While I was disappointed with the number of updates that Fusion, especially Fusion Studio, saw with 17, the ones we got seemed overall beneficial to me, so I'm hoping for further good updates to Fusion as well.
I can fully get behind everything that has been said before! I'm simply adding things that haven't been mentioned yet and that I remember from the top of my head.
They are not ordered by importance to me, besides the red highlighted which are requests I believe are very reasonable and close to my heart
. I also understand that some of these aren't and shouldn't be high priority like many of the things that Bryan said, but I don't think one should "hold back" on a feature request thread
UI:Bigger and more visible render indicator.
Let me hide the toolbar (generally bring back UI modifications)
Make keyframes easier to see in the Playbar and Keyframes Pane.
Give modifiers a visible selection state. So you can select and delete several at once.
Make modifiers available as nodes and support connecting more data types in the flow. (Being able to connect a number data type to an input slider control for example, through the flow)
Updates to the Particles which would also tie into updates to the 3D workspace in general:Bug fixes for issues that have been around for some time, now. For example, behavior change even though the same seed is used or the rgndist function in the pCustom tool.
An out of the box particle turbulence that doesn't copy the velocity to the Particles and thus allows for gradual changes of direction.
Render time style generation so particles stay efficient points until rendered by the Renderer3D.
Updated point rendering of particles, like most modern render engines. Very often you only need particles to be spheres/dots with varying sizes and colors, yet the current methods take surprisingly long to render and make the 3D Viewport sluggish. I assume this is because it's currently not instancing but a bitmap for each particle (?)
Bring back support for Particle Fuses.
Make branching available in particles (although that would probably require a complete change to the current way of simulating them in Fusion, likely completely out of scope)
Proper instancing + multithreaded replicate tool.
As mentioned before, updates to the 3D workspace. Preferably built on USD.
I don't need Fusion to have an inbuilt path tracer if the OpenGL renderer would receive updates. Shadows are not available on both light types and soft shadows are not in the OpenGL mode for how long now?
USD could lead to many path tracers in Fusion.
Navigation in 3D could use a pivot on mouse pointer mode instead of center of the focused object only.
General ideas:RAM usage while final rendering. There is no reason to keep 20 previous frames of the last 30 nodes in the RAM if there are no time modifying tools in the flow. I want to give Fusion all the RAM while working interactively, but it would be nice to be able to work in other software while Fusion renders. Most of the time the CPU and GPU usage would allow that, but the RAM is filled to the Max. (Without manually limiting it before rendering).
and/or:
Increase hardware utilization for faster render speeds.
OpenCL CPU fallback. I'm unsure if this is possible with Metal but it would be great to have a fallback for tools like the new OpticalFlow to be computed through CPU OpenCL (I only know that this exists in Houdini for Vellum sims). There is currently no automatic switch to the Legacy CPU version of this tool when the tool fails to initialize on the GPU. Which happens to me quite often.
"Compiled Macros/Groups". Looking at Houdini, you can use Compile nodes that encompass a set of nodes, limiting the copying between CPU, RAM, and GPU. This makes certain operations much faster as a block of nodes acts as if it was a single node. Something like this might yield speed gains for Fusion, too.
Support for the ResolveFX in Fusion Studio. There are a few tools that Fusion Studio desperately needs, like a good denoiser. Also, the two products should be able to exchange compositions without issues.
Updated imports for Alembic, FBX, and SVG. They don't support current standards/versions.
Smart vectors type of tool. Playing around with the magic mask in Resolve, it seems like it's almost there already. The dots and lines you draw track very well with a face, for example, only deformation is missing. I assume this also works through the same optical flow vectors that Fusion uses now?
Interactive tracking for 2D tracks. (Native) Single frame advances in the tracker would be great, but even greater would be an interactive mode that when activated, tracks to the time you advance the playhead, or advances frame by frame if you use the keyboard to go 1 frame at a time. Results in less clicking throughout the UI and more tracking.
Please separate viewer control movements and timeline movements again, this shouldn't be context-sensitive. There is so much clicking required in F17.
Network renderer/Render manager:Network renderer could use more error messages.
Force render continuation instead of disabling everything. One missing frame is better than hundreds.