Is Blender intentionally designed to be difficult to interact with at first?

Sorry, but reality simply does not feel like that
In the company I work for we do still have old software for stuff like requirements-management that's a pain in the butt in terms of UX.

 

"Reality does not feel like that" does not mean "reality is what I feel like it is."

 

You both have valid points. The best tool for the job should facilitate efficient workflows. In a corporate environment, the cheapest tool for the job is often chosen instead of the best. Or the one that requires the least amount of change. Or the one that is favored by a guy who has worked there for 20 years and is in charge of choosing the tool and he chooses what he's used to. And so on.

 

Actually he said it right lol reality for human beings is just a bunch of brain cells sending stuff around as unity events and triggers. We can't even have a blimp on reality since even the colors we see are just a visual representation of some fancy science waves.

So yes, reality feels like

 

Have you ever even used Maya? I have used it for many years and wrote plugins and even an integration plugin between it and a IDE.

As far as day to day workflow tools and interaction it is not better then Blender, i find tools are about on par but they are better organized in blender since it has less legacy bloat and new tools are better integrated than in Maya. Now sure plugin and scripting API Maya is much better but how you interact with the package and its tools neither win over the other in my oppion.

 

I think new users are simply not a very high priority for Blender. It took them several attempts and a really long time to clean up the interface. There are forks like Bforartists which has all the features of blender but imo improved user interface although their current versions are getting more and more similar.

Blender is a great tool especially considering it's free and the shortcut based workflow in general is faster but speed is not everything. 3ds Max for an example has a lot of designer and engineer users and their focus is not speed modelling. Max also benefits having similar UI with various CAD tools so it's probably easier to learn and if you use anything long enough the speed will come eventually. In the beginning the primary challenge is just doing clean models.

 

As far as I know, out of all the big studios, only Ubisoft decided to use a blender exclusively (and it wasn't a great decision). There is also a mention of Activision, but they don't use blender for AAA games.

Most of the people that use the blender for game development are freelancers and studios with micro-budget.

 

Still, some companies started switching to Blender

 

The truth is that the "better integrated tools" have to be bought as packages because they don't exist in the blender.

 

And what is this information based on? Facts? Or are you just stating what you think you see?

 

Still, almost every big studio uses tools that let them work efficiently.

 

I suppose this is a mix of my opinion and work experience.

Big studios still prefer tools like Maya, Zbrush, and 3dsmax.
Small studios and freelancers don't want to spend money on these as they are expensive. Even I use the blender in my private project though I prefer Maya.

 

well larger studios have more invested in pipeline and custom tooling so switching for them is harder, this is made even worse with the GPL license terms, and how they even apply to python addons if they import bpy

 

Big studios prefer tools like Maya, Zbrush, and 3dsmax because they have decades of corporate inertia and their own forms of tech debt and switching to new workflows costs time and money.

 

That's one of the reason why Blender is taking over, and it has great community, pretty much like Unity.
I know a lot more Blender artists than any other platform. It's easier to work on the tool everyone knows

 

why is this discussion getting so warmed up anyway? lol

 

Guys! Guys!

I've been seeing this whole "Autodesk vs. Blender- which is better? which is more pro? which has more-better adoption?" argument going back and forth since I was going college back in the early 2000s. It really seems like people have been saying these exact same things over and over again for twenty years now.

Really there's no need to defend whichever software you choose.

 

Because we love Blender. End Of! Now go away, all of you. My Blender......MY PRECIOUS!

 

I use C4D since version 6.8. I have 99% of my workflow tools access by right clicking and a menu appears offering me ALL the tools available for the mode I am in. I select the tool and i does its thing automatically or can drag with left mouse if some params need setting. Sometimes it is a dialog box and I hit return to accept the params. The advantage for me is I can sit back in my chair in a proper posture and not be leaning forward accessing keys when switching tools. Very fast and when doing 6-12+ hour session modeling I do not end up fatigued so easily. Right click menus also allow immediate tool selection at the mouse position I am at. Does Blender currently have a way to set this up?

 

I've started toying with Blender recently because I bought an eye generator for it and while it's powerful, the navigation is abysmal compared to apps like Softimage (I was using this app for asset creation until Autodesk killed it) and now I'm using Modo which fits greatly in my pipeline.

And I have my UI set up to where all of the tools I use frequently are easily accessible.

 

Try to change a chair, or desk to appropriate one. There is no reason to strain yourself, when sitting at the desk for hrs.
You can easily set your environment, that you can reach all peripherals and sit in the straight posture.
Personally I like higher desks, where keyboard and mouse is on the bottom extendable shelve. In such I got my legs on the floor, and 90deg elbows, reaching keyboard and mouse, yet top of the desk is spared for any workspace (i.e. paper notebooks).

 

Yes, just change the key, I think blender's contextual menu is on the space bar, bind it to the mouse and you can probably do that.

 

That's some misinformation here. Gimmick plugins (that you can work without in most of the cases) arent a point. It is core functionality that is more steamlined in Blender than in many programs. Including basic features nessesary for game asset development, such as shape keys, vertex groups and UV editing: in Blender, they all can be edited from Edit mode. 3ds Max ("industry professional app") is a mess in comparsion. Edit Poly and UV Unwrap are separate modifiers (which you can only work with one ot a time), Morpher modifier is also pain to work with, and for skinning/weighting, there are whole 3 redundant systems, none of which is quite good. In general, almost every modifier in 3ds Max felt like working with different program, since many of them were bought from 3rd party devs and left without any further support. Blender's clean character/game asset workflow is what sold me on it.
Maya, from what I know, is either similar or worse in that regard. Shape Key workflow there is as bad as Max, needing multiple copies of the object. While in Blender, shape keys are stored in the same mesh, and if a key is created in Edit mode, only modified vertices get recorded. Which is sometimes important for optimization. And none of them have anything like Geometry Nodes. Which already cover both creating custom modifiers and procedural generation of content, provided the user has some vector math knowledge

 

Wrong answer. I don't need physiotherapeutic advice from a developer. Everything is proper for using the mouse to do 90% of my chores till I get into typing or finding this or that key in C4D. The reason I am asking about that ability in Blender is I do not want to strain myself over long sessions. You play hall monitor on others when they get off topic. Stay on topic..which is Blender and it's UI and suitability for different workflows. Not table height. ?!? I need to get an ergonomically correct table and chair to use Blender without stress is what you are saying. Not a great selling point and no info on Blender except deal with it.

Edit: I hate hotkeys. Interferes with my tobacco smoking.

 

There was only one time in my life I thought Blender was lacking.
It was at the moment that I wanted to edit "a lot of" millions vertices mesh.
Even selecting the vertices was a problem.
Obviously I started to google the issue. Turns out it was a Blender only problem, on other well known commercial software it was doable.

Except of this one time Blender is a god's gift.

[Edit] Ok the second one is that exportig/importing fbx is far from perfect.[/Edit]

 

You complain about using tools, but it looks like your ergonomy is lacking, since you can not proceed with certain tech.
If you strain yourself using your workspace, it is not me who is wrong. No need to going defense mode, when someone try to help and give an advise. You can unlock your ability with working tools, if you get more open minded.

So yes, blender requires use of lots of shortcuts.
For work effectiveness, any software like Unity, Maya, 3Ds, or blender, has tons of useful shortcuts.
Learning them improves workflow. But constraining self, is obviously constraining the speed of work.

Don't mind me, blender was always a pain for me, because I couldn't do much with mouse in the past. I am not 3D artist, I am just tweaking things here and there in general, so I don't want to spend tons of times learning shortcuts, when I just open software occasionally for 1hr or 2. I literally attempted to learn blender before 2.0 three or four times over years. Each failed. After 2.0 something eventually clicked (pun intended ). I do love 3D Max however for years.
Otherwise with shortcuts, blender it is fast to work with.

However, I am mostly programmer, so I need a keyboard in a reach of comfortable hands. Not just a mouse. It is not something I do just imagine.
Myself having few decades at the desk, and no problem with eyes strain, nor back, nor hands.
Developers can be in fact good source of such advise. No reason to reject such knowledge a straight.
We developers tend to sit long hrs in front of PC. Knowledge is there on reach of the hand.

 

Hmm, I'd say no matter the workplace, being able to do what you want to do with just one hand is certainly more comfortable.

 

Do you right click a file every time you want to copy it or do you use Ctrl+C/V?

 

Have done it occasionally by mouse, yeah

We are not talking in absolutisms here...

 

What I'm getting at is that these shortcuts exist for a reason and purposefully avoiding them is the fault of the user and not the software. Ctrl+C/V saves you a great deal of time rather than doing everything one-handed with a mouse, especially because it's a common operation and the shortcuts that exist in Blender are the same way. Here's an example:

I want to bevel an edge in Blender. Bevelling edges is an extremely common operation in a lot of modelling because it's a quick and easy way to apply specific surface details. Here's the process with the mouse:

1. Click the object in question
2. Click the mode selector dropdown near the upper left of the window
3. Select "edit mode"
4. Click the edge select button
5. Select the edge I want to bevel
6. Click the bevel tool on the tool shelf
7. Click the handle on the screen and drag it
8. Scroll the mouse wheel to get the appropriate bevel subdivision
9. Click away

Here's how you do it with shortcuts:

1. Click the object in question
2. Hit tab to enter edit mode
3. Hit 2 on the number row to enter edge select mode
4. Click the edge
5. Hit Ctrl+B to enter bevel mode
6. Move the mouse to size the bevel
7. Scroll the mouse wheel to get the appropriate bevel subdivision
8. Click away or hit enter

Despite being only one step less, if you actually put this into practice, the process is dramatically faster. This, like many operations in 3D modelling, is one you'll be repeating a lot. The reasons the shortcuts exist is to make that process faster and more comfortable. The idea that "one-handed operation is more comfortable" is untrue unless you only have one functional hand. Using both hands, one for direct input operations and one for hotkey operations is more comfortable and more efficient.

Ignoring that is not the fault of the software.

 

i use a mouse with macro buttons and set common stuff like copy, paste, delete, duplicate to those.

i try to set it up so that neither of my hands needs to move and i don't have to do many "stretching" maneuvers for hotkeys.

while I love mayas context/gesture menus for speed, if you are doing 8+ hours a day, the click, hold, and drags become a major problem (RSI issues). I've heard blenders toggle style hotkeys is better for that (report coming from long time, professional modelers).

But ergonomics is only something the grunts care about - probably not a factor when it comes time for big studio to purchase license's.

 

If this would be true in absolution like this, every single programmer would use VIM (broaf...). This is not the case. Especially not when you are in the learning phase. Blender nowadays has an okay-ish interface, but it was abysmal before (VIM of 3D applications), but always had excellent shortcut-system. Once you learned it, you could work okay-ish in it, but while you were learning it... I rarely rage-uninstall applications, the old blender was one of them. Then I set the HDD it was on on fire and sacrificed it to the old gods. Then they finally updated the UX...

 

Comparing to VIM is kinda not really a great comparison at all because VIM's first and foremost priority is entirely keyboard based functionality. It's the kind of thing you're meant to use at the terminal level, historically rooted in not having mouse input at all. This is absolutely an apples and oranges thing. No, not even a significant amount of programmers would use VIM, but do you know what they very well might use?

Visual Studio.

Visual Studio is the most commonly used IDE by a wide margin, and I guarantee that almost everyone using it has also learned a whole load of its shortcuts to help streamline the development process. Hell, the first thing I do when I set up Rider is make sure it's using Visual Studio shortcuts because of this.

Also, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, the interface that Blender currently uses is effectively over a decade old at this point. Complaining that it "used to be the worst" is like complaining about the Xbox's Red Ring of Death.

 

Maybe my memory fails me, but I remember that Blender's big UX-revamp was in 2018. Maybe? Or something like that? I'm too lazy to dig up changelogs right now.

Anyway, maybe not the best comparison, although my point is exactly that, neither VIM, nor old Blender was effectively usable without the in-depth knowledge of shortcuts. Until you learned them, you were stalled. The self-learning was not possible. When Blender changed its UI and dragged all the UX and with that people kicking and screaming closer to the mainstream 3D applications' they enabled people to start to use it even when they don't yet know all the shortcuts in and out bringing the learning curve closer to the rest of the DCC applications'.

The only console I own is an Xbox 360, so please stop painting that devil on that wall...

 

The only thing the 2018 interface changed was adding a default mouse click behaviour option on first boot and changing the tool shelf. Aside from that practically nothing changed.

 

In order for every programmer to use VIM, VIM would also need to a good keyboard mapping scheme. It does not have such. Actually vim was designed to work through terminal in case where numpad and arrow keys are missing, and the terminal does not transmit Ctrl+Shift+Alt+<key> key combination. And that shows.

On related note, most programmers (probably) know majority of common modern day shortcuts. Shift/Ctrl + cursor keys, Home/End and Ctrl+Home/End, Ctrl+Insert,Shift+Delete, and so on. Also they work with selection (for example, "Shift+Ctrl+Right" --> "select from cursor position till the end of the word" and "Shift+Home" --> "Select from cursor position till the end of hte line"). So in the end keyboard chords won.

That's actually false. The latest UI revamp happened during 3.0 release, and that's 2021. They added "industry standard" hotkeys, allowed users to select with left click, and so on. If you compare it with 2.74, it is a vastly different experience. There's also a pie menu somewhere.

Being a decade old is also not a sound argument. If UI serves its purpose it shouldn't change. It should stay the same, so the users continue using it without distractions.

For example, most of the modern IDEs use Ideas born in Borland Turbo C/Turbo Pascal. That's from 1987. They were further expanded upon in Visual Studio 6, and aside from it being done in MFC, it pretty much provided standard IDE functionality we see to this day. VIsual Studio itself reuses the same concepts it had since Visaul Studio 2005, and there were no significant improvements since. (There were multiple attempts to make it worse, and many of them succeeded). Lighter editors like VSCode and Notepad++ borrow ideas from vim.(surprisingly), as it was vim (and emacs) which started playing with screen split editing in the first place.

 

According to wiki
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)

That is 2011 April and 2019 July respectively.

 

It was 2019. With the 2.8 release.
https://www.blender.org/press/blender-2-80-released/ and https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/UI

 

For files, almost always right click, very rarely click on a File->Copy menu.
Depends on the files also, and how much automation I need at that time.

Since it is so easy to make accident with a shortcut and undo redo result when copying files is not obvious visually.

For working with ide/text editors and modeling programs ---> ctr+c ctr + v

 

Actually, the multiple mesh for blendshapes is a workflow that's been around for years, especially if you use programs like ZBrush where you can sculpt your character's facial expressions and export it as a blendshape (each layer you sculpt will be a blendshape when you import it into your app.

Btw, in Maya and even Modo, you can create your blendshape on a single mesh and everything will play nice. But these days a lot of character artists will use ZBrush for this particular workflow, especially for things like extracting wrinkle maps.

Also having a separate mesh is good for doing corrective blendshapes, where you apply the shape after it's transform. It's a bit more difficult on a single mesh, that's already rigged, and will be very slow because the joints are being calculated.

 

Ok, thanks for the correction. Most Maya tutorials show multi mesh workflow so I thought there is no alternative. Had my fill with it in 3ds Max days. I was exporting to the platform where mesh KB size mattered, so Blender's "record only edited vertices" approach made big difference.
As for importing from Zbrush, Blender has "Join as Shapes" command so it is covered. Even better, shape key algorithm can be easily replicated in Geometry Nodes; in this case, the external shape can even be animated itself and the modifier will update accordingly. Corrective blendshapes though, here is the situation is more complicated. Making regular (object space) corrective shapes is trivial: you can pose a character and edit a selected (on a same mesh) shapekey in Sculpt mode. Blender will account for armature deformation and edit result will be in pose space. Tangent based shape keys (ones you could put after Armature deformation in the stack) are currently a problem. No default support, and Geometry Nodes do not have an input node for Tangent. Tangents currently possible in GN only through hacks; maybe the node will be added later since the system is still under development

 

iirc it's planned but, much like with Unity features, I can't really recommend waiting for it to end up getting implemented. I love the idea, but GN is basically like using an experimental feature in Unity right now, complete with most of the guides being rendered out of date within a few months of being posted.

 

GN is already very useful and integrates into regular modifier stack seamlessly (well, almost). Even being quite dumb with programming, I was able to make various custom deformer effects for my animations (such as world space squash and stretch) , and even procedural prefabs (living fences, rooms with "nine tiles" algorithm for wall panels, and more). Progress has been great and doesnt show signs of stopping