What is userfriendly ?

Yes, but searching is apparently unintuitive. At least that's the impression I get from some people asking questions that could have been answered so easily with Google.

 

The feature is indeed nice. But this assumes already that you know the name of the tool. Now how do you find out the correct name when you already need to search for the tool because you haven't found it in the graphical UI? Blender isn't exactly famous to rely at standards. And so does it with tool names.

As Ryah pointed out, the need to search for UI items is already the sign of having an unintuitive UI. A good UI is self explaining and user leading to some degree. Here we are at UI standards again.

In Unity we have our Hiearchy. Here we have all the objects in the scene. We have the Project tab where you can find all the assets. And we have the Inspector where you will find all settings for the currently selected element. And that's basically it. And you know exactly where to look when you look for an object in the scene for example. This is great UI design. It is good for muscle memory, easy to use, and gives you a fluid workflow. Because no matter how the tool or the setting is named, you know where it just has to be.

In Blender we have settings in the Toolshelf at the left side, we have settings in the Properties* toolshelf at the right side, we have settings in the upper menu bar, we have settings in the lower menu bar, we have settings in the Properties Window, we have even settings in other windows that has nothing to do wit the current window. Same with tools. The tool or the setting you are looking for can be everywhere. And so you are in a permanent search mode. That's one of the things that makes the Blender UI so unintuitive and hard to use. It is not self explaining and not user leading.

* One of those many small UI quirks. There is the expandable sidebar of the 3D View called Properties. And there is the window called Properties, where you can find the render settings for example. Two different areas, one name. Now follow the advice to change the shading in the Properties

Yeah, that's one of the good things in Blender. It is customizable to some degree. But i would not recommend such a customization for beginners. And even for advanced users it's problematic. Most of the Blender tutorials still heavily uses those hotkeys. "... now press G, then press ... " . Means you break the connection to existing video tutorials. And you have a communication problem now when you don't know the standard hotkeys anymore. Like explaining a newbie a few things. And bug reports are also problematic now. Caused by a bug, or caused by your custom hotkey? I had such rascals ...

There is also the dilemma that this hotkey manager is hard to use. It doesn't tell you about hotkey conflicts for example. And that you most probably have to redo custom hotkeys with every new version. Happens to me regularly.

 

Blender contains its own google. How do I extrude?

hit space... start typing extrude... - oh! there it is and you can see which hot key its bound to, if any. If you get bored of typing extrude, maybe you'll notice that you can use 'E' to extrude. Or if you have prior modeling experience and extrude is a different key in that software, rebind it.

Just got to be in edit mode. Or maybe you're referring to things like... you can't search for mirror, you need to search for modifier, and then mirror is a sub category of that. That's all stuff you get used to once you learn where things are. Oh and modifiers can sometimes be added in edit mode but really you can't apply them unless you're in object mode. I understand the reason for that but the first time... it lets you use mirror, but then you can't apply mirror... and you scour the internet for the answer... only to be told to look at the little 'modifiers cannot be applied in edit mode' text blender told you all along.

@Tiles I like the google-ish feature to search for the tools I haven't used other software as much as I've used blender so I'm not familiar with the standard, but I'm pretty used to where things are and I have been using it on and off for like a year.

You got me on the properties thing. It's poorly named for beginners. Maybe that's why a lot of people just say 'N', which is the hot key for that menu and specify 'property window' for the other.

D: such an insult to open source software!

Not sure what to say about the tutorials. It's annoying and clunky, but I guess for people switching the keybinds around, you'd need a shortcut reference open next to you knowing what's what. You people and your standardized tools! If it were me, I'd just memorize every key bending there is! But I tend to only use free stuff, so that isn't very much.

 

No insult involved. We talk about user customizations without touching the code, not rewriting the software

 

Oh right, this is a 'user friendly' topic. Oops.

Right tool for the job... right person for the tool? Blender comes easily to me so I suppose my opinion on this topic is not valid.

 

I've never said that you 'needed a course' to learn Blender, just that it's the best way to go about it. That was a general statement btw. It also applies to Unity, Modo, C4D, 3ds max, Maya,....

Try looking at it from this perspective:
Imagine that you are a person who knows literally nothing about 3d modeling. How are you supposed to asses which of the two hundred videos/tutorials you've found on YT/Google are good and which aren't?
You can't do this in a reliable fashion.

A person who is a certified trainer by the Blender Foundation, Autodesk or whatnot, is guaranteed to live up to certain standards a random YouTuber may or may not.
If you attend to a course, you have the bonus of being able to ask a question and get an answer immediately, whenever something is unclear.


Blender's update strategy isn't part of the problem though. That's also a case where the problem sits in front of the monitor. Being a technology enthusiast, I can perfectly relate to that. I always want the newest »X«. Be it the newest Unity, the newest Blender, the newest KDE, Windows, Linux Kernel, drivers and whatnot.
There is no good reason not to stick with, say Blender 2.61, while working through a tutorial series made for Blender 2.61.
If you feel like you need to use Blender 2.74 for tutorials written for 2.61 and run into problems, only you yourself are to blame.
Once you're proficient with Blender in general, you'll find it easy to adapt to newer versions because the UI changes generally aren't groundbreaking.

Okay, now imagine that Epic wants to add three times more features to UE4. If they hide them in some menus with a logical structure, the newbie will appreciate them keeping the UI clear. The enthusiasts and professionals would have liked it more if those features were quicker to access, which would lead to a more cluttered UI.

Rarely your application will only be used by one very specific type of user. In the vast majority of cases you'll have different types of users with varying skill-sets, backgrounds, preferences, etc.
Making user friendly applications for for an inhomogeneous userbase is a balancing act.

To that end, making design decisions that lead to your application being harder to learn, in the name of making it more efficient to use for enthusiasts/professionals after they've put in the work, is perfectly justifiable, IF these are the people you're making your application for.

Have an example straight out of the world of gamedev:
WASD for movement is not intuitive. Just like many things in Blender, it's something you just need to know. If you were to write a game for some grandmothers who never played PC games, you better use the arrow keys for movement.
The button with the arrow that points forward, for forward movement is intuitive. Hell, using F for forward, B for backward, L for left and R for right is more intuitive than WASD, which to those people will seem completely arbitrary.

 

I understand the reason to go on a course, but you're missing my point. If you pay to go on a course for a free piece of software because said user needs the course in the first place, you're then spending quite a substantial sum on a free piece of software which isn't used in mid sized or large studios.

Blender to me is what you learn when you don't have a budget and nobody said that's a bad thing, some people work wonders with blender and they're fast with it. I don't find it intuitive, It's a mash up of modes / key commands and wonky navigation / clonky UV tools and I'll never change my mind on that. You might pick up Modo and think it's an utter piece of crap.. I use Maya for a lot of things, I don't think it's intuitive either but it's a necessary evil.. So I got used to it.

I also personally believe it's easier to pick up a piece of software when you're a N00B, I struggle far more because of pre-conceptions of how things should work.

I tried doing a lot of stuff in UE4 that worked in Unity and wasted a lot of time dragging UE4 backwards through a hedge to do the same. It was simpler when I forgot all I knew and used it the way it should of been used, plus it turns out in a lot of ways their methodologies are much better.

On the UE4 UI, it has FAR more tools and features and sub options than ANY 3D modelling tool, lets not talk about hypotheticals here. It's still FAR more intuitive than all 3D packages combined... Has some great tutorials made by the Dev's too, it's pretty hard to mess up for the basics.

 

As someone who tried (and failed miserably) at game dev many moons ago when it was about learning directX and writing your own engine I saw that OP thread and had a good laugh.

Unity is insanely easy in comparison. I also find it user friendly and intuitive, but it doesn't have the "take my idea and make my game" button yet.. Something they need to work on I guess.

 

I see.
People choose their software for a variety of reasons. Budget constraints, license terms, source code access, documentation, help and general support, blatant fanboyism or recommendations from third parties who had their very own reasons, just to name a few.
I do see good reasons to pay for a Blender course. Hypothetically (nobody knows what the future will bring) if my experience with Blender stayed as positive as it currently is and I were given the choice between a 3ds license and a Blender course for roughly the same amount of money some years from now, there's no way I'd pick the 3ds license.
The course would have to be substantially more expensive before I'd even start considering the license. And even then, you'd need a set of pretty good arguments why I should switch.

Okay, that's a huge problem I forgot to take into account. I was coming at it from the direction that if you have absolutely no background knowledge, a tutorial that doesn't explain the absolutely fundamental basics very good, will be a huge problem. It wouldn't be, if you already knew them from another application.

If you're dealing with absolute newbies, you simply cannot expect them to understand words like "edges, vertices, faces, UV mapping, topology, mesh, polycount, polygon, tris, quads, ngons, texture, shading, rendering, ..." You need to explain them in depth.
Sadly, many tutorials I've seen that described themselves as "for noobs", glossed over many of the basics and just dropped you straight into creating a model.

I'm going to take your word for it.
I haven't really looked into UE4 because it came out just a little too late, for me to be interesting for my current project. I'll keep it in mind though.

 

I prefer the ever changing state of my games as I develop them. My first idea is usually not my final implementation, mostly for the better. Look what happened to the film industry when studios with money to burn gave Shamalon a 'make my movie idea' button.