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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had enough time to learn it. It's not exactly a noob-friendly interface.

3d modelling is not exactly noob-friendly, not in any software. Google's SketchUp may be a slight exception, it's pretty easy to draw buildings in it but once you start to do more complicated things, it too gets really hard, really fast.

Blender's new (introduced in 2.5) UI is pretty cool. They try to have all operations available through a widget in the UI (with a tooltip), a shortcut key, a quick launch menu and through a Python scripting interface.

My favorite feature is the quick launch menu. Hit spacebar and a menu pops up, type in what you want and and it searches for operations using a fuzzy text search. It's also nice to see that you can adjust parameters to your operation and see your results live. Previously you had to enter all parameters beforehand and couldn't see the results, now you can e.g. draw a sphere and adjust the number of vertices in it, when you see the sphere.

Blender's UI has gone through a vast improvement and it's great that the UI devs have done their job well despite all the bashing they've had - I'm sure they would have done a lot more if they would have gotten more positive feedback.

Back when I started using Blender, when it was still a proprietary shareware software, most operations were only available through keyboard shortcuts that were mostly not documented. That was not a barrier for me, I quickly fell in love with the software.

Now let's hope that someone has the time to translate (more of) the manual to the new UI.

You must have missed Caligari TrueSpace in your travels. I would dearly love to see basic modeling (including kinetics) made as simple and intuitive as it was in TS 3-6 in another package. (For that matter, I wish it had stayed that easy in the last version of TS.) The only real fly in the ointment was rendering, and the proprietary models didn't export well for texturing and rendering elsewhere. That said, I did a lot of technical illustrations in that package just about as fast as I could think them, and if you didn't need complex reflections with ray tracing (or luminosity rendering), the results were certainly good enough.

I was sure we would be mentioning Blender UI :)

Well indeed, not very noob-friendly and not very respectful of UI conventions. However, it is reckoned that once you get use to it, it is very efficient :

No modal screen. The screen is divided. You can adjust your workspace depending on your current task. Tweaking parameters is very easy thanks to well designed widgets.

If you try, remember that you should leave your left hand on the keyboard (like a fps) and use the keyboards shortcuts.

I used to be pretty good at it. It is a style meant for using the application and nothing else. It is extraordinarily efficient.

I've had problems in the past with applications like that - they often don't take dvorak layout into account.

I don't know. A while back I learned the basics of Blender as well as 3DS Max; I personally found the former easier to pick up. Of course, I didn't do much beyond basics--I got distracted away from 3D graphics in general and never got back to it :)

I can recommend checking out Blender Cookie, it has a small series of "Get Started With Blender" video tutorials and a lot of in depth tutorials (of which a surprising amount are free to watch).

http://blendercookie.com/

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