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I empathise but I've used Blender, 3dStudio, Lightwave, Maya, Houdini, and Z-Brush professionally and they all have complex interfaces that have pluses and minuses. From a modelling point of view I am waaaaaay faster in Blender than I ever managed to be in Maya or 3DStudio, and I first used 3DStudio in probably 1996. Contrary to you I also love the ease of navigation in the Blender viewport compared to 3DStudio and Maya (and noughties Lightwave. Shudder). Numpad controls, split ui, frame object, edge, collection, verts etc.

The one thing is that Blender is heavily keyboard oriented, either shortcut or search based and while you can do everything by clicking around like most people do in Maya or Max, this is definitely suboptimal. Also if you don't have a numpad and a mouse wheel you're screwed. Honestly though, if you're doing 3D professionally, use whatever your studio / industry uses. If you're starting out today Blender is great because it allows you to produce high quality professional work, has great add-ons that are often free or cheap compared to other packages and is free (as in beer).

There are other aspects of the UI that are annoying mind. Horizontal node graphs are irritating, its only now getting an asset browser, there's a distinct lack of proper progress bars, and from an add-on developer point of view it's a pain in the arse to draw on the viewport, the core codebase is basically not documented and the API is stupidly unstable and is broken All. The. Time. The UI / UX has improved for new users but I definitely agree they need to hire some UI / UX people and technical writers / tutorial makers to make the learning curve less cliff like.

I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half

You have a lot of inertia to overcome. That's 15 years of muscle memory and expectations built using different UIs, different paradigms, and different ideas to achieve the same result. You need to factor the fact you're going to be thinking "But I could do that much more easily in <thing I've used for more than a decade>!" a lot. It's possible that you won't ever overcome those thoughts.

Forgetting is a lot harder than learning, and while Blender is pretty amazing it definitely isn't so much farther ahead than the competition it's necessarily worth the effort. Blender's main benefits are that it's fully integrated (it does everything!), and that it's free. If you already have a successful workflow for 3D then maybe it just isn't the app for you.

If blender is so great why can I jump between many different 3D programs without much friction, why was I able to learn other 3D apps a long the way without much friction? I have been trying to use Blender since at least 2003 and each time it refused to stick and was happy to stop using it. Sure it does everything but excels at nothing.

Many people are using blender so maybe it's you and not the software?

Prior to Blender 2.6, Blender used to really go out of its way to be different in every way.

With blender 2.7 and 2.8 they made lots of concessions to have more familiar interfaces.

The thing is, most every other 3D app uses the industry standard control scheme. Blender is different.

That means switching between Maya , Houdini, Max etc is fairly easy on your muscle memory. Pulling up Blender is a very rough context switch.

2.8 made it a lot better, but using the Maya keymap makes working in the Blender way kind of tricky, so you're still stuck in this weird hybrid.

Blenders great, but it definitely isn't as easy to switch between apps.

Blender is exceptional for the price. That's always been the way its been. You aren't buying into just the software, you're buying into a community, and development that strives towards innovation and creating new tools for its customers. You can find excellent free resources to get started, and people to work with. I've been working with blender on a hobby level since 2004, I learned 3d modelling, animation, texturing, rigging, video editing, nodes, uv editing; all through free online resources. I participated in community forums, community modelling competitions, irc discussions. If a 12 year old in 2004 learned it, I think the problem doesn't quite lie in the software UX. If it has to excel in one thing, it's its community.

It really excels in allowing everyone to do 3D modeling and rendering for free, legally.

Perhaps you can afford a license to all these ‘different 3D programs’ you are jumping between but not everyone can or wants to.

I can relate with you. It's been quite difficult for me to unlearn old afforfances and learn Blender. Because Blender is free and quite capable at what it does, it's training a whole new generation on how to use 3D software. And people are producing work expertly and quickly with it. Because of this and being open source, Blender is going to be the future. You and me, we just need to spend more time with it and unlearn what we previously learned.

> You have a lot of inertia to overcome. That's 15 years of muscle memory and expectations built using different UIs, different paradigms, and different ideas to achieve the same result. You need to factor the fact you're going to be thinking "But I could do that much more easily in <thing I've used for more than a decade>!" a lot. It's possible that you won't ever overcome those thoughts.

The irony being that this situation basically is baby duck syndrome, GP is complaining that a "proper" interface is whatever they were initially taught in college. It reminds me a lot of people's reactions to Vim/Emacs. "I've used tons of text editing interfaces, and none of them had this weird modal crap." Nah, you were just taught text editing in Word, and every text editor you've used since then imitates Word.

Which is actually fine, I tell people who look at Vim that they don't need to use Vim. If GP doesn't like Blender, they can just not use it. "I'm used to a different set of UX paradigms" is a completely valid consideration for what tools you use. It only becomes baby duck syndrome when they start saying that every other paradigm is objectively wrong because they don't have >10 years of muscle memory using it.

Honestly before the 2.8 I would have agreed that there was a little bit too much friction but now I think they strike the right balance and I really, really hope they never again change the UI except for minor tweaks.

Easy to use and intuitive should not always be the most important goal. Productivity and not breaking existing users work flow are also very underrated aspects.

I think the right comparison would be vim. Absolutely horrible UI, super difficult to use. The first few weeks will be pain but once you get over the hurdle, it is an absolute bliss.

For me blender feels similar. It took me multiple failed attempts before I got it but now any other 3d editing software feels really annoying and I will deeply miss my blender hotkeys.

Now of course there are indeed some actual UI problems with blender. It is a huge software so some parts have not seen much love for a long time and really need improvement. Some workflows are really annoying.

Generally though I would say, just take the bitter pill. The learning curve is steep at first but it is worth it. So yeah the bicycle might lack a seat but it is much more lightweight and reliable, sometimes it is the best tool for the job.

So baby duck syndrome and you rather use the bike without the seat? Good luck with that after any amount of time/distance.

The other programs have lasted decades and have been used to make thousands of movies and games for good reason. Because they work very well with the minimal friction and have PROVEN reliability.

It is funny how you accuse others of baby duck syndrome when you are the one that can't get over your imprint of having used other software and fail to adjust to using blender. Projecting, much?

Blender is difficult to learn. Maybe it is not the right tool for you. As I said it took me multiple attempts to learn properly myself. Acting like the blender UI is objectively bad just because it does not suit you is silly though.

The part about other software is especially silly considering that blender is exceptionally loved by its users. Something that commercial 3d software can not claim at all.

Yes it is baby duck syndrome to be able to use MANY OTHER software except one. While others who can only use one 3d app say that I have baby duck syndrome. Great logic.

As someone with no "dog in the hunt" you sound entitled.

I'm sure there is still room for improvement however.

I am assuming you’ve used the UI since the 2.8 upgrade? Have you looked into the “industry compatible” key maps that you can switch to in the settings?

I’ve used Rhino, Cinema4d, Maya, solid works and blender and while they all have their pros and cons blender doesn’t stand out as significantly worse in my opinion.

I have used the 2.8 "upgrade" but it was still a pain and things were much faster and easier to do in 3Ds max. Blender relies too much on shortcuts. With 3D max you can do almost everything with just the mouse and in blender that is not the case. I have used 3D max, Maya, XSI, Houdini, Modo, Unity, Unreal Engine 3/4/5 and all of these seemed intuitive and I never felt frustrated by them unlike blender. At this point I would rather play Autodesk than use blender for free which is sad.

The shortcuts are probably the strongest part about Blender, though. You can do edge and box modeling extremely quick with (E)xtrude, (G)rab, (S)cale, and (R)otate commands. And at any point you can press (XYZ) to align to a given axis while you're in the middle of those commands. This lets you keep your mouse in the viewport manipulating geometry instead of hunting for buttons to click.

I think in conclusion your hope is that blender would become more mouse driven than it is now? Unfortunately at this point, this is akin to people asking for better mouse support in eMacs. It won’t be high priority because of the community preference for using shortcuts. Whether shortcuts are faster or not in all circumstances, they’re now second nature to the serious users and the keyboard interface is seen by them as one of the great strengths of the software.

If we're using giphy's to portray feelings, have you considered this? ;)

https://media1.giphy.com/media/eiwvHQUr1efICXF9sv/giphy.gif

>I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8

Well the left mouse button is now select rather than the right mouse button, for starters.

Half of me is wondering why they ever thought RMB-select was a good idea, and the other half of me thinks not having RMB-select is some kind of sacrilige.

> not having RMB-select is some kind of sacrilige

Blender still does have it as an option, in fact one of the few that are displayed front and center before you start editing when it first starts up.

IIRC they thought it would be intuitive to have left-click "place the cursor", just like a word processor. That meant "select object" had to go somewhere else, and ended up on RMB.

In the parallel league of photo editing. This is exactly how I feel about Gimp. It’s a super advanced program with many features on par with Photoshop. But using it is just so much more complicated that I’d rather deal with the deficiencies of mspaint instead of using something so difficult/different. For most needs Paint.net is my preference, just lacking a good story for Linux.

have you tried b4artists (https://www.bforartists.de/)? It's a fork of blender designed to make it easier to use. I'm not sure how good it is because I bit the bullet and got used to blender but I know how you feel.

IMHO, the thing that makes it hard is that everything, everything is context dependent. A lot of operations depend on where your mouse is, both what panel it is over and even how far it is from the objects. Which is weird and counterintuitive. Once you learn it, conciously or unconciously, it's very powerful -- dragging to scale something in blender "feels" a lot more accurate once you latch on to the idea that where you start the drag matters. I'm not sure that tradeoff is worth it, but they have been putting a lot of work into the UI and it is improving. At least they finally let go of right-click select by default.