Blender Fuctionality Board: Calling Blender users!

Reposted from this article on the front page of blender.org:

The discussions on establishing a Blender functionality board didn’t give a quick consensus on how to organize it all. Nevertheless it is something I would like to proceed on, but with little steps forward.

The key concept of the functionality board is organizing a feedback and research platform for active users of Blender to assist on reviewing and development of features in Blender.

As a first step, we’ve created a mailling list ([email protected]) which is open for everyone to subscribe to. You can find a subscription page here.

In the near future other tools can be added as well, such as a project at projects.blender.org (cvs, temporal web forums, feature tracker) and a dedicated web page at blender.org.

As a first target we’ve defined two key topics:

1. getting the board organized; decision procedures, targets, assigning work-to-do, etc.
2. assisting & inspiring the current coders on feasible concepts for Blender 2.28-2.50 series.

Focus and scope should be refined to:

• functionality in the meaning of what the end-user sees and does.
• no technical discussions, although occasional debates on feasibility are inevetable.
• everything that can be done in the current Blender. The very interesting Blender3 or’ NGB’ topics are for another platform, or for later.

Further I’ve asked 2 people to help organizing and moderating the first targets of this project:
-> broken (Matt Ebb), already active in building www.blender3d.org, moderating blender.org forums, and studying media design.
-> basse (Bastian Salmela), active in the user community and die-hard blender user & great artist.

I would like to invite everyone interested in Blender functionality - and to actively contribute to that - to join.

-Ton-

One of the main aims of this Functionality Board is to bring artists and coders closer together in the development process. The board will be used to evaluate new ideas for Blender and see how they can be consistently integrated with the rest of Blender, as well as providing a resource for coders to present their ideas for features to, and get suggestions and research from the people that will actually be using it most - Blender’s user base.

We’re trying to fill in the gap between making a feature request and actually coding it in. You may get a bit more of an understanding of what the group is about by reading these threads on blender.org:

http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=1627
http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=1540

Anyway, if you’re a Blender user and want to have your say in how new features are integrated into Blender, and want the software to adapt to your needs, rather than you adapting to it, please come and sign up to the mailing list and join the discussions.

The subscription page is here: http://www.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard/

Cheers and hope to see you there!

FINALLY. I’ve been dying for something like this to pop up! (you were obviously looking much harder than most of us). Thanks for the heads up!

Excellent!! finally a bit of organization!

That’s a great initiative, a generous and clever move. I wish for a fruitful cooperation.

lol, I signed up, but I don’t know how helpful I can be. Time will tell.

i’m in!

Dani

yep, i signed up…

d52477001

The FuBo will essentially gather artist community feedback on features/improvements they’d like to see in blender. The FuBo will then prioritize the features based on the amount of feedback it receives for each feature. It will hand off the ones that make it to the top to the approriate coder(s) to get implemented.

And the coders will see if they feel like it.
I’m not sure if I really like that kind of ‘designing by pooling’ most seem to expect if not hope for. If the creators of Blender had proceeded that way there would never have been a Blender as we now know it. The majority never gets really original and powerful ideas at first but only much later.

but blender is as you say, “much later”.

blender is a very mature, and complete 3d package.

part of what i said there was a premature, since that is still one concept, not the final design. i should have made that clear.

and in itself quite an original idea.
No doubt that that mailing list will turn out some very interesting ‘reality reading’.

Of course you can help! Anyone having used Blender long enough to know what to improve can help by letting everybody know about their ideas and suggestions.