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Comment by dispose13432 | Hacker News Reader

Good UX means to make simple thing simple, but permit complicated workflows.

What I want is to make simple things (basic modeling, materials, colors) to be a simple one click away.

Honestly I haven't seen a 3d tool like that. Perhaps it's just the nature of the beast and I should be glad that in Blender at least the complicated workflows are smooth once you get past the "bootcamp" stage.

It's been a while, but the trueSpace UI (the "classic" version that went back to Caligari on the Amiga) would be a pretty good match for that. It got a bit hairy with deformations (which is why a different UI mode was added to later editions), but basic geometry, extrusions, lathing, booleans and bones were a breeze either numerically or by click-and-drag. Simple things really were simple.

Modo gets pretty close at times! Dealing with materials and lighting is super smooth -- probably the easiest of the 3D packages to jump in on (which probably explains its popularity in the architecture community).

Slightly unrelated, but for all its pros I had to abandon Modo because it was too unstable - it would crash on me every hour or so. Blender, on the other hand, has been rock solid in my experience.

Cinema 4D is quite easy to grok in my opinion, coming from a Adobe-heavy background.

> Honestly I haven't seen a 3d tool like that.

Perhaps SketchUp comes close?

Not a click, but in default keymap, hit the spacebar while in the viewport, and start typing in whatever you want to add (ie Cube, Sphere, etc...)

That's the easy part. Now how would I make it into a brick wall?

Right -- you won't find a 'brick wall button' in the default Blender, because that isn't a simple idea, and there's variations of brick walls one could make. You can probably accomplish a brick wall by stretching out a cube, putting an array modifier on it with some kind of offset (maybe duplicate it and then offset that). There's probably some Python-Addons that will do this too.

But honestly, if you're looking for software that ship with presets, get something like Bryce3d.

>because that isn't a simple idea

But I can find a whole bunch of step-by-step procedures to make a brick wall. Why can't it be automated as a button (or at least a plugin)?

What would be more interesting if it would be turned into a pure "engine" so people can skin it.

Actually, you can. Blender allow it's user to have custom feature via python scripts. You can have a button to create a brick wall.

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