[Bf-committers] blendercasts reloaded...

[Brecht Van Lommel]

For me the reasons not to do this are:

* It shifts work from tutorial makers to developers, and it's the
developers that are already the bottleneck at the moment, we have many
people making tutorials. So developer time seems a more rare resource
at the moment.
* I have never seen such a system done well in other applications, the
few times I've come across it, it's always been pretty frustrating.
I'm not sure why, maybe it's just a coincidence and there are
applications (of Blender's complexity) out there that do this very
well.

Brecht.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Gaia <gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> Here is the idea and i know "it can not be made" and
> "blender is not made with that in mind" and all other
> common reasons why we should keep hands away from
> creating stuff like this. I recall wetalked about
> it sometime ago in irc and maybe its already implemented
> and nobody told me, who knows :)
>
> However if it doesn't exist: i believe this tool would
> really make it easy totell the world about blender's
> features fast, reproducible,AND with user interaction...
>
> Even if not the entire functionality can be provided,
> "something like that" would be enough already:
>
> curious ? Read on :) ...
>
> preleminary assumptions (mostly doable, or easy to implement)
>
> - I can create a "page" of a defined width/height
> - I can add my personal tutorial layout (if i want)
> - I can add some user preferences if i want.
> - I can specify: "Only for Blender 2.68" (for example)
>
> Up till here: a user who opens this blend file shall get
> the same width/height and the same layout settings and
> the same user preferences that i had defined.Blender detects
> if any of the settings could not be done ("userscreen too small"
> for example) then blender says: no! and rejects the file.
>
> By niw user's blender screen looks exactly like my screen.
> Now to the fun part:
>
> blendercasting:
>
> - Similar as with screencast i start a session recorder
> - Mouse movements are tracked and recorded.
> - The recorder tracks what functions i have clicked at what time
>    and where on the screen.
> - optionally it also records audio in parallel.
> - maybe i can add the audio later when i playback the cast..
>
> All is actually pretty similar to a screencast, except that blender
> records what goes on instead of creating 25 screenshots per second.
>
> Now what can a user do with that after the cast is loaded:
>
> - pause the cast at any time
> - scrub along the cast timeline forward backward
> - make inspections right in blender, make changes, ...
> - save the current blendercast status as regular blendfile
>    for later reuse.
> - However, when user scrubs the blendercast timeline
>    or resumes the session,then all user changes get reverted
>    and the blender cast continues exactly at the current location
>    in the timeline.
>
> Actually the user can make snapshots of a tutorial at any time
> by:
>
> - pausing the tutorial
> - save as .blend
> - resume the tutorial
>
> The blendercaster (tutorial maker) can do a bit more:
>
> - scrub to any point in the timeline and "delete the future"
>    this is for redoing something that went wrong the first time.
> - similar: store the session as a blendercast. either
>    the entire cast, or optionally "from start up to now"
> - load an existing blendercastand
>    add more to the end of the cast (continue a cast)
>
> "blendercast" would be a nice present for Christmas 2014 :)
>
> cheers,
> Gaia
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