The Good Ol' Days

Well I see my name at the top of the list - and have some of the same feelings that @Wingnut has. Some days I look at the forum content and I think, “I don’t have a clue about 50% of these questions”. This maybe due to a number of reasons:

  1. I’m a crap coder - never pretended to be anything else. My coding has been mainly cut/paste ideas from playgrounds, posted examples, Temechon’s book, and of course @Wingnut, with my contribution being a little logic here and there.
  2. I grow old and my brain is not what it used to be. That is not helping with the 2.8/9 versions of Blender ( I still cannot stop right clicking and other stuff), and having to learn Gimp as my 2d graphics program. (My old Photoshop died with my XP computer)
  3. The changing nature/ demography of board members. As Babylon gets more successful, more serious commercial interests are attracted with teams looking for detailed answers for their commercial projects. Me, I’ve always just been a hobbyist - back in 2014, I started on this board when I was 70 years old and was not here to make a living.
  4. Now that Babylon accepts 3d models from the Khronos glTF format it seems their are fewer questions about the .babylon format. For a variety of reasons, I am not particularly thrilled with this format and ignore it, and stick with @JCPalmer 's great exporter for Blender. But there are lots of glTF questions as people get models from various sites that don’t always seem to be living upto expectations.

Anyway, I continue to model and post examples, but I have joined several Blender groups which run competitions. Those groups have still renders or videos as entries - but I post them as a webpage using Babylon. And I have been asked, “how did you do that?”. The two most interested, one is college student using Unity, the other older, with experience with a number of computer languages and trying to teach himself Blender. He has tried Panda.js - which I kind of remember from the old forum.

So I am giving people links to the forum - and telling people to mention “gryff sent me”. I may not be able to contribute in the way I used to anymore, but Babylon is still my favorite 3d arrangement, so I will see what responses I get.

Well that’s enough for now

Stay Safe All, gryff :slight_smile:

6 Likes

I feel you Wing for sure. Things have been always getting more and more complex and to stay relevant I have had to learn a lot and forget a lot. I don’t feel like we are stagnant on resources for basic topics, as they kind of get serviced over and over again by us on the forum.

I guess the best way to resolve this would be to write up a few more basic tutorials that you think would speak better to the target audience of your concern and lets start providing more resources for them through that avenue at least as some starting steps?

One of the most painful things in life if the passage of time and growth.

3 Likes

Over the course of the past few years here with babylon, I’ve learned alot from some really great people. One thing I think the babylonjs community lacks is tutorial videos. @PirateJC does a great job teaching things, I really appreciate it, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Unfortunately when people are faced with several other options which have a plethora of visual learning videos, vs reading walls of text in hopes of finding what you’re looking for specifically; it’s pretty obvious where the newcomers are headed. I’m not knocking babylonjs, or anyone here. I love everything about the community and how everyone tries to be as helpful as possible.
I just wish we had more content creators willing to spend time on videos. Personally when I stumbled across Babylon, it looked bare - and unused. But all the playgrounds I’d found stomped other competitors, so I dove in anyway. Very glad I did.

Sorry for rambling, I hope this is understandable. Lol

2 Likes

@gryff, I do not see any value to you investing any time in glTF. For those very new it might seem a better format choice to grab geometry from the web. If you know Blender though, a .blend is probably going to be a better start point. Reason being, almost all stuff for download is massively over-subdivided, thus it is slow to load, render, and just creates all kinds of problems trying to adjust. Being able to just remove sub-divide modifiers is fast, and much better than trying to fix it with glTF.

I have thought about this a little more. I am not really sure measuring the number, much less the percentage of “noob” questions is indicating lack of engagement.

On the numbers front, what does everyone know how to do? Google. All the questions previously answered, new & old site, are just sitting out there. I have many questions about Blender, python, & javascript. I search & go one of many sites, find my answer. I do not create another ID for the site.

From a percentage standpoint, BJS just has so many deployment options now:

  • std browser
  • npm
  • with react
  • babylon native on windows, iOS, or Android
  • VR/XR headsets
  • babylon native on VR/XR headsets
  • Electron
  • server / headless stuff

I know I missed some. Percentage wise, this area has begun to get significant, and the variety of questions can make it seem foreign a lot of the time. Perhaps a “Deployment” category might make the general questions area more inviting to newer people.

Think more reclassifying topics out of questions by mods would also be useful. Think people should be able to figure it out it moved, especially if they get a little notice in there “icon list” of notifications.

Am not trying to make more work for someone though. Feel free to disregard.

1 Like

@JCPalmer wrote :

I do not see any value to you investing any time in glTF.

I agree Jeff :slight_smile: Looking at various playgrounds with glTF , I keep seeing old VRML - multiple nodes wrapping the object geometry. I used to avoid that - though lots of VRML software used to add those nodes every time you moved an object in your modeler.

I just really worry that one day the exporter, and the .babylon format, might get abandoned, not just the exporter but the format itself. Since we met a long time ago, you have done a fantastic job in maintaining the exporter as Blender changed.

As for all the devices/OS systems, you can add a simple description “quality”.Recently, I was trying to show my grand daughter something I had made for her out on a a patio - dull overcast day on a couple of different computers. Results:

  1. Cheap HP laptop (2-3 years old Windows 10) - total crap - unviewable.
  2. IPad (4 years old) much better than 1 but still not great.

Her dad later ran it on a desktop PC - fine. I recently bought a Samsung Tablet - it somehow has a “brightness” control that kicks in under difficult lighting conditions - but drains the battery very rapidly.

As you point out so many “significant” deployment options - these days I just stick to a desktop PC.

Keep up the good work with the exporter :slight_smile:

And Stay Safe Jeff, gryff :slight_smile:

The file I used for above test : The Gruffalo

1 Like

Not on my watch!

5 Likes

image

4 Likes

@Deltakosh

I have an initial response from the gentleman :

Awesome. First examples are running on my website.

Which is a “local” webserver

Stay Safe All, gryff :slight_smile:

1 Like