[Bf-taskforce25] Blender spring cleaning

[Nathan Vegdahl]

Here's my list.  Some of them are a bit subjective, but I think most
of them are pretty sound.


Lights:
      - Can we kill classic shadow buffers?  Classic-halfway is
universally superior as far as I know, and it doesn't seem to have any
noteworthy performance/memory penalties.
      - Does anyone actually find Lin/Quad weighted falloff useful?  I
never use it, and just find it confusing, honestly.
      - Sample buffers: in retrospect, can't this essentially be
accomplished by just upping the buffer resolution and increasing the
softness?  I feel silly that I didn't think of this during BBB when
this feature was added.  And I feel bad suggesting its removal so soon
after it was added, but it seems like a redundant feature, and is also
really confusing.


Materials:
      - The "Blinn" shader isn't actually Blinn.  This is my fault.  I
would like to take 2.5 as an opportunity to fix this (I'll happily
make a patch).
      - IMO the "Cubic" button should be replaced with an actual
cubic-lambert diffuse shader.  Far less of a hack that way, and much
less confusing to users.  Again, I'll happily do the coding work for
this.
      - Raytraced reflections and refractions should be *additive* to
the base material (M + R).  Right now they are mixed (Ma + R(1-a)).
Again, I'd be happy to do the coding...
      - Is "Tangent V" just for anisotropic shading, or does it have
some other purpose?  If that's all it's for, then it seems like a
weird hack worth killing in favor of a real solution some time in the
future.
      - I would really like to replace the Toon shaders with diffuse
and specular color ramp shaders (which are a super-set of toon's
abilities).  Again, happy to do this myself.
      - If I add proper ramp shaders, could we kill the material
ramps?  I personally find them very confusing to work with, and it
seems almost everything they do can be accomplished in a much cleaner
way with ramp shaders + shader nodes.  So it would be largely
redundant, and killing it would eliminate a lot of UI cruft.


Render buttons:
      - Backbuf image: all it does is specify a background image for
rendering.  This is redundant, because you can easily accomplish this
through the world buttons by toggling "paper" on and adding an image
texture.


Object buttons:
      - Is it just me, or are "slow parent" and "offset parent"
redundant?  I say kill slow parent.
      - Kill track and power track.


Sequence editor:
      - In the clip properties there are: Start/End-still,
Start/End-Ofs, and A-Start/End.  These all seem pretty redundant to
me.  Can't they all just be merged into a single A-Start/End pair,
with negative values being the same as Start/End-still?  Right now it
just feels like 3 places to specify essentially the same things.
      - MPEG-preseek: shouldn't this be a global thing, not
clip-specific?  Should it even be mpeg-specific?  What about theora
etc.?  Dunno.  Just seems weird where it is.
      - Use-proxy: shouldn't this also be global (or per-scene,
rather)?  Maybe with a per-clip override?


Armature:
      - Auto IK: IMO we should get rid of this toggle and just make it
the default behavior for grabbing bones that don't translate (instead
of rotating them as it does now).
      - B-bone Rest: kill this!  It's an evil behavior kept only for
backwards compatability with older files!  DIE!!!!
      - Stride root: kill this.  It's obsolete with the new NLA system.
      - Kill the "W" button next to the bone shape object field.  If
someone wants the shape to always be wireframe, they can just model
the mesh with only edges.


Misc:
      - Modifiers should always be "real".  None of this "make real"
nonsense (ala Armature modifier).  It's just weird and confusing.
      - Killing radiosity: +1.


--Nathan V



On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:48 PM, William Reynish <william at reynish.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Now that spring time is upon us, it's a nice opportunity to do some
> cleaning up in Blenders functionality. Over the years, some features
> have been superseded by others 2.5 is a good release to make some
> clean cuts, now that forward compatibility is out of the window.
>
> Certain features have been replaced by better alternatives, but until
> now the older implementations haven't been removed yet. We have things
> like 'Old Track' and 'CurveFollow' controls which have been replaced
> by more flexible constraints instead. Keeping these old features is
> really just adding bloat, and confusing to the end user.
>
> The reason they've been kept until now has been to ensure a transition
> period, but really these features have been redundant since what,
> 2003? It's about time we have the guts to just go ahead and remove
> them. Yes, in the short term it's annoying to have features disappear,
> but in the long run we'll have a better, cleaner Blender.
>
> When talking about outdated features, I'm specifically thinking about
> these for now:
>
> Curve animation (superseded by the Follow Path constraint)
> Old Track (superseded by the Track To constraint)
> Render windows placement controls (useless really, and irrelevant as
> Blender renders using the image editor by default)
> 'Do Composite' (There are at least three ways of turning on and off
> the compositor. There's the 'Use Nodes' button in the compositor
> itself, you can make a direct link from the RenderLayer to the
> Composite node, and you can use the 'Do Composite' button. There's too
> much redundancy here.)
>
> These are the ones I could think of off the top of my head, but I'm
> sure there are probably more? Anyone else have suggestions for
> features in need of a little cleaning out?
>
> It's a nice time to fight back against bloat and feature creep.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -William
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