1.6.1 Wings 3D Manual available

[LoTekK]

All the font sample links give me "file not found" pages. :( Just wanted to say, though, great work on the manual. Extremely helpful. :thumbsup:

[jmcalpin]

Fixed

Jay

[LoTekK]

Cool. Personally, I think I'm leaning towards the third link (can't figure out which font that's in). Georgia comes a close second, with Verdana not really doing it for me in this case.

[jmcalpin]

that is eurostyle. Georgia is supposed to be easier to read. Verdana was designed to be easily read on the screen.

thanks

Jason

[Fuzatron]

On first look Georgia looked best to me as far as readability. But then I viewed them at different zoom levels and verdana seemed to look better at most levels of zoom.... Eurostyle does look best, but is not as easy on the eyes for something that will be read as much as a manual.

Thanks for taking on such a monsterous task :eek:

[nervous_twitch]

I'm liking Georgia.

[jmcalpin]

cool so we got 1 for each?!? we need some people to vote to help me out. Wish I had made this a pole.

Jay

[JDex]

This should'a had a poll at the top jmcalpin...

Great work btw, wish I'd had this handy 6 months ago...

VERDANA is my vote... :)

[9rin]

put one mark for verdana :)

[takayuki]

Jason,

Just got the manual. It's great. Thanks!

It's 10x better than the IE Modeler manual I'd been using...

Verdana looks good.

takayuki

[negative9]

First I'd just like to say the manual is outstanding, awesome, a feat well tackeled! Great work to all those envolved.

I looked through it, and found one mistype (I think), but looking through it a second time I cound find what I seen. It had to do with switching the diffenitions of EDGE LOOP, and EDGE RING...although I thought it was worded wrong as well... something like...EDGE POLE? I could be wrong, or it could have already been fixed.

Font VOTE: "VERDANA"

Some WISHLIST items for the manual:
- Hotkeys broken down to cover just a single page. Not that what was done isn't effective, but I really like what was posted here: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69031

- More tutorials. I know this takes more people writing tutorials, but also how about formating slighly different - like 3d World tutorials (grided out in steps)? Just a Thought.

I'm sure I'll have more, but right now I'm just blown away by what is there. Again - Great work all!

//negative9//

[jmcalpin]

I'll try to get a 1 page shortcut key list in but the one in the manual is ment to be an extensive list for all keys.

I was thinking about a tutorial that uses some more of the current tools.

Please if anyone else has any wishes let me know as we are putting together everything we need for the 1.0 Wings Manual.

Mean while I am doing more work on temporary manuals.


jason

[negative9]

How about some to the tutorials from the wings site

http://www.wings3d.com/tutorials.php

Especially the "Filling a hole".

I like the ways to make Wine Glasses too.

Okay..I know the Dog house is in the manual, and I may have looked over the above.

//negative9//

[jmcalpin]

here are some roughs for the 1.7.1 manual. Still a WIP but I though I'd post these here so people can let me know their thoughts. the specs for the recomended systems are really rough. I will be working on this over the weekend so I'll post some updates, and any corrections for them on sunday/monday

(These are webpages not pdfs)

Jay


section 1: getting started (http://www.byjason.com/w3d/ch-01/gettingstarted.htm)


file menu (http://www.byjason.com/w3d/filemenu/filemenu.htm)



edit menu (http://www.byjason.com/w3d/editmenu/editmenu.htm)

[chikega]

Georgia is on my mind!

[MuddCellGuitar]

Once it is all done will it be in a downloaddable PDF?

[jmcalpin]

Yes it will be a pdf that will be laid out for the screen. That way you won't have to scroll around to read it and will have bookmarks added for easier jumping around.

Everything has slowed down a little. Kind of hard to hit a moving target. Bjorn has updates coming out every weekend so it is hard to keep up.

Jason

[negative9]

...you had decided to work on manuals only for stable releases?; like...98.10e?

Also, a font ever decided on?

//negative9//

[jmcalpin]

Yes we are now going from sable to stable release. I mean that it is discuraging to see the software go from some minor changes to radical ones. So it puts a damper on things because my plan to update the few changes to the existing bookfor the next release will become rewriting chunks of it. Don't worry I am still committed to getting updates out.

I am using verdana for the main text and switching to impact, ariel black etc for titles. Since we will also have a open office and open doc version available I will need to use fonts that are commonly available for everyone.

I personally love eurostyle so i may use it for a little longer in the 1.x series of manuals until the 2.x versions comes out.

Jason

[activemotionpictures]

Ms will be stealing it already ;)

[Geta-Ve]

i dont know if you have fixed it or what not, but the part where you write all the primitives that wings can create you have

First Row
Second Row blah blah Third Row

like the first and second row words are bold and aligned but the third row sentence is not..

[Geta-Ve]

also, in 5.6 refrence for hotkeys you should have horizontal lines seperating the columns as well as vertical lines seperating the rows.. because the way it is now wit just the row lines it makes it hard to accuratly read the columns, like if there is too much info in one hotkey.. you know?

[Geta-Ve]

hey, ok page 107,

look at "segment by feature detection", half of that is on the left half on the right, thats fine, but once you get down to "quick tip: updating the uv maps after edits to the mesh", there is so much that it has to continue on the right side RIGHT UNDER the rest of the segmenting part, which makes it very confusing to the reader, because he will have maybe skipped segmenting and just read updating uv maps blah blah and then he continues to read the rest on the right and finds you not talking about that...

it happend to me and for a few minutes i didnt realize what you had done.. you need to change that somehow.. its just too confusing that way.. you know? maybe a line or something?

anyways hope you understood what i meant, if now just goto that page and read i think you will understand then :D



EDIT: ok i just decided ill edit my post since no one else is posting here and it is basically spamming... anyhoo, you gotta change the forum name in the links section, it is no longer wings warm and fuzzy, its wings official development forum or something like that, cheers!:thumbsup:

[sketchyjay]

okay,

Thanks.

I'll check into making that change when we edit that section.

jay

[tredeger]

I'm just starting with Wings and am grateful not only for the enthusiasm that is put into it's development but also the care that is given to the equally important issue of manuals.

In using the manual to get up to speed, the most difficult thing I encountered was the fact that (unless I overlooked a paragraph or some such), there was no immediate explanation as to how one orbit, pans, dollys the camera. I finally noticed the middle mouse button starts a camera and was able to proceed. But this wasn't covered in the manual, so far as I saw. Deep apologies if I'm wrong.

[Phrenzy84]

im a maya user by default and gotta say its brilliant what the wings community have come up with. Really digging wings at the moment, still getting used to it, im maya i got all sorts of quick short cuts to get though things, custom marking menus, hotkeys etc. But really liking how wings works.

I hate reading from long pdf's and i liked the manual soo much, though why not i have the paper and the ink why not print it, so i did, all 131 pages of the thing, got it in a binde to keep it clean etc.

[pertm]

This is great. I think I have to print the manual soon because reading it on my PC while using Wings is not easy.

[dgud]

I finally noticed the middle mouse button starts a camera and was able to proceed. But this wasn't covered in the manual, so far as I saw. Deep apologies if I'm wrong.
I'm not involved in the manual, also the manual havn't been updated in the last years, but it might depend on that wings have several different ways of using the camera.
By changing the camera mode and number of mouse buttons in the preferences you get different behaviour. You should always read the information line at the bottom of wings window, there you will have a description of almost everything you can do at each moment.

[Samo]

Please make a bittorrent of PDF manual. Downloading performance is really poor.

[Optigon-cg]

The Wings3d user guide seems to be offline, or the link is bad. I tried the link at the beginning of this thread and at the wings3d website. Neither one is working atm.

Does anyone know where I can find a working link to the pdf? I'm anxious to start using Wings as part of my pipeline. Seems pretty easy to figure out. But I'd love to find the manual.

Thanks

[edit] sorry. Nevermind,... turned out to be a problem with my Acrobat settings.

[el-douglas]

try http://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wings/wings3d_manual1.6.1.pdf it worked for me... ;)

[Kalasfixaren]

try http://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wings/wings3d_manual1.6.1.pdf it worked for me... ;)

thanks douglas!