[Bf-taskforce25] Blender spring cleaning

[Campbell Barton]

Hi Nathan,
Cant comment on shading/lighting/rendering/Armature suggestions so
commenting on others.

Slow Parent - This is used for the BGE, and very useful for having
delayed movement, though it could be displayed in a better way or
detached from SlowParent if we like (made into a BGE only option?).

Sequence editor +1 for all, This suffers from UI design by developer syndrome :)

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Nathan Vegdahl <cessen at cessen.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
- Campbell