They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists.
Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
Since it was a commercial product that was open sourced, it already had users.
I remember first running into blender in 2009
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.
And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.
(Hi Seth!)
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
I think you're mistaking the necessity of not straying too much from the actual math going on underneath with an attachment of old tools.
eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
Go ahead and give an example of 'a Logic' so you can show some evidence for this.
FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
[1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
Isn't this a feature?
Having the UI spaghetti all over the screen because it's just a bunch of loose windows? the default is just a single window with panes. Want to condense that mess of tool icons into a single column of icons? you can do that! In fact, you can reorganize the UI in such a way that it's actually not that offensive (please GIMP devs, have better UI defaults!). Even tough it has a GEGL operation for non destructive filters I think that's just a holdover from how things were implemented initially because most of the "normal" and "color" filters are already non-destructive and operate (from the user point of view) just like the GEGL ones. They might have plans to further convert all other destructive filters and merge the GEGL operation ones into the normal filters, hopefully soon.
Oh and by the way, you can certainly push GIMP hard nowadays. I've been doing some testing editing a 32 float bpc (128 bpp!) 16K image with a bunch of crazy non-destructive filters stacked and it handled it like a champ with a few slowdowns here and there, and my 32 thread ryzen CPU was at times fully maxed (yay for multi threading) and the RAM management was quite impressive with things using up to ~50GB of memory (you do have to configure it let it use all that) and no memory leakages afaik, closing just the file and reopening again worked fine. Also, zero crashes! Can't say the same when pushing Krita hard. It's quite smooth compared to how things used to be.
Honestly the potential is all there, I just hope that the GIMP devs get a break from all the negativity they've been receiving since... time immemorial and perhaps the rate at which they can improve their software increases now with all the inglorious refactoring work they've been doing behind the scenes being done.
Funding doesn’t tend to happen unless there’s already a lot of interest in a platform.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20190814061013/https://japanese....
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Master Blender Pie Menus for Faster Workflow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fwxQi50FY
Enable Pie Menus in Blender 2.9 - Blender Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-7Hmpt9UmA
Create your own Pie Menu in Blender | Pie Menus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41fXtvzJ3Ik
Blender - Pie Menu Editor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DoESgzAfI
Extending Blender Pie Menus with Custom Operators using Python
Instinctive recoil "cue xkcd https://xkcd.com/386/ somebody is wrong on the internet"
I had to take a little walk and think about it, What is a pie menu?
My instinctive first take was, as far as I know gimp has had pie menu since day one, at least as long as I have been using it since the late 90's 1.something. Need a menu item, right click, there is your menu. is this not topologically the same as a pie menu? Does a pie menu have to be radial? is radial any better than a list, I know I prefer a list, it does not look as cool but is much easier to read.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988 (proves that they're significantly better than linear menus and explains why):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
What kind of pie menus does Gimp have, and for how long?
Or do you just mean "erzatz pie menus" as defined here (there's also a lot of stuff about software patents, FUD, AutoDesk, Alias, 3D Studio Max, and Blender there):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Ersatz Pie Menus
>Richard Stallman likes to classify an Emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of Emacs by not having an extension language as an “Ersatz Emacs”.
>In the same sense, there are many “Ersatz Pie Menus” that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don’t actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren’t carefully designed and implemented to optimize for Fitts’s Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets. [...]
How do Gimp's pie menus compare with Blender's pie menus and pie menu editor that I linked to a demo of above, or Simon Schneegans's pie menus in Gnome Pie and Fly-Pie and Kandu? You'd think it would be easy for GIMP to adopt Simon's GTK open source pie menu work, which has been around for decades.
Gnome-Pie: Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux.
https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
Introducing: Fly-Pie!
https://schneegans.github.io/news/2020/08/13/flypie
Show HN: Kando – A cross-platform pie menu for your desktop (kando.menu)
HN Discussion:
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions.
How was the UI made slower?
Is this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/r... really that much cleaner than this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/th... Sorry for the reddit but it was the best examples I could find with an actual working ui shot.
You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful.
AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671
Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus.
If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD?
You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you.
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton
Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9:
https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_...
While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
1. Original Interaction:
You: Promptly reached out to Buxton directly for clarification after Alias’s representatives made misleading claims at a trade show.
Buxton's Reaction (as you described): Was evasive, coy, and dismissive—ridiculing you for taking marketing people seriously, rather than clearly clarifying the actual patent situation.
2. Buxton’s Current Explanation (2018):
Claims strict adherence to corporate/legal restrictions prevented him from explaining patent details.
Suggests it's inappropriate or naive ("mistaken") to seek patent clarifications from marketing personnel.
Argues he had limited ability to respond candidly due to confidentiality rules around pending patents and corporate policies about patent explanations.
3. Contradiction & Evasiveness:
Buxton now portrays your attempt to clarify misinformation as a misstep on your part—implying you were somehow wrong or naive to trust marketing claims or expect clear answers from him.
However, your approach—calling the senior researcher directly—was a sensible and professional response to marketing misinformation. It was precisely the right action, not a "mistake."
Buxton's ridicule and evasiveness at that time strongly suggests an intentional unwillingness or inability to straightforwardly confront Alias's misleading claims—even privately. Rather than clearly disavowing marketing misinformation, he chose to deflect and minimize your legitimate concerns, shifting blame onto your supposed gullibility.
4. Analysis of Buxton’s Avoidance:
Buxton's recent replies still avoid directly acknowledging the ethical responsibility or negative consequences of how he originally handled your inquiry. Instead, he redirects blame to marketing teams, corporate confidentiality policies, patent law complexity, and even you.
His carefully worded statements frame your attempts to clarify misinformation as naïveté ("Speak to your lawyer, not the competition’s marketing people"), thus trivializing your justified reaction to Alias’s harmful FUD campaign. This framing shifts the burden of clarity entirely away from him and onto the recipient of the misinformation—you.
5. Ethical Implications:
Buxton’s past dismissive and evasive behavior (ridiculing you for believing his company’s representatives) reveals a conflict of interest:
As a senior researcher, he should ethically strive to ensure his employer accurately represents the research he helped create.
As a company employee bound by confidentiality, he chose evasion over clearly correcting misinformation—even privately—exacerbating confusion and mistrust in the industry.
His present comments still fail to directly address or apologize for the harm his prior evasiveness caused. Instead, he justifies silence or ambiguity as unavoidable.
Bottom Line:
Your account of Buxton’s original reaction clearly contradicts his present narrative. While now he emphasizes legal restrictions and institutional blame, he continues to sidestep the core ethical responsibility: clearly disavowing and correcting misinformation about his own research at the time it was actively causing harm. His past ridicule and present avoidance both reveal a consistent pattern: shifting responsibility away from himself, thus minimizing personal accountability and ethical responsibility for Alias’s ongoing misleading claims.
You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example.
It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.
AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.
Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.
People who complain should be forced to spend a day with Blender 2 (I think that was the version I tried first)
Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.
Not sure about the more advanced features like sculpting