On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:40:03 -0700, Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:

>be very intuitive.  But to disagree with specificity with that statement,
>I'd need a concrete example of what you find to be non-intuitive.

Uuugh, where to start?  Sorry to rant, but...

Let me start off by saying that better context-sensitive menus would go a long way to
help this
application.  When you only have vertices selected, why show face functions, edge
functions, etc.

I learned to model efficiently in Wings3d after a few tutorials and a few hours of
playing around.
I realize it is not as powerful of an application as Blender, but it is definitely
intuitive and
easy to figure out for basic modeling and UV mapping.

What's up with not prompting to save on close?  I realize you should close with
caution, but
accidents do happen.  I have autosave on, but losing five minutes of work can still be
damaging and
frustrating.

The materials and texture interface is somewhat confusing.  I'm sure this may be from
my
inexperience, but just trying to find something simple, like which value to set under
which sub
window under which context to scale a material is kind of difficult.  Also, I've seen
something to
do with using empties and materials to set the material on an object, but I haven't
figured out what
the heck is up with that yet.

The material nodes interface could be a nice feature, if it controlled all aspects of
the material
and texture, but it doesn't.

The viewport does not display textures properly if you have the textured view selected
in the
viewport shading control.  If you have shaded selected, it only displays the material
properly if it
is a detailed mesh or if the mesh is subsurfed for higher detail.  I know I can use
render preview,
but that doesn't seem to always update properly when changing material or texture
settings.

Why not have common function on single keystrokes, instead of multiple keystrokes? 
For something
like edge loop select, why not just use something like "L", instead of "CTRL + E, 7"? 
Also, the
menu says that edge loop select is "CTRL + E, 6", but it is really "CTRL + E, 7" in
2.43.

That's enough ranting for now...

>Some things still are a little counterintuitive to me - for example, I've
>been playing recently with something that is shown in the new 2.43 feature
>videos - building a chain of links, starting with an extruded circle,
>rotating the extrusion 90 degrees.
>
>I can get it to do everything in the demo video - follow a bezier curve,
>dynamically adjust the number of links based on the length - all of that
>works just fine.
>
>But if I try to rescale the link, things go crazy.  Links in one direction
>get proportionally smaller, while links in the other direction get
>proportionally larger.
>
>For what I'm doing, I want to scale things down to a relatively small
>scale and then manipulate the object within the context of the scene, but
>I can't seem to do that.  I have to freeze the construct by converting it
>to a mesh (I think that's ultimately what I ended up doing) and then
>scaling the new mesh - but I lose the ability to change the curve and
>number of links.

I really like some of the features that I've seen in the demos, such as what you've
just described.
The rigging, skinning and animation features seem very promising.

>But for basic modelling, I find it to be very intuitive -
>space->add->mesh->sphere, and a sphere is added where the cursor is.  If I
>don't like where the cursor is, alt+g to clear the position, alt+r to
>clear the rotation, alt+s to clear the scale.

Some of the basics are not too bad, but they could be better with better context
menus.  Maybe I'll
feel different after further use...



Kyle

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