Blender 2.78 released
blender.org
blender.org
Also like Emacs, the UI changes based on what mode you are currently in, which is super confusing at first because it is often not clear which mode you need to be in to accomplish some operation.
Also like Emacs, they have managed to cram an amazing amount of functionality into the program so it seems to do everything, and is rock solid (it would never crash, when 3DS Max would crash 3-4 times a day).
It's not for everyone, but it is very powerful.
I don't think that is true. It provides a Python API, sure. But most of it is still C or C++. Github says only 4% is Python.
Contrary to some other comments here, I like the interface. My only experience with competing software was ~8 years ago, but I find blender's interface faster and intuitive once you get over a slight learning hump.
Someone wrote a review claiming that Blender was the least painful way to edit video on Linux. I'm not sure if that was/is still true, but after trying two or three crash-tastic alternatives, I'm willing to believe it.
ZBrush is similar at the opposite end of the spectrum, with it's own language and gui priorities, but at least it's entirely customisable.
You probably heard years ago. Blender has changed _a lot_ in the last 10 years.
It's quite the opposite to me. Blender has sensible names (object, mesh, scene) and a few somewhat weird ones (armature for skeleton, shape keys for morph targets). You can search any action with space bar. You can customize keys and set left click as default for selection.
With zbrush I couldn't figure out. "Subtool" still baffles me. I use a AHK script to make it manageable. Sometimes I don't know what's going on (why can't I edit?) and I don't have a log of actions (like blender) to help me figure that out. The thing I hate the most about zbrush, though, is not the UI, but the lack of poly group names (changing randomly if you add/remove one) and the fact that is completely impossible to export/import more than one paint layer at a time.
Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc, from a root creation facility.
In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and change the torus' inner radius.
In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same options as in Max and customize those settings immediately afterwards, once you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object - you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh".
Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it also has Blender-style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can do the same thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh, but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack: they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.
Now, I was doing 3d, cartoony animation when I was working in Maya, and one could argue that non-destructive tools aren't that applicable to that context anyways. Fair enough -- if you need to change the inner radius of a torus after you've distorted the whole torus, Blender has a fairly mature add-on called sverchok: https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok
Similarly I use Sublime Text and I've tried vim some 10 times and it's also not for me.
I also used 3DS Max around version 4 for a class. The UI was more intuitive, and I felt like it would be comparatively painless to learn to do some impressive things relatively quickly...but doing 3D work as a hobbyist, and not one with much money when I was the most interested, Blender became my default. Gmax was pretty cool too, but at the time I was more interested in making pretty renders on a Linux machine, and less interested in creating game content on a Windows machine.
I don't think that's really the problem. Switching to left click to select by default and having box selection and other common UI expectations would help. But also there's a mind set of "blender is awkward". I find it fast and fairly consistent, but only after having spent time learning it.
ZBrush on the other side, never stops being awkward to me.
Does anyone know what their codebase health is like, and how they retain the ability to ship so much?
What helped me a lot is to learn all keys. I even printed out a shortcut cheat sheet.
Then I followed a moddeling tutorial and now I can say it's maybe the best software I ever used.
But the key to learning Blender is to learn to use your keyboard.
A common workflow is to use the Blender Three.js exporter for exporting models, then compose the scene with the Three.js editor, and do the rest in code.
The main reason I prefer Blend4Web is because I've been using Blender for about 10 years, and for better or worse, it's the devil I know. Blend4Web development tries to follow Blender versions as closely as possible too, which means there's never any exporting issues. That said, if I was collaborating with artists, and they were using other 3d authoring tools, then Three.js might make more sense.
It's interface, once understood is blazing fast to me. Yes it has caveats. So does every other big 3d package. I prefer some of the ways that Maya does things, and other times the way Blender does things. (I will never go back to the crashing fits of 3ds max, so much lost work.) But in the end it's the same as all the other tools. You just need to keep at it and it will become second nature.
The UI idea of no overlapping windows is probably my favorite feature of Blender's GUI. The ability to split windows and swap them to ANY part of Blender allows you to set it up exactly how you want, plus you can save your workspaces. Set it up once and forget it.
I can agree that some common commands have obscure shortcuts, but EVERYTHING is customizable. I do mean everything. (Side note, not everything is customizable in Python. :*( But most things are.) I have my own tool panel for all of my animation tools, I have custom shortcuts that overwrite some shortcuts that I never use. In the end I'm faster because of it's UI. Most of all I feel like I have a custom studio proprietary software because of how customizable it is, with just a tiny bit of Python knowledge. I don't claim to be a good programmer, but if you can write some html, you can customize Blender till you get what you want. Heck you can even make Popups/overlapping windows with 1 hotkey + mouse gesture.
I may be an advocate of Blender, but I have used just about all 3d packages and can gladly say that I'm happy with my experiences with Blender. (Since 2.5)
That's how broken blender is. It's hideously painful. If this text box were Blender, it would have taken me about 148 minutes to type this reply, with a random adjustment or undo or redo every letter of the way, I would have been fighting with this text box the whole way.
Blender is the only piece of software I've used in my life with such a hideously broken interface and no, the problem isn't with me.
It's a trauma. It traumatized me. There is no other piece of software on the planet that I would even conceive of using a word like that for - it's the only traumatic interface I've used in my life. Nothing else compares.
I am telling you my feelings as a user who accomplished what he wanted to and got beautiful results. Together with my beautiful results and outweighing them, I remember the trauma.
Seriously, it's just that non intuitive. In the beginning I thought it was perhaps because I was used to C4D, but after that episode, I realised some things in blender simple don't make sense for someone that thinks in objects the mathematical way.
On a side note, I started 3D with POV-Ray many years ago, and, although not having a UI, at least the text description of the scenes was perfectly intuitive... I just can't reach that point with Blender.
In Blender terms, you probably wanted to create a “parent” (typically an empty) for your objects.
How to do what you wanted:
Shift-A Cube Shift-A Cube G to move second cube(assuming you don't want them stacked) Shift right click to select other cube Ctrl+P select Object to parent one to the other(you would use Keep Transform if you wanted to keep them together but move/scale/rotate separate)
Look in the Scene graph on the right, they're still separate objects so you can assign different materials to their faces, unwrap, un-parent them with Alt+P, whatever.
If you wanted to merge the geometry, you'd use Ctrl+J to join them.
if Maya is emacs, Blender is vim. Neither of them are Sketchup, and neither are trying to be.
By the way: I used to hate vi, cause I never gave it a chance. Recently I buckled down and learned how to use it. Now I think it's awesome, and I've hardly scratched the surface. But I finally got over the steep hump, and it was worth it.
It was not designed to be easily learned, but the ui is fast to use once you learn it. One hand on the keyboard hitting memorized hot keys, the other on the 3 button mouse...
What drove me to learn was that I could use a powerful tool, that's improving at a fast rate, legally, for free.
I since used lightwave, maya, sketch up, newer 3ds max... inventor. I still go back to Blender because it's faster for me.
Since 2.5, command and hotkeys in the interface, there's undo, much more friendly to new users, there's much better learning resources. If I was starting now, I'd probably become proficient 5 to 10 times faster.
https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png
Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does. It's (probably) an advanced feature, sure so maybe you can't expect to know at first. But why is there no way to find out other than googling?!!
No little help icon next to anything. No simple tooltips, let alone rich ones. There's zero discoverability.
That's a weird approach to using software. Most people do not launch an application to twiddle with sliders and buttons but to accomplish a task. You can safely leave the correction slider alone until the day you need it (Googling will help), or until you read the manual.
Several posters have already compared Blender with vim - incidentally, vim also has zero discoverability, but once you're familiar with the vernacular, you will be unstoppable.
They only read the manual if the software is so unusable that it requires it. Have you ever seriously read the PowerPoint manual for example?
There's even an xkcd about this.
I guess Blender is not perfect for using it with python only.