Okay, I want to point out something quirky about starting Blender with its ‘factory’ default scene. This is a very very small thing, but it is something that I observed when I started using Blender with version 2.42, and have noticed this little quirk remained in place in every release since, including now version 2.5 alpha 0.
The default scene contains one Lamp object. In versions before 2.5 alpha 0, if you select this Lamp and look at the Preview Panel, it shows the object as indeed being a Lamp. However, if you look at its name in the Lamp Panel, it is named (in the ‘LA’ field) “Spot”.
Now, in 2.5 alpha 0, there is still a Preview area in the new Properties bar on the right side of the screen. If you select the Lamp object in the scene, and then click on the Object Data button at the top of the Properties bar, you can see that the type of the object is now called ‘Point’ (evidently a new type). However, you can see near the top of the Properties bar that its name is still Spot.
I point this out because (1) I think it’s weird to name a Lamp ‘Spot’ when it’s not a Spot type Lamp, but mainly because (2) back when I first started studying about Lamps in Blender, the name ‘Spot’ being used actually caused me a lot of lost time, plenty of confusion, and a certain amount of frustration trying to figure out why that Spot Lamp was not being displayed with its light ‘cone’ which I always got whenever I added a new Spot Lamp. Now I realize it’s just a silly way to name a non-spot lamp. As a beginner, that was not a happy thing.
Like I said, this is a really tiny thing, but wouldn’t it be better to ‘fix’ this tiny flaw in the default start up scene, possibly saving other beginners the same misery I went through? Or, perhaps nobody other than me thinks it matters, and now I just opened the door for a ton of flames. I have been accused often of being a silly perfectionist.
I have to agree with LoBush!
Simple things like this should have been changed at an early stage. And it’s not even hard to do.
But obviously the developers have been extremely busy working on other aspects of Blender. This is not to critizise them for not wanting to do this, but sometimes these simple tasks get lost in the huge pile of things to do.
This is not a big issue, but it has caused some confusion for beginners and it ought to be fixed.
I know this is something we all can do in our own default setup, but beginners wouldn’t know how to do this, even if they are aware of this issue.
Thanks, Chapel, for getting the point. As one who taught in colleges and industry for over 35 years (yes!), I have come to realize how often the beginners of something so often don’t get confused on the difficult things, but stumble badly and get really hung up on the little things. When one is new at learning something, those little (and often unimportant) things can be really off-putting. Now that I know about Blender, of course, I just fix it myself, press Ctrl+U, and move on. But, as a beginner, I didn’t know it was so easy. I first got stuck trying to figure out why that Spot Lamp didn’t work right. It cost me a lot of time and effort to find out it was a red herring. I agree that the developers are really busy, and as one who has also programmed since 1969 (yes!) in Fortran, C/C++, VB, Java, and a few languages you may never have heard of, I can appreciate how easy it is to ignore the little things. Still, I for one want Blender to be better than okay. If a lot of non-Spot lamps are lying around named Spot, then that will become a big deal. But, now I’m getting way off topic here.
i have to admit this never bothered me, but just because i never noticed it. i can fully understand how this would be confusing and you are right, it should be renamed by default.