[Bf-taskforce25] Proposal: Ordering Criteria for Default UI

[John E. Herreño V.]

Hi, hopefully this idea hasn't been discussed on the list. In case I'm going
over an already-discussed topic, I apologize for that.

These past days I've been teaching 3D with Blender to beginners. As I
entered the shading part of the course I had to make a decision about how to
teach it without overwhelming them with so many buttons... so I decided to
just explain the basics (diffuse and specular plus reflection, refraction
and SSS ) restricting the explanation to the *minimal needed* parameters to
get a good degree of control of each aspect of the shader. My decision
turned out to be very good, because they could do some simple-yet-nice
exercises using only that information. That's the reason I'm making this
proposal.

So what's the proposal:

   - Identify the minimal set of parameters that let the user get enough
   general control of the feature (in my case it's just shading, but I think
   it's possible to find some other cases with the same behavior).
   - Organize the default UI putting those parameters first on the list on
   the corresponding panel. That way, the overall behavior can be controlled
   quite fastly and only the power-user will dare to "deepen" into the panel,
   using the more advanced/fine-grained parameters.

Why do I think it's a good idea?

   - The parameters will have an easy to grasp structure: from general to
   detailed/advanced. So even a new user could have the idea to experiment
   first with the parameters that are first on the panel, and getting
   (hopefully) rewarding results as soon as possible.
   - I think it helps on the classical idea of "layering" that sometimes is
   very handy when tweaking parameters: you start working with the minimal set
   until you reach the point to start working with the advanced parameters. The
   structure will be strongly correlated to the "layering" approach.

To avoid getting this message even longer than what it already is I will
just show a snapshot of the SSS panel reorganized applying the ideas I just
wrote about: http://nucleo-digital.com/tmp/Parameter_Ordering.png . Working
with only the first two rows it's quite easy to get nice results without
having to worry about so many parameters.

I've added a fake "SSS presets" widget, because I think the presets are a
key part to accomplish my goal: easying the workflow. BTW, I'm
proposing/asking for the SSS presets to be put there in 2.5x :)

If the idea gains some adepts I will ellaborate more on other aspects and
take the time to analyze more features and try to apply the criteria.

Cheers,

JEHV
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-taskforce25/attachments/20090625/ba9f77ce/attachment.htm