And I am not picking on Godzilla. It only looks that way because he made the most suggestions, giving me the most to respond to.
I am not sure that plain is always a bad thing. I really liked the gallery when I first looked at it exactly because it is plain and simple. Plain allows the images to be the most important thing on the page. It is the images that I've gone to look at, not the background. I thought the way the admins had chosen to set it up was a breath of fresh air in a world that is becoming more and more bogged down in what is fancy.Godzilla wrote:First, The current gallery seems kind of plain. Perhaps some kind of flash/widget to make it more interesting/ organized? (Something like dA's portfolios http://samlavoie.daportfolio.com/gallery/93525)
Please remember also that not everyone lives in an area that provides a fast internet connection. Flash and other fancy bells and whistles slow things down and can be limiting in the way a person is allowed to navigate the images. When I view the gallery, I am looking for examples of something. I don't want to wade through every picture one at a time in a predefined order.
I went to the suggested link. I don't like the tiny tiny thumbnails and the time I have to wait to view something bigger. In fact, there is a pretty interior scene there that I almost didn't even bother to look at because I could hardly tell what it was, but because it happened to be the first thing, it came up anyway while I was looking at the other thumbs. For me, I like being able to view the entire page at once.
Possible compromise: "The Best of Indigo" might be made into a fancy gallery, a collection of images to drool over, leaving the others plain and easy to navigate.
I really like the idea of adding the new categories, but why remove Fantasy? True, those things aren't my cup of tea (I went there looking for dragons!), but would they fit in another category? If you want it removed because there is only room for two more categories and you want to add three, no worries; Nature is already a category, so you would only need to add Furniture and Technical.Godzilla wrote: Second, three new categories: Nature, Technical, and Furniture. And I personally think you should consider removing the Fantasy category.
Yes, you can view the file name by mousing over the image, but that means if you actually want to know what they are, you have to mouse over all of them. Yes, most of the time the names are useless, but sometimes they are descriptive, and to know which are which, you would have to mouse over every image. I find it more useful to just be able to view everything at a glance to decide if I want to look at something more closely or just go on to the next page.Godzilla wrote:Third, no titles. You can view the file name when you click on the picture, random text like "stilllife06half" or "snare30hrsB" floating above the picture is just distracting and unappealing, to be honest.
Again, a suggested compromise: Remove filenames in a special "Best of Indigo" gallery, though I think a good title might be allowed.
I agree, very sensible suggestion.Godzilla wrote:Fourth, you guys (Ono and benn, or course ) should have to approve and sort each picture before it is view-able, currently (or at least the last time I checked), there is no monitoring, so somebody could easily fill the gallery with porn or distasteful images. Also, if you guys had to sort each image, you would be able to keep the "Best of Indigo" regularly updated with new images demonstrating what Indigo is capable of.
I think this would be grand for the "Best of Indigo" category. For the others, however, I'm not sure you would like the unintended consequences. With a rating system determining order, the newest images would always be last because they would always have the fewest votes because, of course, they are new, and being last, no one would know they were there to view and vote upon... You see the vicious cycle? Tinkering with it, by, say, putting new images in a special place for a predetermined amount of time just makes more work for the admins and would fix the problem as much as deferents and epicycles solved the problem of explaining planetary orbits. Displaying the images in descending order of posting is more useful as newer images would always be the first seen, and going from page to page would take you back in time over the development and growth of Indigo itself as well as the artists.Godzilla wrote:Integrate a rating system into the gallery and make it so that the images are sorted from highest rating to lowest rating, and the top-rated image in each category is the thumbnail for that category?
If the site admins view each image before allowing it to be posted (see Godzilla's previous suggestion), that would take care of this. I looked at the images recommended for deletion and found most of them to be interesting to me, giving me an idea of things that might be possible. I don't even care about the text on the image (though if it is really bothersome, one of the criteria could be that text be removed before the image is submitted). Then it comes to who decides? Perhaps there is an image that no one really things is spectacular that shows one thing or another in particular. Also, if the images are arranged reverse chronologically, you can see the growth of the program and of the users.Godzilla wrote:Also, you guys really should do some quality control with the gallery, there are quite a few sub-par (or just biased-looking) renders in there you should get rid of... The gallery should really only have renders that represent Indigo in a positive way.
"Best of Indigo," of course, must be held to a higher standard.
I agree.dougal2 wrote:Once upon a time images were added to the gallery to show off what indigo could do at that particular time. Indeed many images still show very nicely individual indigo features in a clear and simple way... While times have changed - computers are faster, images are cleaner, indigo has developed features that some time ago had to be 'faked' - many images still represent an artistic quality that can be achieved with the software... I was a little taken aback to see my neon sign in your 'kill list' to be honest. Sure, it's noisy - I think the noisy part makes it feel more like a photo taken in low-light conditions and had the render been fully converged it would look like a bad scan-line rendering. In fact, the point of the render was to demonstrate a neon-tube construction and a colouring of emission that was not easy to achieve in earlier versions of indigo. Yes, it's simple, and a semi-demo scene but that makes it no less of a piece of art.
I went to the Evermotion site. The thread cited and the individual portfolios are not easy to navigate, you have to wait for each and every image, and it is slow (and dear dear Indigo team, thank you so much for keeping the skinning of this site so simple, light, and airy!!!) However, I agree that "The Best of Indigo" should contain only those images determined by some large committee to be far and away superior. Leaving the other galleries as they are would not diminish that. Perhaps the "Best of Indigo" should even be moved to a separate page and given all the special treatment it deserves.Godzilla wrote:I guess one way to put it is that the gallery should be treated by the Indigo team as the 'Best of Evermotion' is treated by the Evermotion team. They only award work that is in the top 0.1% (Quality-wise), or even higher. In 4 years, only 58 pieces have been given this award (Out of the 25,000+ projects posted on their forums since 2006). Other works posted on the site are very good, but not quite good enough receive the award... Just as some works posted in the gallery are nice, but I wouldn't consider them good enough to be used to represent Indigo. If I ever hear of a new renderer, the first thing I do to get a feeling for the quality of the renderer is look in the gallery. I did this the first time I ever heard about Vray, Indigo, Fryrender, Maxwell, Octane etc... And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
So basically, I feel the gallery should stop being treated as a photo gallery for all renders done in Indigo (That's what the forum is for ), and should only be used to show off the top 5% of renders done in Indigo.
with respect,
BantyMom