I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender. How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender! The 2.49b to 2.5x upgrade was insane, after getting into the flow, I can no longer go back. If I go back, I can only do stuff that is shortcuttet, but the fact that spacebar search is not up there makes it really really lacking. Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed. Most shortcuts are placed to sane defaults, along with that
Your first problem is the default WM problem, which can be solved after digging down into a option menu somewhere and change alt modifier to super instead. I disagree about your second point: It would waist space, and ruin the initial workflow learning. When you are learning blender as a 3D newb, how hard is it to aknowledge that grab is set to G, scale to S, rotate to R and extrude to E? Add on that you got plane locking on Z, X and Y, which coincidently are on the names of the axis. Besides that, and the
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't cl
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the
I agree about the help system lacking, that one annoys me. I disagree about using UI conventions being a good thing when using a poweruser app, as it would slow me down. I also agree the view is a complete mess, however I doubt any of the competive apps are any better. At the best they might have a few useless wizards more, to hide the mess. The mess is still present, so the point is a bit moot.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was inni
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably
Change the window manager? Seriously? I am not reconfiguring my entire window manager (of which almost all my meta keys are bound to shortcuts of some kind) just so ONE application can work properly. Blender (which is mostly used in linux anyways) needs to seriously look at what the default and most common hotkey configurations are before blindly overriding the most well known and trusted window manager hotkeys in the linux world (aside the basic alt+F# keys of course).
Worry not, they plan to have a new default keymap [blender.org] by the time the final version of 2.5 is released (i.e. by the time 2.6 is released) and that will have ctrl-z as the default for undo. I'm not entirely sure why it hasn't been done yet. I've seen some talk on the blender.devel list about issues with the configuration system, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's still on the TODO [blender.org], though, so for now I still have faith that the new keymap will be included in this release.
Large professional user level applications do not follow standard desktop UI conventions in general. They expect their users to be knowledgeable and proficient in what they are trying to achieve. They do this for a reason, when you know what you are doing, you don't want bloody great big undo/redo buttons, or any other useless crap casual users moan about, taking up valuable realestate.
Just because Blender is OSS these days, doesn't mean is was designed for newbs to play around with. Go and check out all pr
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way.
As I (and others) have said time [slashdot.org] and time [slashdot.org] again, Blender is *not* more difficult to use than any other full-blown 3D Toolkit.
Tools like SketchUp show that user interfaces in 3D building tools don't have to suck as badly as Blender. The fact that Maya and tons of other tools are equally obscure doesn't change that.
SketchUp is horribly frustrating and impossible to use for anything serious- IF you actually know how to model. If you don't, I can see why you'd think it is great. Thing is, blender is made for those who are serious, not those who want to model "just because."
Yeah, Blender is good for "people who know how to model"--people who don't know shit about 3D geometry but have spent so much time in 3D modeling programs with poorly thought out user interfaces that they think this is the way things need to be.
SketchUp has tons of limitations unrelated to its UI, but at least it breaks out of the rut that so-called "professional" tools seem to be in.
I haven't dealt with blender or any other 3D packages much in about 2 years. Prior to that I spent a lot of time around Lightwave from 1998 - 2005 and Blender from circa 2000 - 2007 and then went back to Lightwave even for the hobby work I do on the side because I didn't have the time to relearn Blender every few months when I had time to do 3D work. I'd much rather spend my time creating rather than relearning the program.
Here are my problems with Blender:
1) The interface changes too often. It seems like just as I got used to the layout and where everything was in the UI, a new release would come along and suddenly everything changed. This seemed to be happening about every 6 months to a year. The basic interface for Lightwave hasn't changed that much from when I began with Lightwave 5.6 to Lightwave 9. Hell, I didn't even use Lightwave for a couple years and was able to pick up the latest version (9 at the time) again in just a couple days. Recently I downloaded Blender 2.5 and it was like having to relearn the entire application. I loaded some of my old files and found all the careful particle animations I had no longer work on the new version.
2) It could take days to reproduce the same quality of results with Blender that I could produce in minutes to a couple hours with Lightwave. Especially with lighting. I could get better results in Lightwave than Blender in half the time.
3) Functionality suddenly breaking. I had a lot of Lightwave Models. In the 2.2/2.3 versions prior to 2.37(?) they had a LWO importer that worked extremely well for importing meshes including textures. The last couple versions I used, the feature was broken. I would have to keep an old version of blender around to import models, save as a.blend, then import those files into the lastest version of blender. It was a PITA especially when I have 3 - 4 hours on the weekend to work on 3D stuff. I know there are new and better formats these days, but back then this was a problem.
1) This is mostly because Blender is undergoing a complete UI rewrite. Lightwave is undergoing the same for the version after 9. It was a mature application from 5.6->9. This is similar to the Power Animator -> Maya transition or SoftImage -> XSI transition.
2) This would depend quite heavily on what kind of lighting effect you were trying to achieve without knowing what specific lighting techniques you were trying to use it's really hard to quantify this. Certainly Light wave probably does have som
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Seems fine to me, you don't have to put capitals on every proper noun, very old hat in this day and age. Usually I only put capitals on proper nouns in relation to people or persons names or places, for a general language (not a place as in this case) I don't think capitals are needed.
It's not *every* proper noun! In this instance it is about nouns that are languages, a *tiny* subset of proper nouns! Of course *you* can do whatever you want, but, that doesn't make it grammatically correct. Without the comment about how great your English is, I wouldn't have bothered anyway...
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing.
Ditto here. I was happy with kpovmodeller, but that was dropped from Ubuntu, and although it could be manually installed, it no longer worked with Ubuntu. The chat rooms and forums all suggested using Blender instead, so I tried it. Man, talk about a steep learning curve!
"For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions."
Like, ctrl+z and ctrl+shift+z? Those are rather standard UI conventions. That you need a button over using a standard set of key combination shows you probably haven't actually tried to use the program that deeply.
I would have once agreed with you that blender is difficult, but you need to realize that if you want to be a serious user of a serious program, yo
As a dyed-in-the-wool Blender user, I find the new interface frustrating too -- but mostly because I learned on the pre-2.5 interface, and there's a lot that doesn't carry over. For a starting user, though, I'd think that 2.5 would be pretty simple, seeing as you can press the spacebar and then search in real time for the functionality you're looking for.want to extrude something? type "extrude" and there it is! Typing "knife" gets you the knife tool. It's practically like playing Scribblenauts.
blender has a very steep learning curve, similar to it's commercial counterparts like maya, modo, lightwave, to name a few. yes the UI has some failings, but if you've seen the UI for other 3D apps, it's not too far from the competition... eventually you'll get the hang of where most of what you needs is located, you can always refer to a book such as this as a desk reference. as an aside, i think that several 3d apps have a tendency to violate current UI conventions due to their lineage in X11 unix apps wh
To some extent, I agree with you, but honestly, it's sort of a "once you get it, you never go back" sort of thing.
I guess it may seem "unintuitive" at first, but really it's all about learning the shortcuts and practicing. Once you know them, modeling in Blender is faster and more satisfying than any other modeling program that I've tried.
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those (and others
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those
Actually, it often is. As Henry Petroski lays out in the book "Small Things Considered", there is no such thing as a perfect design. All things are a compromise to some extent between various constraints and a software UI is no exception. Discoverability is great for a newbie -- it put buttons and features in front of him where he can stumble upon them when he needs them. To an expert, this is an intrusion, a waste of space that could be better used for conveying information or something else useful
IF you tell me you find Maya and Lightwave to be incredibly easy and intuitive, I'm going to ship a midget with a Giant Mackerel to smack you with. Every single 3d EFX and CG program I have ever used is convoluted at best, a sheer clif of a learning curve at worst.
I found Lightwave/Modo to be incredibly easy to pick up from scratch and do amazing things with.
Maya was a bit more tricky though, a lot of the default interface isn't immediately intuitive until you read through it a bit.
No other major piece of graphics software that I can think of wastes space that kind of thing. The same goes for copy and paste. Blender uses standard keyboard shortcuts for those and has a complete built in undo menu.
"Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them
seemed to come from Texas."
- Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale"
frustrating (Score:2)
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
Re: (Score:1)
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender.
How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender!
The 2.49b to 2.5x upgrade was insane, after getting into the flow, I can no longer go back. If I go back, I can only do stuff that is shortcuttet, but the fact that spacebar search is not up there makes it really really lacking.
Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed. Most shortcuts are placed to sane defaults, along with that
Re: (Score:2)
How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender!
Doesn't work in 2.55 beta on Linux. Blender also needs Alt-click with no substitute.
Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed.
But they are needed by beginners, so that they don't have to worry about shortcuts at the same time they have to worry about everything else.
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender.
A menu bar, a few optional toolbars, a context sensitive menu
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Your first problem is the default WM problem, which can be solved after digging down into a option menu somewhere and change alt modifier to super instead.
I disagree about your second point: It would waist space, and ruin the initial workflow learning. When you are learning blender as a 3D newb, how hard is it to aknowledge that grab is set to G, scale to S, rotate to R and extrude to E? Add on that you got plane locking on Z, X and Y, which coincidently are on the names of the axis. Besides that, and the
Re: (Score:2)
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't cl
Re: (Score:2)
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the
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I agree about the help system lacking, that one annoys me. I disagree about using UI conventions being a good thing when using a poweruser app, as it would slow me down.
I also agree the view is a complete mess, however I doubt any of the competive apps are any better. At the best they might have a few useless wizards more, to hide the mess. The mess is still present, so the point is a bit moot.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was inni
Re: (Score:2)
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Worry not, they plan to have a new default keymap [blender.org] by the time the final version of 2.5 is released (i.e. by the time 2.6 is released) and that will have ctrl-z as the default for undo. I'm not entirely sure why it hasn't been done yet. I've seen some talk on the blender.devel list about issues with the configuration system, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's still on the TODO [blender.org], though, so for now I still have faith that the new keymap will be included in this release.
Does anybody else think i
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Large professional user level applications do not follow standard desktop UI conventions in general. They expect their users to be knowledgeable and proficient in what they are trying to achieve. They do this for a reason, when you know what you are doing, you don't want bloody great big undo/redo buttons, or any other useless crap casual users moan about, taking up valuable realestate.
Just because Blender is OSS these days, doesn't mean is was designed for newbs to play around with. Go and check out all pr
AWGTGTATA (Score:4, Insightful)
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way.
As I (and others) have said time [slashdot.org] and time [slashdot.org] again, Blender is *not* more difficult to use than any other full-blown 3D Toolkit.
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Tools like SketchUp show that user interfaces in 3D building tools don't have to suck as badly as Blender. The fact that Maya and tons of other tools are equally obscure doesn't change that.
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SketchUp is horribly frustrating and impossible to use for anything serious- IF you actually know how to model. If you don't, I can see why you'd think it is great. Thing is, blender is made for those who are serious, not those who want to model "just because."
Re: (Score:0)
Yeah, Blender is good for "people who know how to model"--people who don't know shit about 3D geometry but have spent so much time in 3D modeling programs with poorly thought out user interfaces that they think this is the way things need to be.
SketchUp has tons of limitations unrelated to its UI, but at least it breaks out of the rut that so-called "professional" tools seem to be in.
Re:AWGTGTATA (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't dealt with blender or any other 3D packages much in about 2 years. Prior to that I spent a lot of time around Lightwave from 1998 - 2005 and Blender from circa 2000 - 2007 and then went back to Lightwave even for the hobby work I do on the side because I didn't have the time to relearn Blender every few months when I had time to do 3D work. I'd much rather spend my time creating rather than relearning the program.
Here are my problems with Blender:
1) The interface changes too often. It seems like just as I got used to the layout and where everything was in the UI, a new release would come along and suddenly everything changed. This seemed to be happening about every 6 months to a year. The basic interface for Lightwave hasn't changed that much from when I began with Lightwave 5.6 to Lightwave 9. Hell, I didn't even use Lightwave for a couple years and was able to pick up the latest version (9 at the time) again in just a couple days. Recently I downloaded Blender 2.5 and it was like having to relearn the entire application. I loaded some of my old files and found all the careful particle animations I had no longer work on the new version.
2) It could take days to reproduce the same quality of results with Blender that I could produce in minutes to a couple hours with Lightwave. Especially with lighting. I could get better results in Lightwave than Blender in half the time.
3) Functionality suddenly breaking. I had a lot of Lightwave Models. In the 2.2/2.3 versions prior to 2.37(?) they had a LWO importer that worked extremely well for importing meshes including textures. The last couple versions I used, the feature was broken. I would have to keep an old version of blender around to import models, save as a .blend, then import those files into the lastest version of blender. It was a PITA especially when I have 3 - 4 hours on the weekend to work on 3D stuff. I know there are new and better formats these days, but back then this was a problem.
Re: (Score:1)
1) This is mostly because Blender is undergoing a complete UI rewrite. Lightwave is undergoing the same for the version after 9. It was a mature application from 5.6->9. This is similar to the Power Animator -> Maya transition or SoftImage -> XSI transition.
2) This would depend quite heavily on what kind of lighting effect you were trying to achieve without knowing what specific lighting techniques you were trying to use it's really hard to quantify this. Certainly Light wave probably does have som
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From one German to another: "German" and "English" should be capitalised!
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They both are! With Berlin and London, respectively! :)
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I was referring to this:
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
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I was referring to this:
[My english is better than most other people's german, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Seems fine to me, you don't have to put capitals on every proper noun, very old hat in this day and age. Usually I only put capitals on proper nouns in relation to people or persons names or places, for a general language (not a place as in this case) I don't think capitals are needed.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not *every* proper noun! In this instance it is about nouns that are languages, a *tiny* subset of proper nouns! Of course *you* can do whatever you want, but, that doesn't make it grammatically correct. Without the comment about how great your English is, I wouldn't have bothered anyway...
Re: (Score:2)
Ditto here. I was happy with kpovmodeller, but that was dropped from Ubuntu, and although it could be manually installed, it no longer worked with Ubuntu. The chat rooms and forums all suggested using Blender instead, so I tried it. Man, talk about a steep learning curve!
Re: (Score:0)
"For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions."
Like, ctrl+z and ctrl+shift+z? Those are rather standard UI conventions. That you need a button over using a standard set of key combination shows you probably haven't actually tried to use the program that deeply.
I would have once agreed with you that blender is difficult, but you need to realize that if you want to be a serious user of a serious program, yo
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blender has a very steep learning curve, similar to it's commercial counterparts like maya, modo, lightwave, to name a few. yes the UI has some failings, but if you've seen the UI for other 3D apps, it's not too far from the competition... eventually you'll get the hang of where most of what you needs is located, you can always refer to a book such as this as a desk reference. as an aside, i think that several 3d apps have a tendency to violate current UI conventions due to their lineage in X11 unix apps wh
Re: (Score:2)
To some extent, I agree with you, but honestly, it's sort of a "once you get it, you never go back" sort of thing.
I guess it may seem "unintuitive" at first, but really it's all about learning the shortcuts and practicing. Once you know them, modeling in Blender is faster and more satisfying than any other modeling program that I've tried.
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those (and others
Re: (Score:2)
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those
It's not an either/or proposition.
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Re: (Score:0)
Actually, it often is. As Henry Petroski lays out in the book "Small Things Considered", there is no such thing as a perfect design. All things are a compromise to some extent between various constraints and a software UI is no exception. Discoverability is great for a newbie -- it put buttons and features in front of him where he can stumble upon them when he needs them.
To an expert, this is an intrusion, a waste of space that could be better used for conveying information or something else useful
Re: (Score:3)
Compared to what?
IF you tell me you find Maya and Lightwave to be incredibly easy and intuitive, I'm going to ship a midget with a Giant Mackerel to smack you with. Every single 3d EFX and CG program I have ever used is convoluted at best, a sheer clif of a learning curve at worst.
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3DStudio 4 for DOS
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No other major piece of graphics software that I can think of wastes space that kind of thing. The same goes for copy and paste. Blender uses standard keyboard shortcuts for those and has a complete built in undo menu.