Sent an email to OTOY and typed this up (below). Reposting here in case any agree/disagree. IMO OTOY will need a complete overhaul of how to use their product if they want to democratise cinematic rendering. ATM seems like a lot of work to sift through to find out how to solve problems. In other words, from a noobs perspective, otoy makes it unnecessarily hard to find out how to get stuff done. But of course it's early. Hopefully this feedback is useful and they create some better tools.
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Unity for Octane FeedbackAs a unity and octane noob I thought you may like some feedback on the integration. As someone who works in communication and and getting info into other peoples' heads every day, it seems you're making your product difficult to harness by structuring information in a non-learner friendly way.
Your docs are simply not beginner friendly because you rush to list all of your whats instead of chunking your info into segments based upon different types of learners
- i.e.
WHY (does this feature/etc exist/why care)?
WHAT is it?
HOW to use it?
WHAT IF (x happens, or you want to try z)?
For background - see
http://www.4mat.eu/method-learning-styles.aspx (this model is very simple, backed by lots of research, and proven to help people learn more quickly).
Your current documentation is probably great for experienced people but if you want to get unity devs building great stuff, it'd be much more helpful to structure your info in a way that's easier to understand / doesn't assume knowledge and most importantly, contextualises all WHAT information with WHY and HOW information.
Your docs have the WHAT covered. What you lack is the rest. I highly recommend you create a list of common jobs/WHYS that devs want to solve and the ways HOW they can do them using otoy. I know for me this would make learning your software much less painful and much more enjoyable.
For eg, here are what i imagine will be common problems:
how can i make my unity scene look great using octane? what about for AR/VR?
how can i make a game object look great using octane?
how can i make a 2d cinematic animation using octane?
how can i make a 3d cinematic animated object using octane?
Hope you and OTOY can produce some more helpful educational videos/tutorials/docs as your product is powerful but also complex and the current approach will prevent most people (except those who are able to persist and persit) from accessing this sweet software.