Open-Source 3D Graphics Design: Where to Begin
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Heh. Whenever you ask someone who doesn't work with image editors professionally (that doesn't mean "use it quite often", it means, having real-world deadlines depend on productivity), they'll point out how many "features" Gimp shares with Photoshop. But features don't mean shit. The interface is a bulky mess. Tons of "little" things don't quite work as expected. And then, when it comes to the truly heavy-weight features, of course Gimp doesn't compare.
Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit.
Free/open software projects are so idealistic, I kinda want to support it. But it's so rare that anybody in these communities gets interface design. It's not unheard of (Firefox is a positive example in my book) but it's rare. Photoshop's main advantage is it's clean interface: http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interfa...
FWIW Joel's coverage of user design is a great read for things like this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html
> Most flame wars you read about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That's missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond?
Most open source tools tend to be written by developers for developers and very rarely take into account the usage patterns of users in the domain which the tool fits. Want to know why Slack is tearing into all these areas that IRC could never get a foothold? You have the answer right there.
Well, I'm not trying to say it's not without it's difficulties, but designing a browser's UI is not even just not in the same court as putting together something like Photoshop, it's not even the same sport.
Photoshop's UI/UX isn't...great, itself, I'd say.
It's far from intuitive. I use the example of Photoshop when explaining software that really learns better when you have someone over your shoulder teaching you.
I find people can't even 'get' photoshop until I sit them down, spend an hour and show them the basics of what's what. Then they can explore.
This is...technically still good UI/UX. If, for such a 'pro' level tool, after an hour or less of slight instruction, a user can find their way around, that's cool - but I think the 'de facto' standard of UI/UX these days is 'pick up and instantly understand how to use'. PS doesn't translate to that, and GIMP could fill that void, and even create a better UI/UX, if they could find some dedicated, passionate people to do it.
Lord knows I wish I had the time.
So the end result is sort of like a junk drawer filled with weird kitchen appliances. You have your grandma’s beat-up cast iron skillet and rusty chef’s knife with some chips in the handle; these need some maintenance but are still your most flexible workhorse tools. Then you have a melon baller and potato peeler you picked up at a flea market 2000, a popcorn maker that you bought for your college dorm in 2003, a waffle iron you found abandoned when you moved into a new apartment in 2007 that makes waffles shaped like zoo animals, and just last year you were given a fancy bluetooth sous vide stick as a wedding present but the bluetooth is kind of flaky and sometimes you need to re-enter the settings 4 or 5 times before it works.
After long experience, if you put everything together you can usually make whatever meal you want, but sometimes it takes some creative license with the recipes, and folks observing the process are mystified.
Car analogy would be really good cheap cars you steer with foot pedals.
I think this is a bit misleading. The last major UI overhaul was in 2011 with blender 2.57. Since then the UI has changed very little. There have been many new features, sure, but I can't think of anything that would be exceptionally disorientating.
But if you just need a fast render...
Its performance will only increase as GPU acceleration options improve. CPU performance is pretty much at a dead-end now, it's barely improved in the last half decade but to slam more and more cores into the chips, while GPU performance is increasing rapidly even now.
Do you know any artists who work in BRL-CAD?
It's tiny, but offers a decent amount of features for 3D modeling.
It's one of the two pieces of proprietary software (other being Mathematica) I rely on day-to-day life. I've even considered starting such a project, but it's near the end of my very long TODO list and I'm unlikely to have time to make it into something usable by the general public.
I really enjoy using Blender for my more art-oriented 3d needs, but I use SketchUp for more engineering oriented tasks like making drawings for my woodworking projects.
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650290
I wouldn't go designing fancy shapes for machining with SketchUp, but it's great for doing plans for simple projects.
I really wish there was an open source alternative, or at least a linux one (Sketchup works ok in wine).
What I like the most is the simple drawing tools that have intelligent "snapping" (to axes, edges, surfaces, etc), which makes it really easy to draw things that have exact dimensions and align perfectly with all the other pieces. This coupled with the smart move/replicate tool makes it a breeze to design furniture with elaborate joinery.
I've not tried FreeCAD. It looks like it could work for my use case, although it looks much more complex and I do like the simplicity of SketchUp, even if it makes it a bit more limited tool (desinging round shapes in SketchUp is a pain, it's a very polygon-oriented tool).
SketchUp is so simple, I'd call it 3d drawing app, Just the pen tool and snapping is enough to get stuff done.
Gimp is indeed tied to the Gimp Toolkit+, but it has almost nothing to do with GNU anymore (and it never had much of anything to do with rms, so trying to smear Gimp by association is kind of mean). In fact, the Gimp developers themselves are quite hostile to the idea of doing things like changing the language to fit GNU recommendations. When I suggested that they shouldn't refer to it as "open source", they were the ones who shouted "POLITICS", refused, and ran away.
So, if you dislike its UI, don't blame GNU or rms. Probably shouldn't even blame GTK+. Just blame Gimp.
Very good demo Video from SigGraph 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo
Pixar Courses at Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar
The issue is that these tools are used in day in and day out by a specific audience that is willing to make the investment to surpass the bad parts of the UX. It's not like a 3D artist can choose to skip using a 3d package - and in many cases the choice which one will also be dictated by external factors. Once the initial hurdles are surpassed, the UX of the tools does work well for that flow. It has to, because that's the customer base.
Basically, these tools can afford to suck in the basic UX because they can't really "bounce" users there.
I do believe that by that metric Blender UI is not that bad.
Building a good 3D modeling package UI is really difficult. Just look at MAX, Maya and MODO. Blender isn't really much worse. Some consider it better.
Since most people here are programmers: some will love VI. VI has an awful interface for beginners. It's incredibly fast once you get used to it.
Since I've learned how to use both VI and Blender, I'd say that Blender is the VI for artists. The interface is great to work with, once you get past the initial steep learning curve.
>it has a API made of Shortcuts.
That... makes no sense. At all.
>A good User-Interface is something that adheres to a common users expectations of the virtual world.
So, because it has a bad UI, it had no UI? That doesn't make any sense. Just because a UI is bad doesn't mean it's nonexistant.
How do we design effective UI's for 'pro' users?
At what point is an application 'pro' enough that it requires a couple hours and some video tutorials or a user's manual to actually get a sense of how the tool works, versus how much effort should be put in on the developer's part to make it 'intuitive'?
Consider what your aspiring aviator sees: http://i.imgur.com/bRmpbjg.jpg
You can dumb that down, but you put people in danger if you do. Burying rarely used things beneath a layer of abstraction is fine in the case of consumer software, but for a pro that might be a huge hassle, or even a dangerous liability in the case of a plane. Engines don't catch on fire often, but if the controls to shut them down involve six tedious steps (Preferences, Engines, Advanced, Shut-Down, Next, Confirm) instead of one quick tug of a lever that could be disaster.
I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats.
You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training.
But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me.
So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics.
So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.
For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.
I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular.
Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
I wouldnt waste so much time on this, if it werent for this wasting so much of my time.
If you do not develop something new, as in never done before, and you are innovative- you basically throw away user-experience, and they will hate you for that- and they got the right too.
If i would make a hidden C-Define into a compiler and forced you too use that, you would demand the compiler dev - of this UserInterface-UndefinedBehaviour to be hanged - but come a different audience, suddenly the standards can shift and dance.
No, Blender is not bad, it's terrible.
You need a tutorial video to understand how to close a pane, and even then it's hard. That has got nothing to do with 3D modeling being hard. It could've been a word processor and it would still be terrible.
And yes, window panes are very much a standardized UI part which has a completely non-standard interaction design in Blender. For no reason.
Edit: Before you downvote this, download Blender and try to close a pane. Just try it!
Like vim or emacs?
>window panes are very much a standardized UI part which has a completely non-standard interaction design in Blender. For no reason.
It's called "tiled window management". Lots of people find it more comfortable to use than the classic overlapping windows.
True, but when speaking about "lots", we have to keep in mind that tiled window management for the general public died together with Windows 1.0. That probably puts the percentage of the public who's ever used tiled window management around 0.001% of the total PC using population :)
And came back with Windows 8 :-)
> That probably puts the percentage of the public who's ever used tiled window management around 0.001% of the total PC using population :)
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
You know how bad it is, if Microsoft lowest-point is your high point.
Yes. There's reasons the popularity of those is waning.
It's called "tiled window management". Lots of people find it more comfortable to use than the classic overlapping windows.
It's got nothing to do with tiling. There's plenty of other software out there that's meant to be used with tiled windows. The interactions in Blender are unique to Blender, non-intuitive and non-discoverable.
There is a tiling window manager INSIDE blender used to control its window frames. It works pretty much like any other tiling manager. You immediately grasp the idea if you've ever used one.
I also haven't heard the same level of complaints that Blender gets about its competition. Presumably, there's solutions.
I believe this is what's called "user-hostile".
You're basically telling the user to RTFM, which is just going to drive away the creative people that you actually want to cultivate.
I'm trying to import this simulation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epyqHzoCxa0) without the camera view and the background image.
Thanks.
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5525/animated-obj...
I found those two things fix missing stuff in exports of all kinds =)
3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow.
For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.
Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.
Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does.
I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!)
Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)