I’d like to say that I translated to Spanish the point number 5 because I think is important to get more blender artists and grow up our community.

Also, I added my comments but they’re in Spanish too. I hope this help for non-english speakers.

http://con100.blogspot.com/2009/10/practicas-comunes-de-una-defensa-in.html

Also, the documentation DEFINITELY needs work! I would absolutely love to see an easy to use documentation site for blender that organises for easy searching every component of the program, and a short example of how to use it. Combined with a few simple tutorials on how to do larger projects, and a beginner tutorial on how to use the interface.

There is ofcourse lots of tutorials out there for people to read, but they are all over the place and many of them are out of date because of how frequently the program is updated.

Though, documentation for new users and the interface, and how Blender users conduct themselves around other users of different programs *should* always be a serious issue. Because these 3 main issues really determine the adoption rate of Blender3D. The more friendly the userbase is, the simpler the interface is, and the clearer the documentation is, the more users that Blender will get.

So we should be always trying to improve on those 3 areas shouldn’t we?

I really want the devs to publish their back ground credentials and references for all design changes which are proposed. This is a major frustration with the development of this tool. We already seeing anonymous users hiring full time devs under their control to make a section of this tool viable for their particular application of blender.

XSI, Maya and Max do this with specific plugins or with external vendors creating significant extentions (e.g. XSI facial animation and lipsync system)

Case in point is the fiasco which surrounds GI/Volumetrics and Realtime raytracing. The research perfromed by the devs was less than transparent as well as the design tradoffs, project plan and development schedule. As a CELL developer I am well aware of the compute power necessary to realize this feature. I can do it with 3 PS3 machines acting in concert. Gettiing the 3d viewport to access this system seems to be less that trivial.

Concerning the general changes and new features I found the blender2.5 tours released by michael b. fox (mfoxdogg) very informative.
He has a blog at
http://blenderlabrat.blogspot.com/
where he’s constantly going thru features that been modified or added lately.
Concerning certain features I guess one has to contact the certain devs via the development blog or blender.org since the development seems to be quite compartmentalized.
Best regards

This forum sparked 5 comments:

@Thomas Eldridge
Blender for Educators is a great idea. I would even support it with donations … as I have with other Blender donations in the past

@Developers
It would be very constructive if the research basis of their development and design decisions was more transparent. Could people publish references (e.g. GPU Gems, Game Programing Gems, etc)

@Tom Musgrove
It appears to me that we are now at a point with this software product that we need to be civil within our forums and we need to address problems in a more academic rather than emotional manner.

@Training
IMHO, training needs to be broken into 3 parts: for artists, for non-artists (me) and for developers/python experts/BGE

@Development schedule
I agree with the last post from Mr. Jenkins. I have no idea what is in Blender 2.5 Alpha1. This make me useless as a tester and more useless as a user. In particular I have about 5 BGE tests which do not work and no idea what needs to be modified between 2.5 and 2.49b.

I enjoyed meeting you, and everyone else! I’m biased on this but after I gave my talk on digital puppets, I heard a lot of chatter going on about midi and osc and 3d controller support and so on and so forth. I did a lot of jumping in to groups of people and asking “what are you all talking about” and was surprised that they were talking about… me!

I’m happy to report two things:
1. right clicking on a button to go to the documentation HAPPENED as of a day ago. I’m so glad I was sitting in that room for the debate. Beautiful.

2. I got a *two* coders on board for OSC implementation. They think it will take about a week. I’m drawing up the plans riiiight now.

Wow, nice i’ll see you there

Shocking you would now be telling Ton how to behave.

Possibly he has taken more blender bashing hate than anyone?