[Bf-docboard] Blender Reference

[Pep Ribal]

Hi Tony,

you are right, even with the small portion I have documented, it gets
outdated quickly. However, I've already found release logs to be very
useful to solve this.

Anyway, I will carry on, and perhaps some day the work done will be
appealing enough for more people to join the project.

Best,

Pep.


2012/4/28, Tony Mullen <tony.mullen+bm at gmail.com>:
> Hi Pep,
>
> Congratulations on your efforts. You seem to have covered a lot of
> material. As you mention on the page, you began it as a notebook of
> what you were learning, and as such I think it clearly shows you
> learned a lot doing it.
>
>>> hard work ahead, the writing, etc. is not a problem. What is really
>>> exhausting is to try to find out how everyting works: some buttons are
>>> not implemented; others have buggy behaviour; others are difficult to
>>> see how it goes...
>
> Yes, it's not realistic to document all of Blender exhaustively all by
> oneself. But a whole lot has already been documented to greater or
> lesser degree on the wiki and can always benefit from updating and
> broadening. You mentioned that you might re-focus your attention on
> contributing to the official wiki, which I think would be a great
> idea.
>
>>> I agree what I need would be to meet regularly with some patient
>>> developer, and steal a huge amount of time from him, but their time is
>>> very valuable, and I'm not sure they would reckon it's worth spending
>>> it with me.
>
> This wouldn't really solve the problem for a couple of reasons. The
> biggest reason in my mind is that no single developer knows everything
> about Blender. Of course many of the busiest ones have a very good
> overall understanding of the code, but for the level of detail you're
> talking about---what does this parameter actually mean on fluid, and
> what does that check box do on an f-curve driver, and so
> forth---honestly there's no single person who knows all those answers
> off the top of their head. Or at least there are precious few, and
> they're very busy with other things.
>
> That said, I've always found developers in the IRC happy to answer any
> detailed questions I have, if I can manage to catch up with the
> *right* developer who knows the specific functionality I'm asking
> about. But that often takes a bit of lurking.
>
> I also think that there's a limit to how detailed, up-to-date,
> accurate, and deep user documentation can be for any given release of
> Blender. As you said yourself, there are buggy spots, sometimes
> slightly incomplete or temporary bits, and it's all very complex and
> changes rapidly, and so it's extremely difficult to document some
> frozen moment in time perfectly. And even if you could, it would
> change again quickly. Any serious user of Blender has to understand
> this and be able to work with it.
>
>> A developers time is COMPLETELY wasted if they program something and
>> no one can use it because no one has bothered to put it in the manual!
>
> This isn't quite true. I think that the most skilled and frequent
> users of Blender actually do a great deal of work with features that
> aren't well documented for beginners. One thing these users do is
> develop working relationships with developers who work on the
> functionality they use most. So, for the real power users, this kind
> of documentation is not that important, but the functionality is very
> important to them (whereas less experienced users wouldn't be able to
> do that much with the functionality even if accurate and detailed
> beginner's docs existed).
>
> This isn't to say documentation isn't important. It is. But the
> functionality is more important, and developers aren't wasting their
> time by focusing on it. And although beginner/intermediate
> documentation is important, there are a lot of features of Blender
> that simply *aren't for* beginner/intermediate users. That is to say,
> there are values and options that simply don't make sense to people
> who don't have a fairly deep understanding of what they're doing. So I
> don't think beginner documentation of some of these details is a high
> priority.
>
> In any case, the place for an exhaustive list of all the buttons and
> fields is a communal wiki, for sure. No single person could write it
> all, much less keep it up-to-date for five minutes. Blender
> documentation is a Sisyphean task. It's important to feel like you're
> learning something or having fun doing it, or else it will overwhelm
> you.
>
> T
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