Hacker News Reader

I agree the Blender has problems. All I'm saying is the combined amount of money that companies like Pixar + Dreamworks + Disney + EA + Rockstar + Valve + Sony + Microsoft + all the other movie, CGI, and game companies spend on Autodesk software would probably fund 30-40 + well paid engineers and they could get an open source piece of software that they could all modify anyway they want VS what they have now, which is Maya and 3dsmax of which they are at the mercy of Autodesk AND for which they have to deal with all kinds of licensing issues.

I know it's not that simple. Each of those companies will want different features. But, with the right leadership (hardest part) it seems like it would be good thing for them to do.

I don't think the FBX format is the deal breaker.

Thing is, studios will use tools like Maya if they meet their needs, and if not they develop internal proprietary software that does exactly what they need. Often they use both in different parts of the pipeline. It is not obvious that there is a space for a third option there of collaborating to build a complete end to end 3d application that will inevitably require compromises.

Open source already happens with specific focused packages (OpenSubdiv, OpenVDB, PTEX etc) which can be very good at one thing. Developing a complete 3d application that meets everyone's needs is unlikely to be appealing given the diverse studio pipelines and requirements.

> notably a lack of UI refinement

That's a common misconception. Blender's UI is extremely simple and innovative.

Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted options:

blender is slow

blender is too hard

blender is hard to use

I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today.

Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:

blender is hard

blender is damaged

blender is confusing

blender is free

blender is slow

In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-wh...

Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).

Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.

Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more "standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.

But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.

Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?

Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.

First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender. It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying. A bit like Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some people love it, Lots don't.

Andrew price went on to say that his proposed UI was wrong -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw

Since then there has been a UI team, which has tackled the low hanging fruit... the bigger design changes probably will come over the next year or so during their 2.8 revamp... where they tackle the bigger issues with blender.

They should fork into multiple products:

BlenderCore -> BlenderCAD -> BlenderEnginer -> Blender3D -> BlenderVideo etc.

... but if Andrew met resistance before, that's probably a non-starter. :(

>Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these

Sorry, that's not what I'm getting, I'm getting

Blender is free

Blender is slow

Blender is better than maya

In my case, it's a "misconception" based on being the guy who has to orchestrate a production pipeline from start to finish and pay the bills for everyone along the way.

Blender's UI may be many things, but like any tool in this field, simple is hardly one of them. In any case, a significant problem in practice is that Blender's natural ways of working don't always match what is used by just about everyone else. Sometimes it's got just the right feature to model something in a certain way, but you then incur a disproportionate cost to adjust that asset so it's useful as part of your overall pipeline, and while the UI for the handy feature might be decent, the overall process is glitchy and error-prone.

Here is the Blender hotkey chart.[1] All 9 pages. With the different hotkeys for each of 12 modes. Any questions?

[1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...

Sure, and here's a 13 page list of AutoCAD command shortcuts:

https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/files/17331/AutoCAD_Sh...

This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that.

If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.

Addendum having just looked at the blender "hotkey chart" you linked: That's not a hotkey chart. That's a detailed description of every command with a hotkey.

If you added similar descriptions in the AutoCAD commands list it could probably hit 100 pages.

Besides, if your finger memory hasn't picked up all of blender yet, tap spacebar for command search. As long as you remember vaguely what something's called you'll find it in there.

3d modeling is not a consumer activity. You can start a Blender tutorial and start putting cubes or spheres together in an hour, or you could make 3d animated movies of the same quality as any major animation studio.

The complexity involved is not a mistake, it is inherent to the artform. Blender does a fine job of layering the tools and UI so that as you need more complicated features they are there for you.

I'm not so very sure about that; before TrueSpace (or Caligari going back to the Amiga) was mangled to look and act like everything else on the market (the move that killed it, as far as I can tell, since it coincided with its decline), it was both immensely more intuitive and more dimensionally accurate when necessary than anything I've used since. No, it wasn't Crayola simple, but it doesn't have to be nearly as hard as Blender either.

> Blender 2.36

One needed all that to learn to use the old Blender. Since the 2.5x version, it got much better. UI got reorganized, keys are remapeable, and most important of all, you can search for any operator by pressing the space bar.

Blender's UI is like Vim. If you don't put the time in to learn it, it makes no sense, but if you do it's the most efficient thing ever.

It is not like vim at all. Vim is predictable and has consistency in the way keybindings work. Once you understand that escape mode exists, you 're already there. Blender is a chaos of multiple window panes, buttons and options in unpredictable places, UI messages all over, inconsistent behavior of tools, and an ever-confusing window splitting mechanism.

I write faster with vim. I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.

For box modelling and poly by poly modelling, Blender is the fastest of all applications I've tried.

Blender is weird but predictable too. For example the keys GRS (grab, rotate, scale) works in different areas (3D, UV, animation, NLA, video editor) where it makes sense (in some there's no rotation). The UI overhaul of 2.5x moved stuff in a more logical order. If you understand the concept of "data blocks" and "users", you'll understand most of Blender.

> I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.

I've spend a healthy amount of time in 3ds Max, AutoCAD, and blender. In my opinion:

• 3ds is most discoverable / easiest to learn

• AutoCAD is most precise (owing to its object snaps and UCS controls)

• blender is the fastest to build in

I have a hard time believing that. Literally every time i had to do something i had to search google for it. Blender buttons are all over the place with no rhyme or reason about how they 're grouped. There are very few menus and in general no way to find what you re thinking about. If anything it's the definition of counterintuitive.

If you 're not working with it every single day , it's quite impossible to grasp the interface, because you simply forget where everything is hidden. It's really really bad.

Blender is no more UI-awful and no more poorly documented than any other 3D modeling package. The problem is that the entire market of 3D modeling packages are either A) massive clusterfucks of kitchen-sink UI, or B) woefully inadequate in feature selection.

Learning Maya or 3D Studio Max is just as much of an undertaking as learning Blender. There is nothing about them that make them inherently easier. But they do cost a lot of money, whereas Blender is free (and Free). So why not just start with Blender? You (the proverbial you) are probably not going to get a job in the games or movie industry anyway.

Blender's choice to use completely non-standard UI features makes it harder to approach. 99.9999% of all software is "click on object to select it" then pick things to manipulate that selection. Blender's default UI doesn't do that so where as most noobs can at least run other 3d software and fiddle with it before spending the requisite weeks learning how to use it, for Blender they can't even fiddle. The must read the manual immediately because the UI doesn't conform to any other app period.

I know at one time even the menus were non standard as in users expect a menu bar with options they can browse but Blender didn't used to have that (it does now)

The UI of Blender could be a lot better. 3D Max, Maya, CINEMA 4D, CATIA, SketchUp ... every 3D software has a sane UI that can be used without reading a manual at all. Except Blender with its non standard UI concepts. Hopefully someone sponsors a UI clean up.

It reminds me of Gimp, which had a similar weird UI where every window had its own unique menus and what not. To give them credit, they fixed the UI for the better.

The UI of Blender is excellent. The learning curve is a little steep, but it's also very sort. Once I'm over the initial hump of the non-standard UI, it felt extremely fast and smooth. It's like VIM (if vim had tooltips) for 3D modelling.

The current UI of Blender is fairly good. It is difficult because 3D is difficult. You can remap the keys to resemble other 3D packages and UI concepts. If you try to make it any easier than that, you're removing useful features.

Also, you haven't used ZBrush, do you? At least in Blender the names of things always made sense (object, mesh, scene...). The equivalents in ZBrush are the weirdest things.

> It is difficult because 3D is difficult

That's an urban myth. The other 3D packages (most of them more featurefull) adhere to common UI conventions and guidelines. Like what happens with a left mouse click, what with a right mouse button - all mimics Win95 UI guideline. The other 3D package mentioned are therefore easy to use without reading a manual or tutorial. Everyone who used one of those programs can easily switch to another one.

Blender UI with it's non standard might be productive for certain professionals who invested considerable amount of time. But other packages have customisable shortcuts too, but offer a lot better default settings.

Blender definitely needs a UI refresh to gain more widespread adoption. Too much clutter in the tool bars and menus, navigation works like pre 1995 3D applications.

For many years there was an option to swap the mouse buttons. And it seems you can copy and paste now with ctrl C and V. What are other difficulties?

I tried to use both 3DS max and Blender (the old one which had mouse gestures and a few menus) without reading a manual when I was young. Guess what? I found out how to transform things, select vertices/edges/faces, move them around...

Yes, I had to read the manual to do more serious things, but that's no different than 3DS Max.

Also, part of the reason other apps seem easier is that they add unnecessary features in menus and buttons. For example I saw a release of 3DS max where one of the new things were extending the selection in some way. You could always do that with Blender by combining two more basic features (hide what you don't want to select, then select and extend). I think 3DS is the cluttered one.

Blender has many problems, but the UI itself is not one. Default controls are bad, I admit.

edit: I also admit it's not intuitive to open/save files of other types (having to select the appropriate option in import/export).