[Bf-funboard] Re: [Bf-docboard] Syncing development & documentation

ph bf-funboard@blender.org
Thu, 14 Aug 2003 19:22:23 +0200


Grayscaling:

Actually I don't think grayscaling the buttons completely is such a good
idea, but I would combine the colours into blocks. So the 'beauty' and
'remove doubles' button should be light brown as well. I think it still
helps the eye to target in the buttons. I mean, until now the most
intimidating feature of blender is the vast amount of already visible
buttons which is for the more experienced user (or at least for me) a big
pro. Still it is better to divide it a bit. And light colours are very good,
since they do not alter contrast and still provide distinction.

Tabs:

Blender hasn't used tabs yet. I think we should stick to this. I can only
repeat:

Blender does not simulate the real world desks (tabs, overlapping windows
etc, bureauphysics).
This seems to be one of blender's most inherent approaches!!

It uses the monitor as a digital environment. It does it straightforward
(except the sliding window headers maybe). That's not newbie-friendly, but I
say, keep the documentation and the 'get started' tutorials at their best
(and obviously available) and the newbie won't mind so much to learn a new
approach.
Evil as I am, I would put a 'consider to download those tutorials first'
page prior to the Blender download.


As I see it, collapsing and overlapping breaks with some very old and (in my
case) proven Blender concepts of visualising. Please be careful there.


--------------------------------------

beneath are some older ideas of mine:

Constraints, that can be applied to an axis, so that you only need two
constraints to completely define the rotation of a given object. This should
solve the 'one axis point up' limitation once and for all.

Those constraints can have two limitation sliders. One from 0 to 180
clockwise and one counterclockwise.

Additionally a force could be applied to those limitations (each slider it's
own), but it should be possible to set it to zero, to get hard borders if
you like.

By the way, Theeth's Lock track constraint is also a nice solution. Thanks
for coding, Martin.

Blender has a kind of reduced instruction set and I like it very much. I
rather build my complex stuff out of simple tools, rather than having
hundrets of specialized things.

Therefore I find it necessary to keep the constraints as flexible as
possible.

RVK, armatures and lattices:
This may be a bit too much coding work for the near future, but I'd like to
mention it anyway.
It would be extremely helpful if one could be able to edit the mesh in it's
deformed state. Otherwise it's a constant trial and error thing.

For good animation, I find it important for armatures and relative vertex
keys to smoothly work together, since RVKs are very good to enhance the
armature's deformation abilities.

the Armature elbow issue:

could it be possible to create special vertex groups where the vertices keep
the distance to their center of rotation?

one personal wish: The Q-key for quitting blender could be limited to
Alt-Ctrl-Qkey. I always get a slightly insane grin, when I mean to quickly
hit Ctrl-Wkey to save and miss it by one keylength to the left. ouch

including german keyboard layout for the python text window would be nice. I
cannot get [] at all anymore. In previous versions of Blender, at least the
numpad workaround was possible (Altkey and a number, 91 and 93 for
brackets). But this old and useful feature is gone now without substitute.
Could that be repaired?


Haunt_House