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Proposal: Blender

Should the Blender SE site be targeted towards Blender users or developers or both?

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  • What are your own thoughts?
    – hardmath
    Jul 13, 2012 at 2:56
  • 2
    In my (very) humble opinion, I think that the Blender SE should be targeted at all levels of Blenderheads and lower-experience programmers. When you start messing around with Blender's source, you need a bit of help at first. After you get your basic questions answered and a firm grip on the code structure, your questions get significantly more advanced and it's time to, as @Christofian says, migrate to Stack Overflow (or, considering how dependent the computer graphics field is on math, the Mathematics SE).
    – fouric
    Dec 29, 2012 at 3:23

4 Answers 4

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I think that focusing on the end-users is the way to go. The Blender developers would probably be asking questions that don't apply to creating 3D art; they would probably be more interested in asking programming questions about how to create functionality in Blender which would fall under StackOverflow's domain. I think it will be imperative to get the Blender developers to act as the site's experts, answering questions rather than asking development questions.

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It would be great if we could get developers involved, because they obviously know a lot about blender, having made it. That said, I think that programming questions involving blender should be migrated to stack overflow.

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IMHO, the site should cater to end users, but it should also allow for a scope that includes:

  • Developing addons (which is done in Python).
  • Using Python to script games/drivers/actions/etc.
  • Anything related to using the Python API in general :)

It should not cover:

  • Building Blender on SystemXYZ.
  • How to get your branch merged in svn.
  • How to make Blender generate unicorns when the user is idle using custom C code :).
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Since the Proposal is still in Definition phase, that is honestly the sort of thing still to be determined (the range of topics and audience) primarily by the process of posting and upvoting/downvoting Example questions.

However if you have an interest in the proposed forum for one reason or another, and don't feel it would be well expressed by posting Example questions, then perhaps it would be good to articulate your interest with a "self-answer" here.

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  • So, these discussion questions aren't the preferred vehicle for defining things like this? That should primarily be done in the example questions? I'm still new to Area 51. Jul 11, 2012 at 17:09
  • Taking a look at the higher voted questions, it seems it's catering mostly to users, but I agree. This is still definition phase. Things can change.
    – Luke_0
    Jul 11, 2012 at 21:45
  • @RustyTheBoyRobot: Keep in mind I was first trying to answer the original "would" (rather than "should") question, then (since you presumably have a preference) give some direction for affecting the outcome. You've certainly contributed your share of Example questions, but what you upvoted or downvoted I will not see. In any case you'd be welcome to answer this question yourself. Since Blender is a developer (modeling) tool, I had to think a bit about the distinction between users and developers. Evidently (based in part on your Example questions) the issue is developing Blender plugins.
    – hardmath
    Jul 12, 2012 at 1:01
  • @hardmath - My thinking was that since Blender is an open source project, this could either be catering to questions about how to further develop certain aspects of Blender in a collaborative way or catering to users of the end product. But, the more I think about it, those developers would be best suited to be the experts that fuel the answers. Jul 12, 2012 at 3:49

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