User Interface: in addition to Reference Manual, Right-click-F1 brings Online Tutorials

Learning and using Blender is lot of fun. And quite a lot of frustration. For lot of people YouTube (YT) is the main learning repository. Unfortunately, YT’s Blender resources are unstructured and disorganized. There is no formal way to find A) good YT tutorials regarding the B) user skill level: (B)eginner, (M)edium and (A)dvanced and C) the topic in mind. Here is the initial proposal how to improve Blender learning process through the clever use of Blender User Interface and numerous existing YT resources.

Blender 2.8 already has the right-click Help/F1 ability to immediately show the particular item Help in the online Reference Manual. Unfortunately, Reference Manual is not enough for learning purposes.

This right-click Help/F1 system could be improved with additional functionality:

1. User could right-click on a particular Blender item/topic and (instead of clicking F1) add link to a particular YT video tutorial. The link is saved in her (let’s call it) Learning Repository (LR) on her local computer in some sort of simplified database
2. User can evaluate the quality of the presented YT video material and put a score (let’s say one to five stars *) regarding to her expectations, the quality of the presented material and its usefulness
3. This LR is filled with more and more user’s links and becomes a sort of a user’s personal database of useful links to various Blender topics: modeling, shading, etc.
4. It is also possible to share those personal links to central Blender repository (let’s call it Blender External Teaching Base, BETB), which is maintained by Blender Foundation
5. More and more Blender users are using this functionality each day, so the BETB is growing.
6. User has option to include other people’s experiences (links to quality YT videos) in her right-click Help/F1, so in addition to her private links to YT videos there are also the best scored links from the BETB regarding that particulr topic. User can assign her/his personal score regarding relevance and quality of “other people’s” suggestions.
7. So, if one is interested in particular shader node explanation/tutorial, his right-click Help/F1 will show him his own links and additional five (or ten, could be user selectable) best scored links to YT explanations of this particular Blender topic.
8. BETB should be managed by Blender Foundation with strict rules about A) what (links) goes in (the main obstacle being harmful users providing links to YT videos with inappropriate and/or irrelevant content), B) defining and managing usability criteria and overall policy and C) which links should be deleted from BETB and when (if for example the usability criteria over time for some particular link isn’t matched). Fortunately, our current e-mail/web systems already cope with spammers and there are plenty of technologies, which block/filter inappropriate content and harmful people.
9. If successful this project could change the way knowledgeable people prepare and publish their Blender YT tutorials. In a certain time frame there will be positive quantitative and qualitative change regarding good or even excellent learning materials for beginners, medium skilled and advanced Blender users, covering various Blender topics.

This proposal is of course more of a social project (or experiment) than particular user interface improvement. There are a lot of open questions regarding this proposal. Final goal would be: positive Blender marketing, better Blender tutorials, more skilled Blender users in less time, with less frustration. It looks that Blender will stay here with us for a long time in the future. Let’s take advantage of this and do our best for us and future Blender users.

Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal.

aloha