TOOLTIPS FOR BLENDER 101
UPDATE
The idea of tooltips would be something like this:
That the tooltip in addition to a small description as it has now offers much more information (and more visual) to facilitate learning for newcomers to Blender.
The link to the direct manual (instead of the right-click menu) and a brief description, which may come from the texts of the manual. I would complement it with small gifs or even static images (which can also be those of the current manual). The idea would be that in the pages of the blender manual you can establish a category of thumbnail to an image per post and that blender reads this information (with the option to have it downloaded on the pc) and show.
To avoid being loading images and texts unnecessarily you can have a small "lag" so that after 2 seconds or so the mouse is on the tool the complete tooltip is loaded, leaving the current version (reduced) first.
ORIGINAL
No se si conocéis la herramienta de autodesk Revit, es un software para modelado BIM de arquitectura. Las herramientas tienen un tooltip que contienen tanto una pequeña frase que describe la herramienta, un texto más largo que describe como funciona y una pequeña imagen (a veces como un gif a veces estática) que muestra el resultado de la herramienta.
Obviamente esto aumentaría el tamaño de blender, se podría incluir como un extra, una especie de addon que se descargue, para mantener blender liviano teniendo la opción de activar (descargar) los tooltips extendidos o no.
17 Comments
I'm thinking in something like this example
It can be part of the 101 Blender UI Project
The images can be an optional package or addon and blender stil be light.
@Antonio Navarro Blaya: I really like the look of that. If there were multiple images like that, having it fade between them (not too slowly) instead of cutting might feel more professional without much more work.
@quargzon: check out the AnimBot tools from Alan Camilo that he is creating for maya, features a very similar help type.
@Luciano Muñoz: Yes, i'm thinking in something similar like this.
The real challenge here would be generating all of that content. We have quite a bit of it in the manual now (and users can/should right-click any element and choose Online Manual to see what's there. But we have a hard enough time keeping that documentation up-to-date. Doing it for every release with every function in Blender is a daunting proposition. I'm not sure that enough of the right people exist to keep up with that.
It may be interesting to see if tooltips can query the online manual for this kind of data and populate it on the fly, but I don't think I'd want to make having an internet connection a required feature of Blender. It would have to have a graceful fallback in the event that there's no network.
@Jason van Gumster: Have Blender scrape the wiki somehow? That way you only have to keep one repo up to date. The problem there might be figuring out some way to consistently format the info within the tool tip. You could even have the tool tip grab the info in real time, that way you can keep the download size low, it would then cache the tool tip content. Just a thought.
@BrianDeArtiste: That's where I was going with it. Wouldn't even need to scrape if there's a decent API (REST?). The biggest challenges would be:
@Jason van Gumster: Oh my gwad, I did not see the second paragraph in your original comment. Sorry.
@BrianDeArtiste: No worries. It's just good to know that folks are thinking along the same lines. :)
@Jason van Gumster: This idea can be good for the "101" team.
"I do not know if you know the tool of Autodesk Revit, it is a software for BIM architecture modeling. The tools have a tooltip that contains both a small phrase that describes the tool, a longer text that describes how it works and a small image (sometimes as a gif sometimes static) that shows the result of the tool.
Obviously this would increase the size of blender, it could be included as an extra, a kind of addon to be downloaded, to keep lightweight blender having the option to activate (download) extended tooltips or not"
...it wasn't to hard, just a paste-copy from google translate
@: Thanks
I don't know if you know the Autodesk Revit tool, it's a BIM modeling software for architecture. The tools have a tooltip that contains both a small phrase describing the tool, a longer text describing how it works and a small image (sometimes as a static gif) that shows the result of the tool.
Obviously, this would increase the size of Blender, it could be included as an extra, a kind of addon that downloads, to keep Blender lighter having the option to activate (download) the extended or non-extended tooltips.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
it is great idea ,zbrush has similar tab ,I like online documentation more because blender stay very light installation ,but frankly there is no hind online help is under right click menu it should be somewhere at open splahscreen or something like that,
Using SVGs is probably a good idea. Not only would they be much smaller, but they'd also be nicely DPI-scalable.
@quargzon: It can be very complicated to represent certain tools in svg. For modeling tasks it may make sense, but in render options the creation of the thumbnails can be very complicated.
@Antonio Navarro Blaya: Oh yeah, I'm not saying bitmaps should be removed completely, just that anything that could be represented as an abstract graphic could use vector images. AFAIK, bitmaps can be embedded in SVGs, so they would encompass both vector and raster, and be more futureproof.