[Bf-committers] lessons from Sculptris

[Tom M]

I'm sure many of you have play with the sculptris release,

there are some really useful ideas we should adopt concerning ease of
learning and ease of use

1)  When you open the program it has a help overlay quickstart guide
explaining the most important functions and shortcuts.  The text is
extremely unintrusive and the first thing it tells you is how to
toggle the help text on/off and the last thing it tells you is where
to find more extensive documentation.

This is an idea I think we should definitely consider adopting - it
cuts the learning curve drastically.

2) It does some difficult tasks automatically

I compared the steps taken to start texturing a model in sculptris to
the process in Blender.

In Blender it takes 20 - 30 steps and requires 6 or so context
changes, and a lot of fairly in depth knowledge of where stuff can be
found in Blender to get to the same stage as 3-7 steps in sculptris,
requiring no inherrent knowledge of sculptris.

The main way it accomplishes this is allowing the computer to do some
steps automatically, that, while slightly dumber than what an expert
might do, can allow an artist to get painting without having to deal
with any technical issues.

We actually have the technical ability to accomplish the same zero
learning curve approach for setting up painting and I've recommended
to the mentor of the paint GSoC how we might do it.

3) It has a minimalist approach to tools and interface

It takes the tools you rely on 95% of the time, and gets the defaults
perfect, and gives you only the most absolutely crucial variables and
settings for the tool displayed by default.  For tools where more
complexity is desirable for experts it has a clean method of allowing
the user to display the advanced information.


These combination of these 3 principles has resulted in massive
widespread usage and praise of sculptris for both its power and ease
of use.