[Bf-committers] new UV test grid

[Paolo Ciccone]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:04 AM, Harley Acheson <hacheson at shawnigan.ca>wrote:

> Paolo,
>
> You might be assuming that you are arguing for something that Campbell
> is against. That might not be the case.
>

I really didn't assume anything. I only assume that Campbell is extra busy,
we know by all the records about Blender, Durian etc. :)

And I wasn't talking about  Campbell in particular but about the development
of Blender in general. Brilliant coders, such as Ton and Campbell and
everyone improving Blender, are light-years
ahead of the user of Blender.
My post was not meant to stir up troubles and I hope we can keep a "level
head" about this. Blender is used by end users. It's a free tool. Anybody
can download it.
That doesn't mean that we have to dumb it down but we know that there are
many people who used other 3D packages professionally and they can be
stumped by Blender.
BTW, professional is a term that I see abused and misintepreted a lot. It
doesn't refer to a developer. It doesn't refer to somebody with an
incredible deep technical knowledge.
Professional means that you get paid for what you do. You program for a
living? You are a professional programmer. You get paid to flip burgers? You
are a professional burger
flipper.
The feedback to my popular "Blender Survival Guide" on Creative COW
highlighted the needs of the Motion Graphic artists. Those are professionals
in the motion pictures industry who know programs like After Effects and
FCP, they are very well respected in their field,  but didn't know how to
tackle Blender.
Now, because of the "BSG" a few more of them do know it and they like it. I
don't think that there is anything wrong in making Blender more approachable
for that kind of professional.
Some of them are not professional modelers, yet, but then again Blender is a
very feature-rich program that can be used for many reasons.

I'm sorry if my reference to Apple has upset people but objectively, yes,
they are the benchmark of user friendliness in computing. From the moment
you open the box of one of their products you can see the care, the
maniacal attention to details that goes into providing the best "first
impression" possible. I don't think that there is enough appreciation for
how important that is. The first impression, how easily you can approach
a product, is often what will capture a user/customer for life. You might
not like Apple but their product design is second to none and there is a lot
to be learned from the way they take care of the user experience.
Please, let's not turn this into a flame war, let's keep it "business". I
myself cannot stand several companies on the ground of moral issues but I
don't avoid learning from what they are doing right.

Making Blender easy to install, easy to be expanded and easy to be used is
one thing that, IMHO, should be of the highest priority for 2.5. A lot of
people are looking at this release as "rebooting" Blender.
If we don't take advantage of this possibility to capture the attention of
potentially thousands of new users, we waste a precious opportunity.
Remember, more users mean more people buying books and DVSs
and that turns directly into funding for the Blender Foundation. Not a bad
things to work for.


> The new UV test grid (and the old one) can be created procedurally very
> easily. Therefore Blender can be shipped with these two grids without
> unnecessarily bloating the install.


I think that we are getting too worried for just a few added kilobytes.
That's hardly "bloating" the install. A few of grids in JPEG. In this day an
age we should not worry so much for such size.

Cheers.

--
Paolo