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I apologize for splitting hairs Bernard, but I feel this distinction is important:
to me there's a difference between "user friendliness" and intuitive design-- unless I am misunderstanding what you mean. I agree that the render tree is quite user-friendly and elegant if you are a TD, a technically oriented person, left-brained, or educated specifically in its functionality. My argument has always been that the render tree doesn't seem to be designed to be easy to pick up for talented people who are perhaps more right-brained, or less technically inclined-- and this was affirmed by Luc-Eric's response.
Of course there will always be special (lucky, hardworking or gifted) exceptions to this generalization, such as yourself. But my original critique was that it doesn't make sense to me to design a graphical interface for the technical user, who might not benefit from it as much as the typical artist, who by nature is visually oriented.
Putting nodes together with little connectors just SCREAMS right brain creativity to me.
As an artist, I don't want phong or blinn or math nodes or photons or an "invertrefl" socket-- I don't know what that stuff means or how to connect it. I want red, and shiny, furry, glowing, and wet (geez, sounds like something a doctor should look at now that I type it). Seriously, that's an over-simplification, but it's a valid way for an artist to want to work.
Do you think it would be possible to have a graphical node-based tool for artists to do all the things they need to do-- colors, textures, layering, transparencies, surface properties, etc.-- while also retaining the level of tweak control and functionality that the render tree already has? Do you think something like that would be useful? Or should TDs be supplying presets to artists to tweak?
Mike
On 6/27/06, Bernard Lebel <3dbernard(at)gmail.com> wrote:
Don't get me wrong, I have never said the Render Tree is perfect, far
from it. The debate evolved around wether or not the Render Tree is a
user-friendly tool or not, which I think it is, and is a very elegant
solution in its current state.
But since you bring these concerns up, I agree with all your points,
Jordi. I hoped for a long time that things would be taken care of in
those areas, but quite frankly I've lost hope so I stopped bugging
Softimage about it.
Bernard
On 6/27/06, Jordi Bares <jordibares(at)the-mill.com> wrote:
> Not that i want to start a war but totally disagree, fair enough we got
> used to, fair enough we can do a lot of things with but truly is not
> very comfortable nor intuitive.
>
> The truth is that every single software tool i have come accross is
> basically an 80-90s solution instead of a friendlier more closer-to-life
> interface (and i talk about design interface not the gui)
>
> Specially with materials we are (on any software) still in the
> paleolithic, cameras, lights... seems like the raw power is just spent
> in the software abstraction instead of the concepts because nobody is
> really revisiting them.
>
> The first welcome approach i have seen is Maxwell where you deal with a
> fair amount of reality on the material definition and cameras and seems
> far more intuitive than anything else.
>
> On top of that the locality of those tools, meaning they do not exposed
> as they should, does not reflect how sophisticated this tools are
> internally. Why shouldn't the rendertree be part of the fxtree and
> viceversa? Why the fcurve editor is not part of the rendertree?
>
> The same for the physics, why cloth, RBDs, softbodies and particles are
> not integrated fully into one single umbrela, a mega-physics engine?
>
> Anyway, my 2 cents before Spain kicks some French ass today. ;-)
>
> jb
>
> On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 08:11 -0400, Bernard Lebel wrote:
> > Despite its current limitations and bugs, I think the Render Tree is
> > as elegant as elegant can be. Perhaps it is me who is stubborn, but
> > having played with various approach, I think it's the easiest one for
> > most situations.
> >
> >
> > Cheers
> > Bernard
> >
> >
> > On 6/27/06, Mike Werckle <stumbly(at)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Perhaps I am too idealistic. Do you think that the act of creating shaders
> > > is so complex that it's simply unrealistic for me to wish for a more elegant
> > > solution?
> > >
> > > Mike
> > ---
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> Jordi Bares <jordibares(at)the-mill.com>
> The Mill
>
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