Well, damn, I just read a scathing commentary on Blender. I won’t call it a review because, in my mind anyway, he seems to have never become the least bit proficient in the program. The very thing others, including many users of Maya, find streamlined to a work flow he is crying about. I started to leave a comment but he wouldn’t get it. And, I mean ‘He wouldn’t get it’. At seventy four his feeble comments didn’t even piss me off and that wouldn’t have been the case… . Damn he would have lost his mind attempting anything in 2.49. He,d be in a rubber room somewhere if he has a problem with right clicking. LOL! Matter of fact I would find his remarks humorous except for one thing. He could be taken seriously by some. http://www.redsharknews.com/business/item/173-blender-love-it-and-or-hate-it
I installed and uninstalled blender 4 times before it finally made sense. I have been using it for 3 years now and can not do my job without it. Speaking from personal experience I can say that the following companies use models/animations/effects created in Blender:
Siemens
NAACP
ESPN
Home Depot
Chick Fil a
BMI
Quantum Digital
Eppointments
Modern City Moms
Precision Enterprises LLC
And I am sure I am not the only freelancer making a full time living using Blender. Is blender as good as the “big boys” Who cares? Not a single one of the companies listed above cared what software I used to create their models/animations.
So does this article bother me? Not even a little.
it’s mildly interesting to me that he focuses his criticism only on the UI. that’s disingenuous at best, downright lazy at worst. it would have been much more interesting to see him critique the guts of blender - the quality of its modeling tools, camera tracker, texture painting, VSE, etc. otherwise it’s like saying star wars episode 1 sucks because of jar jar binks. yeah, he was annoying, but it’s a lazy way of critiquing an entire movie.
sure, the UI is difficult to learn. so what? i’ve wasted hours trying to find where stuff is in ms office 2007, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that office is very powerful at what it does - it’s just annoying to learn where the new commands are. i think critiquing a UI is perfectly valid, but if your ENTIRE critique is based on that… well, readers should take the critique as seriously as he takes the software he is critiquing.
the title should be changed to “blender UI: love it or hate it.”
sigh…
oh, on an amusing note - do any of you other folks accidently use “x” to delete something in other programs? haha. i do that all the time at work.
Hmm…an interesting read, that’s for sure 
Thanks for sharing!
The problem with these kinds of posts is that if anyone does reply in defence of the criticized software, I’m guessing you’d very quickly get labelled as an un-objective fanboy.
Just on the subject of keyboard shortcuts - how many times have I read on these forums that when AutoDesk users watch Blenderheads work with said shortcuts they say that the Blenderheads seem to be working a lot faster?
Anyway, definitely bookmarking the link :yes:
EDIT:
All the time, man, all the time It’s just much more quick and accessible than having to go aaaall the way over to Delete!
Great post, btw, I totally agree.
I try to rotate images on web sites al the time with the middle mouse button…
he should use the Maya keymaps. 
i agree the default blender keymaps suck.
Haha, it’s odd isn’t it? One of the main criticisms that we hear in regards to Blender is the “odd” UI, and yet here we are trying to use the same “odd” UI functions in other applications 
honestly, i get what he’s saying. for users coming from other software i’m sure it takes getting used to. but a different keymap does not damn an entire piece of software. for someone like me that has never used any 3d software before blender, well it’s just another piece of software to learn - no better or worse than anything else since i’ve not had any experience. again, i think it’s silly to criticize software by basically stomping his feet and crying that it’s not like 3dmax or maya.
oh, and the other part of his criticism is “it’s not as good as commercial products.” well, i suspect if blender had hundreds of paid developers working full time on writing the software then it would probably be just as good or better. that’s another silly criticism.
i’d be ok with him if he spent one paragraph saying “the ui is difficult to learn if you’re coming from another 3d program and it’s not as fully developed as commercial software. now, let’s talk in detail about how good it is at accomplishing it’s purpose.”
i’ve read many times that blender’s uv tools are some of the best around. i’ve seen repeatedly on maya and 3dmax forums that if people are having trouble with uvs to download blender and use blender’s uv tools.
I still use the default keymap set, but then again Blender is the only comprehensive software I ever used, so I’m used to its keymap paradigm.
Now I will admit that there still is numerous discussion over the Blender UI not being as good as it could be, and I will agree that we can still see further expansion of the current concept, but it is at least better than 2.49 (something which you’ll even find a number of professionals agreeing with).
When you look at the big picture though, there’s a number of things that were working against Blender in the professional field that no longer exist, Blender now has Ngons along with an overhaul of the modeling system, an overhauled compositor, a completely new render engine with GI and node-based materials, an ongoing upgrade in the sculpting department (dynamic topology and masking), a future viewport code upgrade that is already being worked on, ect…
LOL. I’m glad I’m not the only one trying to use Blender’s shortcuts in other programs.
Ace Dragon, blender is powerful, but the blender default keymaps are useless for people coming from other apps…
its a huge turnoff trust me. and the Maya keymaps need to be “fixed”,
as they do not have access to the “specials menus” “main specials” , edge, face, verts…
i made some custom Maya keymaps but removed them since some changes kept breaking them…
maybe i will re-up them in a few days…
Most of that critique is about the default keymap, not about the software itself. It really is poor and very counter-intuitive, i certainly don’t like it so i use my own custom one. I’ve rarely used the default shortcuts for any software, including 3dsmax, so it doesn’t really bother me so much because they’re configurable.
I’d say that when it comes to serious full-time use, the transition between any 3D software is always a pretty painful one that requires you to re-learn a lot of things that go beyond key shortcuts. So if you don’t have the time or patience to go through something like that, stick to the software you’re familiar with.
sorry but this is like saying: Oh my god italian is useless to people who come from other countries and don’t know it!!
I mean, I started with blender, and now when I move to other programs I have problems with the keymaps… and it doesn’t look to me that other programs have all the same keymapping…
But I don’t go around saying that maya or 3d studio keymapping is useless because I use blender… is just different I guess.
Not my intention to derail this thread but seein’ as how you brought up Gimp again…
Let me clue you into something.
I’ve used gimp for 7 years. I am a black belt in Gimp-Fu.
I’ve written python plugins for Gimp when needed.
Gimp 2.8 for windows is broken and buggy. And I’m not just talking about the performance.
Many things just don’t work. Not ‘don’t work as I expect’, just plain do not work. Broken.
Gradient editor and color maps, for example. One cannot edit a gradient. One cannot edit a color map for indexed images.
Again, I’m talking about the windows release of 2.8. Should never have been released.
Yeas, I’d dearly like to go back to Linux and used Gimp ‘as it was meant to be’, but that just ain’t feasible at the mo.
And that, mon ami, is what sucks
I’m not discounting that, and given that was what the tread originated as. The thread I linked however has spiralled into a big chest puffing, my tool is better than your, feature that feature this debate, layout this, layout that, blah blah blah.
I am drawing the conclusion that this is yet another pointless thread saying who is better and why yet without providing specific details and evidence (and I have yet to learn to stay out of these pointless debates of opinion that typically lacks fact).
Not to mention open source projects usually get started by a programmer who wants a tool a specific way. Like minded people join and if enough like minded people join, the project grows. Those that aren’t liked minded, have the opportunity to do the same. Why do you suppose there are so many variations of Linux distributions?
Anyways, different tools fit different people for different jobs for different reasons. Whoever wrote the article at redshark had all those things not fitting together well.
… but I am also doubtful he was “reporting” but rather being biased. I think the article at redshark is nothing more than a clever ploy to generate hits out of the Blender community by generating this reaction.
I have tendency to try to deselect text by pressing a, thus removing said selection and replacing it with an a.
On Topic: I find myself getting really fanboyish at such posts and I have to restrain myself from commenting zealous blender fanatical comments (“All hail our great and shiny monkey head”) but on a more serious note, in the end it comes down to whether you want/can create stuff with a program, if it doesn’t work the way you want you either modify it (off topic: the lack of customization options like background colours and themes etc is really frustrating and tends to make move on more quickly) or you don’t use it and move on/find something that does what you want it to do.
Blender is as far as I know one of the most customizable programs, and nothing is stopping you from changing stuff the way you want it. Though I can understand that for some industry professionals it can be annoying as it requires an investment of time and thus money to learn/customize blender. But if really so many people are put of by blenders default keymap, why is the maya key map still so broken (as some people report, I have no experience with it). I mean if some people really wanted it to work they could fork some money together and get someone who knows what he/she is doing to fix it?
So it kind-a worked… You text was deselected…
I tried to read as much as possible of you guys’ comments. Here’s mine:
He’s on the loosing side. Blender IS being adopted more frequently here and there, especially as people who had a steady job with a company get laid off and forced to go freelance. They can’t afford anything themselves, so they pick up Blender. And, once you’ve grown accustomed to Blender, you really do grow to like it. Then, they get back inside a studio, and bring in Blender, here and there, till all of a sudden it’s being used a lot.
place57 that is exactly how many installs it took me to even get that damn cube to move. 2.48 I believe it was. And, if I hadn’t been retired I might have just given up. Somehow the many tutorials out there were unknown to me. But, even then with my new found grabbing ability Blender was pretty damn intimidating. And, just about the time I knew my way around the UI here comes the new Blender. Hell, maybe the one constant really is change. But, many times I still run across 2.49 out there in video tutorial land and have to smile.
Now with respect to my post about the e-mail I received from RedShark containing the rant about Blender. Hey, that is what I choose to call it. I pulled up the RedShark e-mail again and noticed something on the bottom of it. ‘This email has been sent to: ghost_ _ @_ _ … from The Lightworks Team’. So I then Google up ‘Lightworks Team’ and came up with the page below. But, as some have posted it was obviously a hatchet job and not a unbiased review of a program.
Hey - I originally started a thread to discuss this article and that thread got closed because the conversation was here. First off, although I’m not the writer of this article, I do work for RedShark, so take anything I’m about to say with a grain of salt.
The form of the article is definitely more ‘Commentary’, less ‘Review’, and definitely not intended to be a ‘hatchet job’. In essence, it’s an Op/Ed piece, meant to spur conversation. In that sense, I think it was a success, even if I disagree with the author’s assertions.
Personally, most of Phil’s sticking points are non-issues for me, although when I first downloaded Blender, I opened it up, took one look at the interface, and said ‘Pass’. It was only several months later, when I had the time to spend, that I gave it a proper try. Now, I can’t imagine doing a project without it.
If there was an ‘aha’ moment when it all clicked, I can’t remember it. I think that’s because Blender training seems to build upon itself, gradually, through A LOT of repetition. It seems impossible at first, with an impenetrable interface and a 1000 hotkeys, but with a little dedication, you realize and appreciate how the program is laid out and constructed.
Previously, most of my work was in NLEs, and I always contended that if you know one NLE, you know them all. I can pick up a new editor easily, becoming proficient in minutes. I started my Blender journey with similar expectations, and left discouraged. However, once I realized that this was a different beast altogether, I adjusted my expectations and approached Blender with more patience and respect, and was rewarded for my efforts.
Anyway, just my two pennies.