Hi there
some elements if thing D5 could benifit from improvement
Anomorphic lens flares.
To be able to give specified lights that horizontal sci fi lens flare effect like in sci fi movies
To similute fast moving traffic - light streaks. Very useful doing night scenes where you see the foreground simulate these streaks for cars
Harsher depth of field control. To be able to push the depth of field past its limit to any value you require
Blokeh. The be able to load blokeh or have a set of blokeh effects.
Isolate light elements to not cast or elements not to receive shadow/light
Shadow catcher for renders (maybe a shadow channel to be rendered out for post process)
Better transparency alphas in the sky channel. Glass get removed in that pass and lots of trees usually leave a clear halo around it.
Bigger or detachable / resizable preview window.
Multi window support. Final render view window with maybe a option to have a splitscreen area to work on a different area. Windows can be arranged to be used on a second screen, making the work area much more customizable. Maybe have an ability to save a workspace for video and one for editing and one for scene setups, something like that.
To be able to set up a default start up template that you usually use in your projects.
Custom paralax support. To be able to set up or render your own room to build a paralax library of your own.
Smaller project files if possible, compressed. I dont mind waiting for a file to open but after a while doing a few projects your hard drive gets filled up really fast. The workspace folder also gets hammered with textures of jobs you dont use anymore or a lot. I would say keep the project files in the project and not some of it in the workspace folder. or an ability to purge this without damaging your libraries or actual program
Muliti layer materials. Would be great to add more to materials like weathering or blend 2 type of materials
More control over material apsect in the terrain materials (less clunky texture paint functionality on terrains, not able to paint precise or finely on terrain is not really great - ability to add different type of brushes, more refined boder control). To be ablke to have the same amount of control as you have in the default material editor in the terrain material tools
A great addition to D5 would be just to be able to paint any type of texture on to any surface, imported models, or terrain. To be able to paint dirt over a pre textured model , blending it on to a d5 terrain with same texture as you paint, gives a more “grounded” experience. D5 texture paint tab. Open it, and it brings you into a paintbrush mode where you can just paint on custom texures where you feel your model need some touch ups or extra grime or different type of effect on it. This would be a real winner if you can make this work.
Improved ai engine. I know Nano Banana is used in sketchup lite, maaybe to consider start using this in the main engine as well for better and consistant output between platforms. Lately im not very impressed with the output in the style transfer results. Very post apocalyptic and funny enought, low quality for a 5k render that is completely unusable.
To be able to set up skies in D5 lite, and gets transferred to D5 pro on sync. (not only one sky model. I realized doing a day scene in sketchup lite, save it, and make a night scene,save it, and with sync, it only transferred the last one you worked on) would be great if all saved sky setups will be transferred to pro and not only a single one.
To have the same ai engine options as D5 lite in D5 pro as an extra ai tab. This will mean you can do same tests if you do not have sketchup but am brainstorming in d5 while making a scene, even go a step further and incorporate that also into the ai agent to pull that information from the generated images (maybe you can star one you like) and the agent can take its assesment from it suggesting planting, cars,sky setup etc from that)
Make the pro the best one, not only a “step” in the process where you have to start in sketchup in design phases.
Maybe think of having a sky option to merge D5 skies with hdris. I have had multiple times a good Hdri, but it had maybe a horzontal skyline you dont like and would have been nice to cover it with the sky cloud system of the program. D5 deafult skies reflect/glare and streak the sun properly, using an hdri, having a custom sun and looking straight into it does not give streak, glare or anything, it just make a light source that is unnatural, forcing you to use the default sky system instead if you want to use those effects and actually want to see the sun shine. Not really working in custom with an hdri. Maybe just revisit the sun on or off toggle switch for hdri and impliment this on it.
The ability to set precise or smooth per layer based. Working on a detailed model, but you still require elements around your model but you dont need them to be displayed in full resolution and have them to be switched to smooth (final output fill automatically make all layers precise)
Proxies in model, for a lighter experience on big files, or the ability to load *.drs files as reference files that can be edited on the fly and just updated in your main file, but does not make your master file insanely heavy to work on. (its not like D5 teams) its suppose to work for standalone users but you can split your file to make it lighter to work on showing everything. Less memory intensive, less gpu hungry. But work as one when you render final images.
The ability to draw over a render, specify an area, or markup and state with text what need to be ai generated to your liking. Ex, drag a circle over an area, this should be grass, and ai makes this area a grass patch. This feature should be not a once off but you can just edit and specify till you are ahappy with multiple iterations stacking as it goes on.
(Also would be great if you can have an option in the style transfer / or any other to change the seed since sometimes its stuck on one look and you can get another look if youre lucky)
Ai results to be stacked. Yes its great to have ai features, but you can only have one. Maybe ai upscale and inpainting but thats the most. Would be great if this can just be stacked as you add more and more effects on your liking of your result.
Having also one output is also sometimes not that nice, maybe give it 4 alternative outputs like sketchup lite (high or low) just throwing out thoughts
Lastly to be able to save your pre sets locally instead of cloud based of 10gig storage space. There is so many times you make something nice, perfect garden setup or perfect sky setup for yourself and have to delete older pre sets to make space for your current setup. I would love to be able to save this locally on my bigger workspace drive and have more control over my personal library than to depend on an online connection and online storage space requirement. Over a few years you will run out of space and you will have to decide what you want to keep or delete and sometimes you want to keep all of it. Yes online storage is great, but maybe give an option to save locally your specific pre set of online or both with a toggle switch. Same with custom libraries, to have it stored locally or store it in your online account as well would be a nice feature with a tick swich you can flip on any time even if you have made these a few weeks ago already.
I really hope someone will read this long essay and give it a thumbs up if you feel if this is good ideas, I certainly feel its not asking to make the world flat, its just things i have picked up over time that i feel could make this program even stronger. I dont want credit if any of these are implimented, just to be able to enjoy it in the end. Any comments are welcome, I would love to know what you think.
I know these request will be mostly ignored, hardly considered, but hey i had to give some ideas from my side.
Regards
Jacques