I’ve told you what I love about using Blender so in the interest of fairness, here’s my top 10 things I can’t stand about the software!
Regarding #10 and #1, you can actually bring over your settings when you install (a new version of) Blender. It’s not clear to me which OS you use, but if you are a down-to-earth citizen, you use Windows:
Open an Explorer Window and type “%APPDATA%” into the address bar. You will be navigated to your personal application data folder. Find the “Blender Foundation” folder, within it, there’s the “Blender” folder. This folder contains settings folders for every version of Blender you have used. You should be able to just copy that folder and rename it to whatever version you just installed (e.g. “2.77” to “2.78”).
Under inferior operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS, there should be a similarly hidden folder in your user directory.
There’s also a very poorly conceived way to do this from the Blender UI. The very first time you launch a newly installed version, there’s a “Copy Previous Settings” Button in the splashscreen. It’s only there until the new settings folder has been created (e.g. once you save something), so you must be very vigilant.
Shortcut keys are really never a problem for me because of two reasons: pie menus and the spacebar menu. Also the Asset Management addon by pitiwazou et al is very good (although paid).
10- It is true that UI does not help to enable many addons at once. There could be an enable/disable addons of active category.
It could be useful to track conflicts.
9- Nowadays, developers have taken good habits to document what they are working on.
Features in developments are documented on a wiki page which will be linked by release log on official site of the Blender release that will integrate them.
There are sneak peaks videos. It can introduce a problem. people may ask a documentation for a feature that is not finished.
This kind of request can not be taken seriously.
Most of times by reading commits logs, you can understand how things works.
But you can ask on a forum, there is always somebody who knows (at least developer himself).
When feature is integrated, release log is the key and often video tutorials are created following the release in the next days, week or month.
So, new features are easy to discover.
The way to present official documentation on line is evolving.
I remember that for 2.3x series, official documentation was based on 2.32 printed book. Html pages were black text on white background with few images.
Manual for 2.4x series looks like this.
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Modeling/Metas
I remember that its french translation made by volunteers was finished when blender 2.50 was released.
During 2.5x series, nobody knows if a feature will be kept or redone. Most of 2.5 releases were unstable tests that user could not trust. And UI was completely different than for 2.4x.
So, rewriting of manual restarted only for 2.6x series.
Now, manual is presented in a new way. There is the idea that its whole content should not be rewritten each time UI is updated, each time Blender enters a new series.
Manual maintainers seems to be numerous from the past and very active.
You don’t have to create an account to software site to read documentation.
You can buy lots of books and training DVDs.
Obviously, situation is a lot better than what it was.
8- Blender Interface is probably always on top of conversation on this forum or it is second, just after Cycles discussion.
Seriously, there is an UI section on developers site and members of community well-known to propose or help for its improvement.
https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/
7- Things are as is for historical design decisions.
If these decisions are problematic, user’s community have to agree on these problems, on solutions to find and have to explicit them to developers.
It is how blender is made by users.
Sometimes, it takes a long time to convince people that there is a problem.
Sometimes, it is easy.
But if blender does not always follow industry standard; it may also be because Blender’s users prefer their tool as is.
And sometimes, Blender’s ideas are taken up by the rest of the industry. (example: grease pencil, 3d cursor, OpenGL sequencer view…)
6- It is often hard to objectively say that it is true. It may be because 3D is hard to learn or because pros have habits in a different 3d software.
In the other hand, there will always be people to say that they learned Blender to kids.
5- it is true. In 2.4x series shortcuts were not customizable. So, one was immediately assigned to created tool.
This idea continued when shortcuts became customizable. In community, people are often referring to an operator by its shortcut.
We don’t say Translate. We say G.
“_So, what is the new feature of this release ?
_ There is a GG !
_Whoaa !”
A new keymap with standards shortcuts and less shortcuts by default is discussed since years. It was originally planned for start of 2.7x.
But it may arrive for 2.8.
Seriously, we have menus, buttons and search to access operators by other ways than shortcuts.
It is not enough. There is the idea to use more widgets in 3DView.
Pie menus already helps to use less shortcuts.
But it is also a cultural problem. Users don’t know operator’s name but they know corresponding shortcut.
So, they teach you the shortcut.
4- python api was improved to let addons create thumbnails. So, there are now, pose lib addon, pro:lighting skies addon and asset manager addon that are using this ability.
Current filebrowser is able to display thumbnails for Blends, Images and Fonts.
There are plans since 2.5 to improve this area. There is a development branch about an asset engine.
3- Rendering speed is often relative to what is rendered, with what hardware and what techniques. It is really a debate of specialists.
You have to mention what render engine; you are talking about.
By being too vague, you help nobody.
2- There are idiots, everywhere. It is a problem if you cannot get job because of that.
But if you want to fight this reputation; you should spread articles about prizes won by Blender movies or Pixar’s compliments or renderman addon.
https://gooseberry.blender.org/jury-prize-at-siggraph-festival/
1- If you were the developer of modeling tools; you would have a different point of view.
A developer have to work without a start-up.blend file that could be corrupted.
He have to test the tool, quit blender, recompile it with codes changes, restart blender and check if changes works.
Will you force him to add a cube ten times per days because you have to save your preferences once every two/three months ?
Most of these are either being worked on right now or are on the radar of the developers (UI improvements are coming, Cycles is getting a denoiser for a massive performance boost, ect…).
I also find it a little anti-climactic that the #1 reason to hate Blender is the default cube (considering that you can always delete it and save the now empty scene as your startup .blend). As for the fact there’s no ‘enable all’ for addons, have you ever considered the idea that having them all on at once could create conflicts and clutter the UI with thousands of new buttons?
most hobbyist are not going to produce scenes with Hollywood level complexity, and when your scenes don’t have that level of complexity then the commercial render engines are not as fast as most would assume. The have been people benchmarks on this forum doing test of cycles vs renderman, arnold etc and on moderately complex scenes cycles is usually faster.
I also think the learning curve bit is bunk it’s hard all around if you are trying to learn packages like modo, maya, max, lightwave, cinema, houdini.
also the industrial standard bit is bunk aside from left click select even simple things like panning, zooming and orbiting are different between the packages, translate, rotating, scaling also mapped to different keys between most packages. so yeah what standard are we talking about.
I’m critical of a lot in Blender, but the only part I hate is how flaky it is saving things. Blender deletes things I want to keep and keeps things I want to delete. I have to babysit Blender to make sure it actually does what I told it to. It’s infuriating at times how unreliable it is with my data.
Agreed. The fake/orphaned user and undo system are the hardest things for me to manage, even after a decent amount of time spent with the program. They’re also the things I tend to mention immediately when suggesting Blender to others. It’d be great to see these things improved upon in the future.
I also agree that Blender could use better tools for resource management, such as.
- -Purge (delete the datablock from the .blend file and from all places where it is used).
- -Batch replacement (replace all datablocks with the same prefix with the selected one, would be helpful in cases where you have Grass, Grass.001, Grass.030, ect…). This would especially be helpful when appending multiple group nodes that make use of smaller group components, speaking of…
- -Flag as component (for group nodes meant to only be organizational components of larger group nodes, meaning they won’t show up as an entry in the group menu).
3D is just a massive topic. Blender can do a lot so it takes time to learn it. But a better UI would to be honest make it easier teaching it.
I have years of experience seeing students struggle with it!