3dCodex.com - Critiques and Ideas
Hello everyone,
I'm Mr. Bluesummers, and I've created a new tutorial aggregation site called 3dCodex.com. It's named this way because I want to pay specific attention to browse-directed users (without neglecting search-directed users, of course).
My goal is to maintain a clean, organized, and useful collection of 3dsMax tutorials- preferably the best on the web. No overlays, no pop-ups, no gimmicks. Just tutorials from a clean database. I'm currently using a tag-based system that allows you to hone in on the kind of links you want. Search functionality is pending.
Some friends of mine (avid polycounters) have spoken highly of this community. They said that if I wanted my "shit ripped apart" this was the place to go.
I'd love to hear critiques and ideas for the site. What do you like? What would you change? What do you want to see integrated?
Thanks kindly,
--Mr. B
I'm Mr. Bluesummers, and I've created a new tutorial aggregation site called 3dCodex.com. It's named this way because I want to pay specific attention to browse-directed users (without neglecting search-directed users, of course).
My goal is to maintain a clean, organized, and useful collection of 3dsMax tutorials- preferably the best on the web. No overlays, no pop-ups, no gimmicks. Just tutorials from a clean database. I'm currently using a tag-based system that allows you to hone in on the kind of links you want. Search functionality is pending.
Some friends of mine (avid polycounters) have spoken highly of this community. They said that if I wanted my "shit ripped apart" this was the place to go.
I'd love to hear critiques and ideas for the site. What do you like? What would you change? What do you want to see integrated?
Thanks kindly,
--Mr. B
Replies
nice searching thingy doodle on the left. although lets say i was looking for a tutorial and in my haste i pressed "more results" how do i go back?
i would change "more results" to "next page" and add a "previous page" to balance things out.
Speaking of updates, allow me to transcribe the list of "cool things I'd like to do to the site but need to prioritize":
- Entries, Entries, Entries; more tutorials!
- Add search functionality
- Add a footer with contact info and a feedback button
- Add star ratings system (or just thumbs-up/thumbs-down)
- Add click tracking (i.e. 'number of times viewed' stats)
- Greedy tag matching
- So, in a nutshell, right now the site uses strict tag matching. If you ask for a beginner's lighting tutorial, you won't get an intermediate lighting tutorial. Greedy search will return approximate matches after returning exact matches.
- "Sort By" pulldown in the upper right of the entries panel:
- By Date
- By Popularity (see 'click-tracking' feature)
- By Rating (see 'ratings' feature)
- By Relevance (see 'greedy search' feature)
- Extended Entry View
- I'd like an 'extended view' that lets you see what tags a tutorial has, extra statistics, that kind of thing.
- Report Link
- If you think a link is mistagged, mislabeled, or otherwise crap, you can report it and it'll get thrown back into the bin for re-review (and possible re-tagging).
Do any of these seem like they should be super-high priority?The site does look slick! Good job.
I would say make search functionality high on the priority list. If I were to use this site and wanted to look up normal map tutorials I'd have no option to right now.
I'd love to see this site develop, keep it up!
One quick thing I'd like to see as far as the "submit" section goes.
For the thumbnail link. I think it would be better if there was an "upload thumbnail" that auto resizes the image, instead of a link. Because with the link, Everyones going to have to take an image, crop it to 88x88 px. Then upload it onto their server space and then paste that link into the thumbnail space. I dunno, I can't imagine too many people going through the trouble of all that.
Anyways, again great idea for the site, I really like where its headed, just gotta get enough interest and enough people submitting. Has the potential to be an amazing resource.
The trouble with scaling the image into the 88x88 is if the incomming image isn't 1:1 aspect ratio it'll look revolting. I'll show a preview of the image, and I think letterboxing would be a good option for people who have really off-aspect thumbnails.
Let me explore the image processing library (and FTP UL/DL facilities) and get back to you on this.
However, I've decided to take the easiest road possible and just do a dumb search through all available text. I.E. it won't suggest spelling, it won't search the tutorial text, it'll just look for resources with the desired words in the title or description. Sorry to be so primitive!
P.S. The restructure now makes the site a little faster. It's still the same size (13kb, <1 second to load) but the code-behind is much leaner.
My only suggestion is that when you start building up the number of tutorials you have... it may be helpful to have an option where you can change how many entries are on a single page.
Keep up the good work.
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Source Error:
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http://www.3dcodex.com/?d=3&f=0&s=4&page=0
Hope you can solve the renderhjs mentioned (occures here too when I change any searching parameter). Good luck and keep it up.
>> As part of my cleanup, I'm making the resource submission form much more user friendly. There will be a preview window that shows you exactly what your entry will look like before it goes into the codex. This will embrace the thumbnail preview, letterboxing, and upload features.
Nice idea though, i remember when i was at uni things like this where invaluable.
I'm hoping to have thumbnail resizing done by today. If things go well, I'll also have uploading done. This will provide 2 types of functionality; auto-sizing and hosting. Does this sound like a good direction?
Tonight I want to deploy the new submit page, and check the size of some of my images. The site is already pretty lean (a full page of returned resources is 52kb top to bottom), but some of the background images could be even smaller.
The next thing I'm hearing a lot of is "more tutorials". Does this sound like it's the next big priority? The tool I made to handle insertions (Syringe) has lagged behind in development and will take time to bring up to speed.
Two issues I had.
One was that after I filled out everything including uploading the thumbnails, I would hit submit, then I enter the security code, it would then tell me I failed to upload a thumbnail. Since I know I did upload it, I just said submit again and entered the security code again and this time it submitted properly. That happened both times I submitted a tutorial.
The other thing that would be nice. Is after you successfully submit a tutorial you have an "another?" button. And when you click it it lets you start adding another tutorial, but it does not clear your previous data. So i have to manually clear that out before submitting another one.
Anyways works pretty well besides that! how will I know once you've checked it and added the tutorials submitted to the codex? Maybe allow the submitter to add their e-mail and you could have an e-mail sent out to the submitter once their tutorial has been added?
I got a laugh out of the second issue, because I left the information in there on purpose. I'll make the form clear from now on.
Good idea; I'll include that in there too. It'll be an optional field though; don't want people thinking that they'll get spammed.
Then, I ensured that the fields were reset after every submission.
Finally, you discovered one more bug, but didn't know it. You submitted tutorials without any tags, so I need something to kick back and say "you need at least 1 of each tag type".
Tomorrow night I'll start ramping up Syringe so I can approve and insert the submitted tutorials. This will also help me because now I can just scour the web for tutorials myself and inject the using the same front-end everyone else uses (and then, of course, approve them with all the other submissions later).
I mean for beginer, for exemple some tips for creating texture?
For exemple :
http://samavan.com/3D/Takeshi/PC_Girl_A/samavan_pc_Girl_A_Tutorial_A002.jpg
What do you think about a Photoshop section?
A Photoshop section would be pretty awesome- maybe as a headline item (i.e. 3dsMax, Maya, XSI, Photoshop...).
Cool stuff so far, search would be pretty handy
Yes, it is I. From the very bottom of my heart, I apologize for that project. It was brimming with potential, but with Autodesk threatening to do it, it was a losing proposition. However, I got shafted coming and going since it didn't come out with 2009, and it's not looking like it'll happen in 2010.
If there was a coder out there willing to take it on, I'd be happy to help and provide all of my notes and source code.
I'm glad you like the Codex! Let me know if you have any critiques, or ideas for cool improvements.
Alright boys, I'm looking at this...and I think I'm going to need to do a core rewrite. The current structure is becoming exhausted. I'll make two more changes, and then push out the whole lot (10/20 view, direct insertion, and the "report this" button).
After that I'll sit down with pencil and paper and draw out the final system. You know...model-view-controller style. x__x
While you're looking at that, I'm drawing up how the new system will function.
Cheers!
Alright, you guys can keep track of my progress on http://Beta.3dCodex.com , though it's not functional yet. Please let me know if you have any feature requests or ideas about new directions!
Any thoughts?
Hop I had one!
http://www.3dcodex.com/Default.aspx?&d=1&f=1&s=4&page=1&rpp=10#
---> PC_Girls_AA
But I give a link for some exemple, but it seems too long...
No way to add in you code sommething matching string starting with http:// and replace it per a blolt "link" ... and the url will be hided ^_^
Good point. I bet you could put in HTML tags into the description and it would take over. I should probably put together some rules about that. ^__^
Shrew, if it's not too much trouble, could you restate the changes you'd like to see? I know you're in agreement with the earlier comments, but it'd be nice to get your perspective on those changes as well.
Cheers!
I also added a textbox that contains a URL to the slice of the codex you've filtered for. You an bookmark it, or send it along to someone who needs help.
Take a look at the 3dCodex beta page again, and try clicking through some of the filtering. I still need to put in a "loading" animation, but the latency shouldn't be too bad.
So (making sure I understand this) as I select the different filters (software, difficulty, etc.) it should automatically show the results without hitting a "search" button? Right now every time I select a different filter it gives me this auto-message: ENTRIES REDRAWN AT 4:56:07 PM
Anyways, I like the idea a lot.
oh and one minor thing I thought might make things easier is to make your filters in Alphabetical order.
That and you should add mudbox to the software list.
Correct. Sorry about the auto-message. That's a method stub. Instead of actually doing it's job, it instead "says" that it's done what it's supposed to do. In this case, it's saying "Oh yah, I'm supposed to redraw the tutorials right now". Eventually that'll be replaced with actually redrawing the tutorials.
Done and done. That'll show up the next time I push this to the beta page.
In the meantime, any thoughts on this mockup? I fleshed out the new (slightly wider) regular mode, the expanded mode, and the compressed mode.
In the expanded mode, I'll include the ability to leave comments. Please tell me how you think things work if you're faced with this page? Is it clear what the buttons do? Would you feel comfortable using this interface?