Sorry, but I gotta unload some frustration that has been building …
I just bought several paid plugins (found on this site by the way), and the documentation is HORRENDOUS. There is no logical explanation for what they do and why, and the example videos and gifs on the author’s pages are done almost as if they were time-lapse. Things happen so fast, with the guy clicking away as if he’s in a speed-modeling contest, whilst yabbering away about something other than what he’s trying to demonstrate. Extremely frustrating. Another popular blog forum has a very nice collection of plugins with an animated .gif to demonstrate each plugin, but the person who produced the gifs didn’t leave the text up long enough to read, and short of downloading the .gif and going through it frame by frame with an editor, you just can’t read the text.
Developers - PLEASE PLEASE consider the customer and aim your documentation at someone who has no clue how your product works or why it does what it does, when you do video demos describe what keystrokes you are making and why, rather than clicking away like a mad man on a deadline while talking about the weather in your town, and if you are going to use text to illustrate something, PLEASE leave it up on the screen long enough for a mere mortal to actually read it. You should be educating newbies, not trying to show what a boss modeler you are!
Agree. Purely unprofessional. For any other professional (paid) software such a thing is unacceptable, strangely i have only seen this with Blender addons/plugins. And then many wonder why they are not taken seriously?
It is common practice for user manual to be part of a product!
(unless given free of charge, but even then some hints and advices are pointed)
I think that https://www.thegrove3d.com/ provides so limited document for addon. On the websites, too long texts are used to explain how a natural tree grows like a plant textbook does, however there is so few pictures to show how the addon parameters can effect the CG tree. Maybe there is detailed document in the bought addon, but who knows.
This is one of the reasons why I was hesitant to purchase Grove. It looks like a great add-on but I didn’t see much in the way of learning material. I want to know more about a product before I buy it. I want to see how difficult/time consuming it is going to be to learn. Also, they really should add more examples of what the program can do.
Man I kinda of have an idea of which plug-in you brought(I might have brought the same one)…I hope add-on writers see this I am kind of put off buying another Blender add-on.
It has absolutely has nothing to do with been lazy…This whole randomly press buttons and see what happens is a slow and stupid way to learn anything sorry but I am a read the fucking manual kind of guy.
And when I have to sit through useless time lapse video were people seem to do anything other than explain how the add-on works I get royally pissed off.
If anyone needs to see how to do documentation style video look at what the Unreal guys have put out, those guys put out video that last 5-10 minutes clearly explaining how to use a specific tool short sweet and highly focused. No aimless rumbling on about nothing. or gif’s
In the Blender world I would say look at the BlenRig documentation…(that’s how make documentation )
As a customer trust me I will not buy another add-on unless I find out the quality of documentation before hand.
Reply to Albertofx: The ones I was talking about were not any of your tools - though after looking at your ‘tutorials’ I’m afraid they also illustrate what I’m talking about. Sorry. They might be good as a quick and confusing demo of what the tool does, but I don’t really think you can call those “tutorials” as it would be highly unlikely that someone could learn how to use the tools or what all the options are by watching a video that goes by so fast you can’t tell what is clicked and see what it does unless you download the video and play it in slow motion with something like VLC. I quit buying “courses” that were several hundred dollars because of that - I got tired of having to download and play things in slow motion to see what the hell the author was doing (and he wouldn’t even explain it while he was doing it!)… Might be fine for some folks, but life is too short for me to waste time with poor documentation and poor tutorials…
from the public website and video, I think hardops has bad tutorials. it seem that the author likes to show “hey, look at my quick operation and the final nice model” even without too many key/mouse button displaying.
yup, and with busy schedule i haven’t really touched HO since first released
no documentation, unorganized files, few bugs and i was like ‘no, thank you’ - am out of beta phase and faster flowing via known workflow
Do you guys have good examples of addons (Blender if possible) with good documentation? Can you provide examples of what kind of documentation you are missing?
I have been saying this very same thing for years. Both here on blenderartists.org and before when it was elysiun.org and over on the freenode irc channel #blender. AND I have built up somewhat of a bad reputation because i have been so vocal about it.
As a result I have just come to expect to have bad or no documentation with plugins as just something that goes along with using blender.
Again, documentation is a part of a product or a tool… an abiding must if one wants to make profit and sells, otherwise there’s high risk of lawsuit, penalty, fine… not to mention it’s unfair to the consumer, buyer.
Is this just about paid add-ons (semantic point, they’re add-ons, not plugins) for Blender or all add-ons? Software documentation in general is fairly lackluster. That said, nearly all the add-ons I’ve seen (even the for-sale ones) are written by individuals… sometimes by a very small team. We’re all pretty approachable. If you have questions or something is confusing, it would be best to contact the developers directly. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I really like critical feedback on my add-ons. Even better (especially in the case of free add-ons), if you could provide specific improvements to the add-on’s documentation, that would be an even bigger help.
ambi i could provide you with at least two dozen examples of addons with bad documentation. But then I would get and even worse reputation than I already have. I have skirted the limits of being banned several times and do not want to even get close to that again. Whenever I do see good documentation I make and extra effort to post here and point that out and pm the author and tell him.
Sometimes it is a matter that the author is not a native english speaker. That I overlook. To me the fact that they made the effort and attempt at even making english documentation does them real credit. I applaud them for that effort.
But most of the time its just what i call geekese. That is the the people the make addons are really great programmers but do not know how to show people that do not know how to code or have no interest in coding how thier program works.
When I say how thier program works I do not mean the lines of code and what they do. But how you get it to do what they say it is supposed to do. Those authors are more then happy to explain the programming code but the actual mouse movements and clicks and key presses they can not explain. And if they do they make glaring leaps of logic and procedure. Its like they assume the since they know how to use the addon that everyone should know how to. Well they know how to use it because they wrote it.
Things have gotten even worse since Youtube and Vimeo have come to be popular. Now all someone does is get a screen recording program and press a key and start talking. They do not realize the the person viewing the video cannot see what keys they are pressing or wha mouse buttons they are clicking. They do not give any thought to explaining why they are hitting a certain key or what the keystroke does.
But now I am getting up on a soapbox and preaching so i need to stop. As i said before I have just come to accept that bad documentation and user instructions are part of using blender. But the situataion has gotten a lot better than it was 15 years ago when I first started using blender.
there is software that lets you show keystrokes and mouse inputs on screen in videos. QiPress and KeyCastOW seem to be popular for windows. i am sure there is software for linux and mac too.
