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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I’m an expert user of Illustrator and I found Blender’s core UI choices weird and clumsy in a way that paid 3D programs weren’t. Blender fundamentally feels like it’s designed by someone who’s never used another art program in their life.

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Yep. I've used Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere), Sketch, old Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, Shockwave) I know how to use a number of different IDE's, and yet when I opened Blender, I had to watch a tutorial on how to do even super simple basic operations.

I suppose the question is if Adobe's choices are the optimal ones, or if there's other defensible choices.

I'm an occasional Photoshop and Illustrator user (longtime Fireworks diehard, though, RIP) and while some conventions make sense to me, there's plenty of things that I have to look up tutorials for, even if I've learned them before.

Sometimes different software is different.

Sometimes it's not worth to optimize too farther from the current local optimum. UI designers have a "budget" for weirdness and unfamiliar conventions and must spend it wisely

I wonder what your take on the ZBrush UI would be then. It makes Blender seem positively sane and OCD by comparison.

Yet many artists make amazing stuff with ZBrush.

That's the point. Blender UI was for Blender expert users. Not some other program's expert users.

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