HiNMity wrote:- Left click/Marquee select
- Customizable key/mouse bindings
- Floating panels ( as in build you gui wherever/however you want)
- Customizable menus
- Tabbed panes
I don't see how any of these are that important.
No tool I use have these functions and they all work very well, from hamer, car to coffemaker.
Photoshop has no key binding, and I never heard anybody complain about that.
I believe that floating panels are made by the devil. More and more packages move away from floating panels (dreamweaver, flash, word).
All photoshop users I know complain about windows being in the view and want a second monitor to put the panels (next to each other) on. Windows user complain about windows being opend on top of parent windows. Etc.
If you want I can show some pictures of the tools they use at pixar.
HiNMity wrote:If Blender had those things as defaults it would gain a larger audience but it would not leave out the existing one since blender would be designed to be ultra customizable but with good recognisable fast approach features.
Workflow is hardly customizable.
For example; B- Click or ClickDrag for box select is baked in the software, no keybinding is going to alter that. ( On the other hand blender is highly custumizable, just dl the code, compile your own version. No kidding, I understand not everybody is a programmer, but for larger Multimedia companies this should really be easy. )
First select then action, or select an action then on what object, is baked in software, so again not custumizable, and that's more important then anything else.
For what you are saying the user has to be not only is an expert at blender (know where and what all functions do) but also an expert at GUI.
HiNMity wrote:Sometimes i get the impression that blender tries to reinvent the wheel and forces the users to like it.
Pretty much like other software. Ever tried flash?
But I think it's not true. There is a certain workflow in mind, and yes the users need to follow that workflow (for example select object, action on selected), if they don't like it; get another package. But it's not a random workflow invented by some car mechanic. It's based on inhouse animators creating daily animations. Pro's. Surely it's not bad to adapt to there habbits? What I read here are adaptations to grow a larger audience of hobbiests. I put large question marks to that goal. Or rather not to the wish of that goal, but to the possibility to reach that goal with the current code base.
HiNMity wrote:How can we make this tool to fit into as much peoples production pipelines as possible and how can we build it around a fast learning approach?
I'm still not convinced this is a good question.
I don't see time and assets to get all workflows in one package, blender does not even have 1 workflow for lots of parts of creating animations. Alias/Discreet have a big crew on their software where the can make everything a tool or action or etc. That comes with a price: big $$$ for the package. Other write on only a small part of the animation process, like modo and wings (modeler) or mental ray and yafray (renderer). They all more or less excel in their part.
Blender is a complete suite. That's not a marketing credo, that's what it is.
A single person can produce a logoflap in one day. A single person can produce one animation scene (like explaining how a coffee machine works) in one week. That's what blender is good at.
I rather see time and effort in this 'forced' workflow expand in character animation and flow animation and dynamics then in getting more users making more checkerboards. And say oow and aww on a mirrored raytraced subsurfed sub-surface scattered cubes.
Flying an airplane means learning the cockpit. And when one of the engines is on fire I want a button to start the fire extinguisher, not a greyed out button under fire toggle in the hazard tab.
I'm not against making things easier. But the GUI guys will have a tough job on making it easier for everybody. Maya style floating panels with user definable plug-in calling MEL scripts is just a toy if it can't call things as morph targets, driven keys and smooth skin binded IK joint chains.
I understand that's largly just me. I can adapt to another layer of eye candy.