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UX - bake appearance


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"Bake appearance" shouldn't be active/clickable when there is nothing to bake - that goes for the corner tool as well. And more (rasterize on just rasterized layer, expand stroke on a bitmap based brush etc.)

The term bake is also ... not a great choice - and it makes me hungry. "Finalize" or something more logic in a software program would make more sense.

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14 hours ago, Jowday said:

"Bake appearance" shouldn't be active/clickable when there is nothing to bake - that goes for the corner tool as well. And more (rasterize on just rasterized layer, expand stroke on a bitmap based brush etc.)

The term bake is also ... not a great choice - and it makes me hungry. "Finalize" or something more logic in a software program would make more sense.

"Bake" is actually pretty common term in the 3D business where you deal with textures and the like, so there is at least some precedent in other softwares when using the term. Baking in the details created from the Contour Tool into the actual model does make some logical sense here.

That said, there might be a more suitable name for it. Personally I think the operator has a lot in common with Expand Stroke, so maybe rename it to "Expand Shape/Contour" instead as a way to explain both features?

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9 hours ago, Jowday said:

"Bake appearance" shouldn't be active/clickable when there is nothing to bake

It used to be called/labelled Bake Corners in 1.8 which was more informative/intuitive when using the corner tool

Not sure why it has been changed to "Bake Appearance" in 1.9 - maybe we are going to see a whole lotta new baking going on so they needed a new more generic term for it 

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12 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

"Bake" is actually pretty common term in the 3D business where you deal with textures and the like, so there is at least some precedent in other softwares when using the term. Baking in the details created from the Contour Tool to the actual model does make some logical sense here.

That said, there might be a more suitable name for it. Personally I think the operator has a lot in common with Expand Stroke, so maybe rename it to "Expand Shape/Contour" instead as a way to explain both features?

Ah, I didn't know that. But still if you never used 3D software you don't really know what the result will be of baking. Not easy to find a vector-friendly term. It would be great to use the same term where it is possible, but expand ... hm hm. 

This is UX territory. Fx determining and harmonizing terms in all three apps based on what users expect or understand. Our "IMO" are not worth much.

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BTW bake actually 'expands' the shape (if size is positive). The original shape is then lost. So the term is actually fitting 🤭

I would prefer an 'add as layer' option - possibly selected as default. User choice then remembered.

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  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
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Baking is the name of the process about saving information related to a 3D mesh into a texture file (bitmap). Most of the time this process involve another mesh. In this case the information of the first mesh are transferred onto the second mesh UVs and then saved into a texture.

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Texture baking is the process of transferring details from one model to another. The baking tool starts a certain distance out from the model (usually a low-resolution model for game use), and casts rays inwards towards another model (usually a high-resolution sculpt).11. dec. 2018

Quote
What does Baking do in blender?
Baking, in general, is the act of pre-computing something in order to speed up some other process later down the line. Rendering from scratch takes a lot of time depending on the options you choose. Therefore, Blender allows you to “bake” some parts of the render ahead of time, for select objects.
Quote

Baking is a term that is used widely in the 3D community. It is a term that can be applied to many different processes. What it generally means is, freezing and recording the result of a computer process. It is used in everything from animations, to simulations, to texturing 3d models and much more. The process of calculating light and shadows is extremely intensive for the computer. Luckily an environment tends to be static so we can calculate the lights and shadows and bake them into the geometry. 

So, kind of okay term, kind of not.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
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  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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On 9/28/2020 at 3:12 AM, Jowday said:

"Bake appearance" shouldn't be active/clickable when there is nothing to bake - that goes for the corner tool as well. And more (rasterize on just rasterized layer, expand stroke on a bitmap based brush etc.)

The term bake is also ... not a great choice - and it makes me hungry. "Finalize" or something more logic in a software program would make more sense.

If everything was ‘free’ it would already be there. It’s not that you’re saying something nobody thought of - it’s that for the simple case it works fine, but it doesn’t scale... with a large selection, do you really want the UI to slow down because it’s establishing if any of the items in the selection has a contour, or one of the nodes in the curves has a corner radius just so it can light up a button? It’s this kind of thing - that’s not ‘necessary’, just ‘nice’ that leads to slowdowns. I don’t want us to get slower for something that doesn’t matter most of the time. If I’ve got a contour on my object, I can see the bounding box doesn’t match the visible area. Clicking the button produces a change and I can see it did it. If you press the button and there was no work to do it does not make a change so it just doesn’t matter. Same with corners.

Regarding ‘baking’ - well I’m sorry if it makes people hungry 😋 but I thought the term was quite nice and it has been there years in the corner took. If it’s because you’d like it to be more specific (‘bake contour’, ‘bake corners’) then I agree (versus ‘bake appearance’) which again was done simply so the string could be shared across many common actions - reducing translation overhead and resource size.

Whether you or anyone else sees the ‘method’ on our apparent madness, it’s worth asking about on the forums for a sanity check, but don’t assume the worst from the start - innocent until proven guilty and all that ;) 

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3 hours ago, MattP said:

If it’s because you’d like it to be more specific (‘bake contour’, ‘bake corners’) then I agree (versus ‘bake appearance’) which again was done simply so the string could be shared across many common actions - reducing translation overhead and resource size.

The bake button of Corner Tool and Contour Tool actually invoke Convert To Curves, which will "bake" corners and contour when applied to an object with both corners and contour, so it is better now that the buttons share the one label.

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Matt, thanks for the explanation behind the programming efficiency and UI with regard to the Contour tool. Your right of course, once you've used it, it's obvious that a contour has been applied or not. 

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11 hours ago, Jonopen said:

Matt, thanks for the explanation behind the programming efficiency and UI with regard to the Contour tool. Your right of course, once you've used it, it's obvious that a contour has been applied or not. 

Obvious for the experienced users. Then it is also obvious for some that something cannot be converted to curves but still that is disabled often in the menu. When some features are disabled or some not when they have no effect a great and simple usability trick lost its potential.

It is simply bad UI practice best avoided.

And lets repeat the expand stroke example. It is enabled when a bitmap "vector brush" is selected and people come here to ask why nothing happens when they select it. Then they discover - later than late - that the vector brush is not vector at all. Only the path. Perhaps there is a "programming efficiency" explanation behind this but customers just don't care.

It is about taking the end users performance serious as well.

At the university I followed a course (usability and HCI, Human computer interaction) where we discussed similar UI issues that was already old knowledge at the time. The year was 1999 (!!!) so the debate here is silly.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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