@sozap & @kilon - Thank you very much to the both of you for discussing how the Mr.Tapll proposal might be implemented on a technical level. I enjoyed reading the back & forth between the two of you about how difficult such a task might be accomplished. I found it personally fascinating, so thank you again.
The Mr.Tapll proposal was deliberately vague because it approached a problem from a conceptual point of view first, and the reason why it needed to start there is not to test the technical feasibility of the idea, but to test the idea itself. If the core idea was good and true it would provide a clean workbench to then start drawing plans and making strategies on.
From what I’ve been able to make out, based on the feedback from this proposal, it’s that people really like the idea, to the point where some even ask why such an idea hasn’t been done before. That’s encouraging, and I hope it’s encouraging enough to the Blender developers to incorporate this idea into their thinking.
Here’s why that alone is really important: If you start a technical journey from the very basics of what a user wants, and start to build around that as your centre you will complete your quest with everything supporting that central point. (This is better articulated here: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and then work backwards to the technology”).
The problem is that Blender has already been started (back in 1998), and now users are asking for lots of things to be the central focus and the devs are doing brilliantly at adapting their software as best as they can to meet these demands. Kudos to them, by the way.
But as things change and evolve if you’re not thinking about the goals of where you want your software to be in 5-10 years time, then you might develop your ideas to a place where it’s extremely difficult to change: because the decisions you made along the way didn’t allow for that possibility to eventuate. Making small adjustments now, may prevent the need to make massive changes later.
kilon, you kindly mentioned that Mr.Tapll was an “…awesome proposal that looks great on paper but incredibly hard to implement in practice.”
At this moment in 2018, yes, it’s an unrealistic minimum of 5 years away if the approach was to implement an integrated Version Control System into Blender, with all the bells and whistles included. It could be argued that the reason why it’s incredibly hard to do this is because Blender never started with the idea of having an integrated VCS in the first place. Now, 20 years later, its structure doesn’t support the possibility of something like this very easily- thus it’s a massive change. However, if the idea of an integrated & adaptable pipeline was part of its founding vision then, even if the early editions of Blender didn’t feature this at all, the structure would have always been building towards such a goal, and in 2018 implementation of the idea might be easy, if wasn’t already part of the software.
Hindsight is always 20/20 however and I don’t fault the devs at all by saying this. It was merely to illustrate a point.
Blender is great, I love Blender, however, the entire point of the Mr.Tapll proposal is to encourage the devs to begin thinking about how something like Mr.Tapll might be implemented in the future. It may take small changes in Code Quest 2.8 to help pave the way for Mr.Tapll to exist in Blender 10 years from now, for instance, but if these changes were to be left out of 2.8 then Mr.Tapll might be 12 years away instead, as an example.
Right now a much simpler approach (than direct implementation of Blender’s code) is to implement third-party software to help reach an experience of what using Mr.Tapll might be like, (for instance, Blender Cloud, or Shotgun) but even having the Mr.Tapll proposal exist also helps those third-party software developers better evolve their ideas to what the users want.
I hope you can both appreciate that.
@sozap - Thank you so much for your wonderfully informative reply! I’m very impressed by your work, by the way. I particularly like Ella, Oscar & Hoo. What a beautiful style… Gorgeous! The way you have accomplished this is well hidden from the viewer. I still don’t know how it’s done, but I’m suspecting it’s mostly 2D rigs.
I have an unrelated question: Were the storyboards in Transformice done in Blender also? If so, what was that like to use as part of your pipeline process? (Perhaps that wasn’t completely unrelated after all).