Collected manual notes, requests for documentation

[tngreene]

I have received many useful e-mails from one of our users @arb65912

Here is a summery of requests

Materials

• What will be exported (diffuse color, intensity, specular intensity, emit value)
  • Covered implicitly in materials section (only these ones)
  • should explicitly say "These things have changed"
• Use of Draw setting in material
  • Covered as setting
  • No example for its purpose
• Draped setting
  • Covered as setting
  • Example needed?
• Manipulators
  • Need examples for a few manipulators
  • Link to cleaned developer blog post?
• Override specularity
  • Applications for PBR
• Use alpha cutoff
  • Needs Examples
• Surface type
  • Covered as setting
  • Need explanation between visual (what it looks like) and what this does
• Camera collision
  • Covered as setting
  • Example of how to use it
• Override light level
  • covered as setting
  • Include example with glowing buttons?
• Night texture preview
  • Covered description
• Tint
  • Covered as setting
  • Need explaination and definition of words like albedo, emissiveness
• Part Of Cockpit Panel
  • Covered as setting
  • Need connection between these and plane maker
• Custom Properties
  • Covered as setting
  • Example of how this will get used in X-Plane
  • Understanding of what "reset" is and why it is important to OBJ
• Weight
  • Covered as setting
  • Needs understanding of how it gets written in OBJ and how that affects X-Plane 11
• Conditions
  • Covered as setting
  • Needs better explanation and example of use
• How does the material-per-layer vs material-per-object work? (hint this is a misconception. Don't look at this bug and assume this is a thing future onlookers. Okay?)

[tngreene]

Textures

• Need basic tutorial for how to set the basic 3 textures, Default, Night, Normal/Specular
  • Glossary For these words
  • How they affect PBR
• Getting a live preview for in-game textures
  • What is the state of this feature, and its future?
• How does textures-per-material-per-layer work vs textures per-material-per-object work? (hint this is a misconception. Don't look at this bug and assume this is a thing future onlookers. Okay?)
• Better guide to render baking

[tngreene]

OBJ/Exporter Questions

• How, in broad terms, does the OBJ file spec work?
• What are relative paths?
  • Covered briefly with layer names
• Where are log files?
• How do you find text errors?
• Better explanation of how datarefs are used to interpolate between two values, since that is a common theme in the exporter and in X-Plane

Layers

• Will Optimize Change geometry?
  • Covered in Settings description
• LODs
  • Covered in settings, missing less than, greater than information correctly explained
  • Explanation for why you would want 4 LOD bins and how that would work

[tngreene]

Animations

• Detailed explanation of dataref driven development (see above)
• Remove all references to loc/rot/locrot
• Bone animation needs major explaination
• Resolve "rotations along an arbitrary axis can look flipped" section in previous manual. What was it talking about?
• Details about show/hide
• Some animations example, such as an animated rudder (thanks include example of animated rudder in docs #119 )

[tngreene]

• Should also mention that it may appear Blender is frozen or your OS is not even responding, but exporting lots of verticies just takes time.