I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender. How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender! The 2.49b to 2.5x upgrade was insane, after getting into the flow, I can no longer go back. If I go back, I can only do stuff that is shortcuttet, but the fact that spacebar search is not up there makes it really really lacking. Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed. Most shortcuts are placed to sane defaults, along with that
Your first problem is the default WM problem, which can be solved after digging down into a option menu somewhere and change alt modifier to super instead. I disagree about your second point: It would waist space, and ruin the initial workflow learning. When you are learning blender as a 3D newb, how hard is it to aknowledge that grab is set to G, scale to S, rotate to R and extrude to E? Add on that you got plane locking on Z, X and Y, which coincidently are on the names of the axis. Besides that, and the more obscure sub menus, what stuff do you actually want when modeling and you don't know shit? I learned the idea on 3D on milkshape, at some point later i tried blender and did not like it. And some time later I tried blender again, but this time looked up a basic 3D tutorial for blender, it was really really good for learning. Just replacing the "button X here" with "hit keyboard and speed up workflow" is something every single student of something like modeling should learn quite fast.
As for the third point? A menu bar? Options? Etc? They already exists. You have tool options under the tool panel, you have menu bars elserwhere, they finally got rid of hiding away the options menu under the information tab and made a popup for it. I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't cl
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the
I agree about the help system lacking, that one annoys me. I disagree about using UI conventions being a good thing when using a poweruser app, as it would slow me down. I also agree the view is a complete mess, however I doubt any of the competive apps are any better. At the best they might have a few useless wizards more, to hide the mess. The mess is still present, so the point is a bit moot.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was inni
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably
Change the window manager? Seriously? I am not reconfiguring my entire window manager (of which almost all my meta keys are bound to shortcuts of some kind) just so ONE application can work properly. Blender (which is mostly used in linux anyways) needs to seriously look at what the default and most common hotkey configurations are before blindly overriding the most well known and trusted window manager hotkeys in the linux world (aside the basic alt+F# keys of course).
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frustrating (Score:2)
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
Re: (Score:1)
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender.
How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender!
The 2.49b to 2.5x upgrade was insane, after getting into the flow, I can no longer go back. If I go back, I can only do stuff that is shortcuttet, but the fact that spacebar search is not up there makes it really really lacking.
Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed. Most shortcuts are placed to sane defaults, along with that
Re: (Score:2)
How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender!
Doesn't work in 2.55 beta on Linux. Blender also needs Alt-click with no substitute.
Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed.
But they are needed by beginners, so that they don't have to worry about shortcuts at the same time they have to worry about everything else.
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender.
A menu bar, a few optional toolbars, a context sensitive menu
Re:frustrating (Score:1)
Your first problem is the default WM problem, which can be solved after digging down into a option menu somewhere and change alt modifier to super instead.
I disagree about your second point: It would waist space, and ruin the initial workflow learning. When you are learning blender as a 3D newb, how hard is it to aknowledge that grab is set to G, scale to S, rotate to R and extrude to E? Add on that you got plane locking on Z, X and Y, which coincidently are on the names of the axis. Besides that, and the more obscure sub menus, what stuff do you actually want when modeling and you don't know shit? I learned the idea on 3D on milkshape, at some point later i tried blender and did not like it. And some time later I tried blender again, but this time looked up a basic 3D tutorial for blender, it was really really good for learning. Just replacing the "button X here" with "hit keyboard and speed up workflow" is something every single student of something like modeling should learn quite fast.
As for the third point? A menu bar? Options? Etc? They already exists. You have tool options under the tool panel, you have menu bars elserwhere, they finally got rid of hiding away the options menu under the information tab and made a popup for it. I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't cl
Re: (Score:2)
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the
Re: (Score:1)
I agree about the help system lacking, that one annoys me. I disagree about using UI conventions being a good thing when using a poweruser app, as it would slow me down.
I also agree the view is a complete mess, however I doubt any of the competive apps are any better. At the best they might have a few useless wizards more, to hide the mess. The mess is still present, so the point is a bit moot.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was inni
Re: (Score:2)
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably
Re: (Score:1)