The next few years in the visual effects industry will be very exciting and dynamic, with
an increasingly competitive landscape.

Modo will probably get character animation tools and Lightwave Core will be released.
An interesting article about how LightWave Core is designed to be a serious Maya competitor (or killer), can be found below.
http://fxmogul.com/articles/View...e=Interview_With_Jay_Roth
Over the next few years a big feature to compare 3D software by, will be multi-threading, and interactive performance - the applications that excel in performance will do very well.
Houdini seems to pick up (based on web articles) most of the high level effects work these days, including destruction, fire, and water simulations. So it will be interesting to see whether Maya can get some of this work back with future improvements. Maya 2011 had quite a lot of improvements, but still no uprezing of fluid simulations, or batch fluid processing.
The trend of interactive view ports is definitely on, Houdini 11 Sneak peek shows many improvements to OpenGL display - among many other improvements.
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1752&Itemid=316

Ability to make reference groups in Reference editor with custom names. For example Prop_Burger, Prop_Vase, Prop_Sword could all be grouped under user created reference group called, Props.

Have a mode in outliner to seperate reference nodes from native nodes, so you have two alphabetical lists, seperated by some visual element (line).

Grow and Shrink Artisan Weights - Grow weight while attempting to retain falloff (while painting skin weights, clusters etc, This would save a lot of time and allow you to globally adjust the effect of your falloff).

I find it distracting while rendering still frames, and scrolling back to images already cached, when Maya keeps resizing frames to fit the window.To fix this issue the 1:1 ratio button in render view window should have option when RMB clicking it, to “Lock on 1:1 Ratio”, this way Maya will always show all render stills as 1:1 ratio, even while rendering.

Allow users to Remove the current (last rendered) image from render view, thus render view would default back to displaying last saved “Keep Image” or no image.

A great deal of time could be saved when creating and painting cluster weights, by adding an option to create a cluster with a interactive graphic heat (effect) overlay, to establish overall weight values (like soft modification tool). So user can define which vertices become members, and the values of each member. After doing this initial setup, any further finessing would be done using artisan.

When moving a curve towards a surface that is live, curve should distort to wrap around live object. Currently you cannot project a curve on to a polygon surface either (as far as I know).

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Hmm this would be nice...From the upcoming radical rebuild of Lightwave, now with Core in the title.
A preview of Lightwave Core is here:
http://newtek.com/lightwave/core...ogy_Features_Document.pdf

Multiple Scene Documents/Referenced Scenes
One significant improvement that CORE offers is the support for multi-scene document editing and asset management. You can choose to work with these multiple scenes as different shots or variations of the same shot. Multiple scenes are presented and managed in the outline panel.
In addition to multi-scene editing in the same session, scenes can be referenced within other scenes, allowing you to break tasks into more manageable documents. Doing so will allow you to focus on the purpose of that particular element. When the time comes, you can also reference that scene in a larger master scene.

Wow that would be very useful for animation sequences were you need to output slightly different versions, but keep everything very organised and in one file.

EDIT: Actually after reading this again i’m not sure if this is a unique system. Maya’s reference system works well. But I sort of get the impression with this implementation, you can have multiple versions of a scene inside one version of Maya, and easily switch between versions, from an outliner type window. This would be very handy in large animated scenes, where for example a client might want two versions rendered, one with slightly different textures, or a different subset of props. Rather than make two scenes or use references with this system you could make changes to your scenes, and store the changes as a scene state. This allows key frames, geometry, and edits easier to maintain between the two versions of the scene - compared to multi-scene or reference approach.

It would be great if they put “spinners” in the value fields.  It’s a pain to have to click in the field, then ctrl+middle-mouse drag in viewport to dynamically adjust them.

3ds Max 2013, Maya 2013
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Core i7, 12GB RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3700 (Driver 297.03)

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If u don’t like to drag in the viewport u have the Attribut Editor.If u want to change an value u just hold Ctrl and LMB drag in the value field to change in small steps ,Ctrl and MMB drag to change the value in medium steps, and Ctrl RMB drag (u can drag diagonal if u like it more) to change the value in fast steps.
The fact is that u have more range of motion if u move the mouse left to right and less range when u move it up and down.

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You should be able to rearrange user created attributes in the channel box

Drag and drop render nodes (2D Texture, ramp etc) in hypershade. If you drag and drop, it connects the same render node, to this new attribute. If you hold down shift and drag it to another attribute, it duplicates the render node and attaches it.

Add tolerance setting to Align UV’s, so you can select and align many UV’s at once easily. This would be handy to tune UV’s into a perfect grid. Eg make it work in combination with snap top, snap right etc.

Straighten Vertex Path tool. User would select first and last vertex, and the edges between them they wish to straighten, then drag mouse to either side to dynamically adjust the level of straightening (similar to how Smooth UV tool works). An additional very awesome option would be lock vertices to surface tangency of current model. This would be extremely helpful to cleanup and simplify complex topologies, such as a character faces.

Add “Interface Brightness” slider to Color panel.

Load and Save Color Settings form Color panel.

Convert a cluster to a soft modification node, and convert soft modification node to cluster.

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Braden99 I have a script that does something very similar to the straighten line you describe. http://thnkr.com/w/MDfindLineThroughPoints It’s a bit different in that it does not take the first and last point, it finds a trendline though all points. What you describe would be even easier to script.

A very helpful addition to a straighten vertex path tool, would be “Average Vertex Spacing” - Example below. So you could have one tool to straighten all your vertices, and average out the distance between them - incredibly helpful for cleaning up meshes.

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