I'm sure many of you have play with the sculptris release, there are some really useful ideas we should adopt concerning ease of learning and ease of use
1) When you open the program it has a help overlay quickstart guide explaining the most important functions and shortcuts. The text is extremely unintrusive and the first thing it tells you is how to toggle the help text on/off and the last thing it tells you is where to find more extensive documentation. This is an idea I think we should definitely consider adopting - it cuts the learning curve drastically. 2) It does some difficult tasks automatically I compared the steps taken to start texturing a model in sculptris to the process in Blender. In Blender it takes 20 - 30 steps and requires 6 or so context changes, and a lot of fairly in depth knowledge of where stuff can be found in Blender to get to the same stage as 3-7 steps in sculptris, requiring no inherrent knowledge of sculptris. The main way it accomplishes this is allowing the computer to do some steps automatically, that, while slightly dumber than what an expert might do, can allow an artist to get painting without having to deal with any technical issues. We actually have the technical ability to accomplish the same zero learning curve approach for setting up painting and I've recommended to the mentor of the paint GSoC how we might do it. 3) It has a minimalist approach to tools and interface It takes the tools you rely on 95% of the time, and gets the defaults perfect, and gives you only the most absolutely crucial variables and settings for the tool displayed by default. For tools where more complexity is desirable for experts it has a clean method of allowing the user to display the advanced information. These combination of these 3 principles has resulted in massive widespread usage and praise of sculptris for both its power and ease of use. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
