Gallery Suggestions.

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BantyMom
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Re: Gallery Suggestions.

Post by BantyMom » Sun Jul 25, 2010 11:08 am

I'm new here, really new, so new that I can't even get Indigo to work yet, so perhaps what I have to say won't mean much. However, I suspect that when new people come here, one of the first places they might visit is the Gallery, so seeing it through the eyes of a lowly newbie might be useful.

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.
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)
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.

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.
Godzilla wrote: Second, three new categories: Nature, Technical, and Furniture. And I personally think you should consider removing the Fantasy category.
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: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.
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.

Again, a suggested compromise: Remove filenames in a special "Best of Indigo" gallery, though I think a good title might be allowed.

Godzilla wrote:Fourth, you guys (Ono and benn, or course :wink: ) 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 agree, very sensible suggestion.
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?
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: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.
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.

"Best of Indigo," of course, must be held to a higher standard.
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 agree.
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.
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.

with respect,
BantyMom
[b][color=blue][i]Old girl trying to learn new tricks - needs lots of help.[/i][/color]
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[i]"If the world were logical, men would ride side-saddle." -Rita Mae Brown[/i]

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Godzilla
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Re: Gallery Suggestions.

Post by Godzilla » Sun Jul 25, 2010 2:45 pm

Thanks for the reply Banty.
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 agree with you completely (And admittedly that was a poor example I originally posted). 'Plain' was not really what I intended to say.. a better phrase would be 'poorly formatted'. I dislike how each preview image is a different size and shape, it would be more aesthetically pleasing and cleaner-looking if there was a standardized look to the gallery, such as this example I posted on the previous page. (Click the second 'view demo' button)
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.
I think my original motivation to suggest removing the fantasy category was that most of the images in that section shouldn't really be classified 'fantasy', such as - 1, 2, 3. I guess my postition has changed from 'remove fantasy' to 'remove the incorrectly categorized images from fantasy'. And I suggested nature because at the time of the original posting (very nearly a year ago) it was not yet a 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.
If standard-sized image crops were used as thumbnails (such as in the example I posted earlier), instead of re-sized versions of the full image, you would be able to tell what the image was by looking at the image. It's just my personal preference that there be no text on the thumbnail page because I feel it helps maintain a cleaner and simpler look. There could of course be text in a detail box once you actually click on an image, though, for adding information about the render. Also, standard-sized thumbnails would be extremely easy to implement if the Indigo team added another upload field titled something like 'Thumbnail - 200x100', and if the uploaded thumbnail was not that resolution, it would be rejected.
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.
Looking back, I don't know why I suggested this :lol: . I now feel that a rating system would be a just plain bad idea and would add unnecessary clutter to the gallery as well as an unneeded feature.
If the site admins view each image before allowing it to be posted (see Godzilla's previous suggestion), that would take care of this.
This would be the simplest solution.
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.
I guess this aspect just comes down to opinion. I feel that the gallery should be slimmed down quite a bit and showcase only the best images, instead of every image, like I said here-
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.
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.
I was not intending the 'Best of Evermotion' forum be used as an example for how to showcase the images, but rather an example of the quality standards I believe the renders in the Indigo gallery should be held to.
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Soup
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Re: Gallery Suggestions.

Post by Soup » Sun Jul 25, 2010 7:58 pm

Boom! I'll wade through those suggestions/ that discussion when I have an hour to spare :lol:
I think Fused is looking at the site next week, perhaps it's time we dove into the gallery.
The least I want to do is align it properly :roll:

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Godzilla
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Re: Gallery Suggestions.

Post by Godzilla » Mon Jul 26, 2010 5:54 am

Banty and I are just discussing my previously posted suggestions.. I don't think you have to read through all of that.
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