what the parent is. It's a bit of a research project to make it really work, but it could be very useful.
* Muscle Deformation System.
* AttrCollection integrated into Maya.
* A sort of on the fly blend shape or some solution to easier muscle deformations without having to resort to more blend shapes.
* Skinning envelops for initial soft or rigid bind adjustments.
* Use peripheral devices like the mouse/joystick/midi as a motion capture device.
* In the Graph Editor have the ability to create keyframe loops from a subset of keyframes of the original anim curve (like in Maya Fusion).
* In Trax, displaying weight / time warp curve on the clips (the curves should be drawn on the clip bars).
* In Trax, have 'synchronization' between clips and their anim / weight / time warp curves.
* In Trax, when dragging a clip on the timeline, it's weight curve should be 'dragged' (moved in time) together with it as well.
* The graph editor always shows the 'original timing' of the anim curves of a clip, even if the clip is offseted/scaled in the clip editor. An option should exist in the graph editor to see these actual offseted/scaled versions of the clip's anim curves.
* In Trax, controlling clips with the time warp curve is not very intuitive, as clip curves are expressed in frames, but the time warp is expressed in percentage. An option should exist to allow 'frame-based' editing of the time warp curve.
* Function to de-compose one clip into multiple clips, based on groups of animation curves (for example, extract anim curves of an object, from a clip into a new clip; or extract selected anim curves from a clip into a new clip).
* Editable Ghosts would be good, then you could edit its future.. while looking at its current state to make sure anything funky doesn’t happen.
* Color usage in paint weights function instead of grayscale. The grayscale is to hard to read when the values are low or high.
|Rendering|
* Ray Diffuse (Dirt shading) refined and incorporated in stock rendering engine.
* Blurred Reflections.
* All particles types capable of Hardware/Software rendering.
* Faster Ray-tracing engine in general.
* Better Fur/Hair.
* Global Illumination. <- They did add Mental Ray
* Radiosity baking.
o Bake radiosity and texture map.
o Save as single/dual texture map for easy integration into Viewpoint or Shockwave3D scene.
* Tighter Render Man integration or RenderMan as default renderer.
* Render regions in viewports.
* Toon rendering engine; including Object outline; lines on hard edges; gradient shadows (also banded shadows; like ink fills).
* Sub-surface scattering material (Pixho.com has a nice method), but convert it into one node (speed reasons)
* Velvet material (like the one in Nachos and Cheese plugin @ highend3d.com).
* Next Generation Toon Shader.
* Depth-of-field support in multi-pass rendering.
* Hardware renderer should use an off-screen OpenGL buffer for rendering so users could use the desktop while rendering sequences.
* Like the above, Playblast should also use off-screen OpenGL buffers.
* Full support for all features of RLA and RPF file formats
* A built in node based compositing solution or tight integration with After Effects or a compositing program that is actually supported on all the same platforms as Maya.
* Clipping maps so that you can use a single map that is seperate from transparency and specular to make part of a surface invisible. Is this allready possible in MR?
*PNG file format import for textures
|User Interface|
* Do simple arithmetic (3.14/1.5+2.6*7.3) in any intField or floatField such as in channelBox, Attribute Editor etc.
* Middle Mouse button scrolling !!
* Ability to create your own hotboxes and assign them to any hotkey as you can popupMenus
* Movable UI elements.
* Buttons that have left, middle, and right click commands (button -c "print LEFT" -c2 "print MIDDLE" -c3 "print RIGHT").
* Fix the popupMenu -enable flag so that you can set the enable state of the popupMenu. Then you
can have multiple popupMenus on the same control and you can set which popupMenu you want enabled for what ever
context you want. I hate having to add/delete popupMenus or change the popupMenu's -pmc flag to get this functionality.
* Fly-out tool/shelf buttons.
* Tear-off menus in hotbox.
* Ability to create floating menus (torn-off) directly.
* Marking menus in 4.0 currently buggy; starts shuffling items about when gets 4+ entries.
* Highlight selection while dragging marques.
* Explorer style scene management. Layers in folders; folders with various attributes.
* Ability to sketch in background plane; useful for outlining poses; referencing out proportions and the like.
* Context sensitive menus! (Menus similar to RMB Marking Menus, but contains tools which can be used)
* Drag and drop UI builder to easily link attributes to custom interfaces for quick character controls.
* Rounding snap for 'virtual' value slide, mmb (eg adding alt mod would snap to 0/5 on whatever decimal grain your sliding on ..ctrl/shift/none), and the ability to bump between boolean/enum/discreete values. Some compat attribs can’t be slid jointly too, frustrating.
* Studio Tools style shelves, including rollout functionality.
* Command to query the position of the mouse and query which mouse button is down/pressed. This would help with building dynamic menus. For example, you could calculate which zone the mouse is in so that you can create/enable the popupMenu for that zone on the fly.
* Ability to map mouse buttons as user sees fit.
* Construction Planes like in Power Animator/Studio.
* Add Attribute, Edit Attribute, Delete Attribute should be consolidated into a single UI.
* Every editor should have a button that locks their mainListConnection.
* Auto-scroll for Attribute Editor when expanding new (frame-)layouts.
* Folders in Hypershade – Good for putting shaders into folders like, House, outside, particle materials, main character, would be very useful.
* Hypershade creates a lots of large empty areas when re-arranging large shader networks (too much distance between nodes).
|Dynamics|
* Particle events other than collision (penetration, volume entry/exit).
* Particle Inter-Collision, fast code(not faking with per-particle fields)
* Don't split the particles into HW and SW, make them capable of rendering in both Software, and the Hardware render buffer, very annoying!
|Scripting/API|
* State machines.
* Event routing.
* Other cool stuff that would make agent creation for flocking and crowd simulation type stuff easier.
* Polygon API properly exposed thru MEL (consolidate polyEvaluate, polyInfo, polyListComponentConversion, polySelectConstraint etc to more closely resemble the API).
* Improvements to the Script Editor:
o Numbering lines.
o Store commonly used pieces of code (Menu).
o List of commands like the Expression Editor has.
* Real-time 3D engine implementation.
* Even more extensive MEL hooks.
* Ability to compile expressions into fast nodes.
* Ability to script the ctxEditMode so you can move or rotate the transform tool's manipulator pivots for example: manipMoveContext -e -piv 0 2 0 `currentCtx`.
* Since the ‘ls’ command has an -objectsOnly flag so that components and attributes are ignored...there should
conversly also be -componentsOnly and -attributesOnly flags. Its such a pain to not be able to determine if
selected items are components or attributes with a single ls command.
* You should be able to query the top left corner of any GUI item...not just windows. This way you can position
windows relative to a given control.
* Ability to create your own manipulators in MEL without resorting to API or crazy hacks.
* It would be nice if sets could optionally store and return its members in the order you placed them in the set.
* Formatting, like italic for comments, bold for main functions, colors used for different procedures.
|Mapping/Texturing|
* Port over all poly mapping tools to subds.
* Better integrated texture painting functionality. Allow ability to paint on 2d representation of UV's inside of Maya and have update on model in real time. Ability to switch texture channels on the fly and paint in 2d editor.
* Texture/Shader sampling command/node: given a UV and shader/texture -> get the color, lighting/shadow info at that UV.
* Auto UV mapping over distance/span of faces. - This would automatically lay the map out by allowing you to select the faces you want mapped, the seam/ split if the sides of the texture connects, and map out the UV texture determined by the distance of one point to the next (If they can map the points in 3d space and make the geometry "live" and build on top of it, then why not this as well?).
* Multiple UV sets for displacement/bump mapping.
* In UV Editor, snapping options should work in all modes (not only world space).
* Ability to snap multiple UVs horizontally or vertically in the UV Texture Editor (like the cv's in the modeling view).
* Polygonal UV editing should be enhanced by allowing all existing tools to operate in UV space also (like deformers, etc).
* NURBS texture parametrization editing in the UV Texture Editor.
* Poly UV mapping given the ability to create an UV map based on a 'wrapper' NURBS surface.
|MISC|
* Support for import/export adobe atmosphere and Maya RTA.
* Supports for OpenGL 1.3 and higher (OpenGL 2.0) Viewport rendered bump channels come to mind.
* Integrated Compositing environment.
* Foley Studio functionality.
o Multiple Speaker / Receiver Nodes which can be placed anywhere.
o Key able volume.
o Sound groups: A node which contains attributes like density, distortion etc, and objects can be connected/placed in these groups, those objects will interfere with the sound wave (like a wall dulling the volume and clarity of music in another room.)
* Good Flash exporter. One that solidifies colors per setting in the global render (This way if you had a detailed animal model with multicolor fur, it'd turn the coloration solid, instead of trying to make a mark for every strands differentiation).
* Better integration of file referencing.
o Have options when saving files to automatically split out animation per file based on what reference node it's attached to. For example, if you load in 2 characters as references & animate them, the animation curves are saved in the scene file. Instead, you should be able to save them out individually as well.. so they're more easily accessible for other animators.
o Also, have the referencing NOT BREAK if something like an anim curve was hooked to before, and isn't there. It should pop up a list of "problems" and have the user choose how to re-connect things.
* Better documentation for ALL the nodes (yes including those undocumented ones .
* Partial collapse of history.
* Ability to bind mouse buttons.
* Copy and paste nodes throughout dependency graph.
* Selection Priority attribute on transforms for user defined per-object selection priority ...maybe I want a particular locator to have the highest selection priority in the character or scene.
* TAB key should be added to hotkey list....would be perfect as a contextual toggle key...for example, it can be used toggle the state of a stateManip if there is one in the current tool or node etc.
* Noise deformer.
* Help out 3rd party Renderer developers.. Brazil - Vray etc..
* Less annoying watermarks in the Maya PLE. There is really no need for a watermark in the GUI.. it makes actually using the program difficult. The watermarks in renders are too strong make them like 10% opaque.
* Add the contents of the Maya Living FAQ to the standard documentation It should be the first thing a new user sees