Support for image/gifs/videos in the interface
It could be nice to have the possibility to add pictures, gifs, and videos in the interface and not only the links.
If we can add pictures or videos (links from youtube or else), we will be able to add documentation directly in our add-ons. If it's only link, the size of the addon will not change.
12 Comments
I for one would find this feature very annoying, as I do in every app that has this feature. I'm all for it, though, if I can turn it off so I never have to see it.
Just to give an example of usage:
Maya's AnimBot addon has tooltips with Gifs. If you hover a tool for a few seconds, it displays a tooltip with text and animated GIFs explaining & showing the tool:
For those worried abond addon's size:
GIFs, pictures, videos, .... Are compressible. Most addons are delivered as archive / zip files anyway. And formats like GIF or JPG are made to be lightweight if asked to do so.
As for AnimBot, the addon is full of such GIF's (243), and only is 90MB of download.
* @-L0Lock- * I guess it's all relative, but Blender 2.8 uncompressed right now is a little over 300MB so you're looking at a 25% increase in overall size for a single feature?
I don't disagree it would be useful, but perhaps a link to the relevant article in the Blender manual / wiki would be more practical.
We just need to use links and not local images. But both options could be nice!
You download any addon you want dude. And take into account that I talked about a big addon for a big software. AnimBot has 243 GIFs, it's a huge amount that very few addons would ever reach.
* @-L0Lock- * yea but consider that animbot is just a plugin and the weight of it is as much as the entire blender
* @Luciano Muñoz * No, 90MB of a big addon isn't "as mutch" as 300MB of Blender. Maths.
And like I said, it's an example of a BIG addon with over 200 GIFs. Mosts addons wouldn't ever need such amount.
If you don't want to have GIFs in your addons, just consider to download only the code file, or not download them at all.
If you don't want to put GIFs and JPGs and videos in your own addons, don't put any.
But do not prevent others to do so.
* @-L0Lock- * Perhaps I misunderstood. I took this to mean adding GIF examples to Blender core functions. Understandably that would be a huge undertaking and significant increase to the file size.
Perhaps, though what you mean is to make it possible for programmers of plug-ins to include GIF examples. In this case, sure! It can be as large or small as they want.
The thread's title is "* Support for image/gifs/videos in the interface*".
To me, the idea is only to give new tools to addons & devs.
I quoted AnimBot as an extreme example of how it could be used on a large scale.
Another example could be TexTools for Blender .
If you look at its home page, there are some GIFs to demonstrate the addon's features. Some of them could fit as little demo gifs to show how to use some feature
Let's imagine the dev decides to display such GIFs right in the addon, it would cost only 2-3MB in the worst case , while making his addon way more user-friendly/discoverable.
AND if you allow using URLs in the code, then we could have some extra possibilities:
And we can think the thing further.
Let's imagine that in the "first start" splash screen, you could have a little "Overview Tour" button which would basically start a sequence of demos to introduce you to Blender's basics. Optional of course.
* @ammusionist * If I do like the idea to see GIFs in tooltips (for Blender and addons), as it would give clearer explanations of features & buttons, you raised a good point: it would increase the file size of the Blender installer & portable archive.
That being said, @-L0Lock- also made a good point: it would be up to the addon authors to decide if they want to add these GIFs or not (if they think it worths increasing the file size of their addons in exchange to this extra Help).
About Blender itself, even if I wish it could also have these GIFs in toolips, there's a high probability that the installer file size would increase significantly.
So maybe, Blender's tooltips could still be enhanced with links pointing to the Reference Manual .
* @ xan2622 * No real need of links since you can hover anything and hit <kbd>F1</kbd> to open the manual on the correct page and chapter.
* @-L0Lock- * * @-L0Lock- * I tend to think that this
F1hotkey is rarely used by new Blender users (I don't even think many Blender users know about it).It would be useful (I think) to have the following sentence added to the tooltips:
"Press F1 for more informations about this feature."