[Bf-docboard] Blender Reference

[Knapp]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Tony Mullen <tony.mullen+bm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

I am a fairly advanced user and I still have to disagree with you
here. I spend most of my time making art. I don't want to waste it
trying out buttons that don't do what you might think or settings that
don't work right. Often these are bugs that don't get found because
almost no one knows what they do. I have worked with stuff as it was
being made and it is true that you can get to know things that no one
else does but this sort of knowledge is quickly lost if not
documented. Even the programmer often forgets what each setting does
after a year of working on the next project.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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