Quote - I have actually produced a bit of a spec about controls for some other application. I'd like to share it here. Please don't make the same mistake as they did for Carrara where they have sliders with a range from 0 to 1 and don't provide the capability to set negative values or values greater than one with the slider (which do often make sense).

Not a problem there, the only "limitation" set on the controls are those specified by the artist, unless the figure creator intentionally limits the control it will allow for negative or positive values-

Quote -
Viewing the value of a control as a displayed value between 0 and 1 (with however many decimals) or 0 and 100 (as a percentage) isn’t really helpful when the real meaning is for instance a door where the value in degrees varies between 0 (completely closed) and 90 (fully open). Many other examples could be provided with varying values and meanings. In general it would be better to display the value in a meaningful way, as varying with a specific resolution between a minimum and a maximum value and possibly with specific texts if only specific discreet values are valid. This of course only provides a means of displaying a very specific value and does not provide any indication of the relationship between the actual value and the valid range of values (which would probably best be indicated with some form of slider).

Well, allowing a control to display either a percentage or an angle measurement I think would be easy enough, the difficulty would be in trying to do additional scales like feet, inches, meters, etc. 

I'll see what I can come up with, no gaurantees that would make the first release but it might be worth playing with just to see what I can come up with :) > Quote -

Just a suggestion about controls in 3D applications. In the text were also suggestions for combining two values to form controls in the shape of "squares" (two sliders) and "balls" (two dials), nudging required the use of the shift and alt keys. These have their applications but are probably not in scope for this project.

The controls I had in mind initially are like the 3ds max controls, a text box that you can type values into and two arrows (up and down) that allow you to increment or decrement the value and watch in real time the results.  I'll do a bit of playing around though and see if I can't possibly use these controls in conjuction with a more traditional style "dial" control as well. 

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...