There’s some good tough love criticisms in that thread. It’s an interesting read.
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exactly … things are changing significantly
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Someone does need to pop in that thread and correct that one guy concerning the transform tool hotkeys, though.
…G isn’t for move! G is for grab! Geez, people. Comeon! It’s so obvious!
they are not used to modal tools … yet when they discover their potential they will fall in love like everyone else …
Edit: Looks like I got my browser tabs mixed up. I was actually responding to this link linked from another thread.
Nice to see something that is trying to be objective. I’ll give my thoughts here, because I don’t have a Flipped Normals account (although I do sub to their YouTube channel).
– Doesn’t work well with other pipelines
I agree. Fortunately, this is being worked on as we speak.
– Pipelines are already established and completely redoing your pipe is extremely expensive.
I disagree with the premise. You don’t have to redo the pipe to include Blender. Besides, pipelines change all the time. For example, Substance Painter came out only like 5 years ago and is common in pipelines.
Production is always looking for a simpler solution to a problem. Unfortunately, Blender’s poor usability ensured it was not the simpler solution. As Blender continues to improve, I think it’ll wind up in more pipelines naturally. Even if it’s just someone using HardOps/Boxcutter/DecalMachine to create Sci-Fi assets or something.
– Blender is still catching up to the established 3D Software.
I agree. I think it’s going to catch up real quick, though.
– It’s really hard to find professionals who knows how to use Blender compared to Maya. This makes it a lot harder to crew up for productions.
I’m not sure if this is really true, but assuming that it is, I don’t think this is going to be a long-term issue. More and more people seem to be using Blender now, which should solve the problem going forward.
– The work the big studios produce is sometimes worth billions. Their biggest concern is the quality of the final product, not that their 3D software is free.
Blender isn’t just free, it’s also Open Source. Studios can freely craft tools and fixes to the things they need directly into Blender and redeploy immediately. It basically has all the benefits of an in-house tool, without the overhead. So I agree that the price isn’t a factor, but independence can be a very valuable business commodity in itself—and I think it’s something Blender is uniquely qualified to deliver.
Another thing to note. Blender isn’t only catering to the 3d market. Web designers, concept artists, flash animators—all sorts of markets that didn’t use 3d much previously are now tinkering with Blender. Some of them are very large markets.
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I can’t claim to be a learned professional here, but I do have enough experience transitioning from a more standard compliant 3D package to Blender to understand where they’re coming from.
I’ll admit, when I first started seguing my way into Blender, I thought it godawful. The only reason why I made the move from Modo was because I’m merely a hobbyist, and couldn’t justify the price to keep using it. Sure, Blender is a very capable piece of software, and I found it could do everything I needed it to, but there were plenty of times I thought The Blender Way was convoluted for the simple sake of being convoluted.
On the flipside of things, I’m now so used to Blender, have grown accustomed to The Blender Way, that switching back to a more standardized keyset and workflow would throw me for a massive loop. I can understand why people who have used Blender for so long prefer it the way it is. It’s what they’re used to. It’s how they know to work. G,S,R is now so ingrained into me, that switching back to the usual Q,E,R setup, something I initially missed greatly, would seem weird and goofy to me now.
When you’re used to something, you’re used to it, and most people won’t want to acclimate themselves to something new unless they see a direct, immediate benefit to doing so. Transitioning Blender to something more standards compliant seems like it’s just that. Changing the hotkeys around to appease a group of people who barely even used Blender until here recently might seem like a slap in the face to some of the people who have been using it for years and years now. They don’t want to relearn the basics for them.
…and other people won’t want to relearn the basics just to use Blender.
I guess things have reached a point where if we want Blender to be a massive success, we’ll all need to accept that some things will have to change. Though at the same, the devs don’t want to entirely alienate the old faithful fanbase. They’re still Blender’s core audience, after all.
Figuring out how to balance things out, find that happy medium is why we pay the devs the big bucks. I think they’ve done a pretty good job of things thus far.
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I would like to know if it would be feasible for this: the option to set the method of creating collections when upgrading pre-2.8 blends to 2.8 standard, choosing either layers or groups or even both.
Currently when converting pre-2.8 blends to the 2.8 standard, 2.8 creates collections exclusively based on layers. However, in many of my blends I used groups rather than layers for primary organization.
This conversion method winds up completely ignoring my group organization by placing everything into a single unorganized collection or more requiring me to manually re-create all new collections based on my previous groups. This is very time consuming and mistake prone.
I come from the first generation … when there were lightwave and 3d studio max, I started interacting with blender … in the meantime I added XSI (which I recognized as a great software master) and Maya …
but over time, having given up professionalism to work in various production studios (10 years have passed by now), I stayed with blender and little else … which I loved anyway and almost always was enough for what I needed to do with it
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Some solid criticism. I especially agree with his assessment regarding retopology and UV mapping, which are quite primitive after having tried Maya before learning Blender. UV mapping is somewhat all right and I think Blender does baseline unwrapping better than Maya when you start doing cuts and stuff, but when it comes to the tools in the toolbar, Maya does it better (not to mention that you can’t see your UVs outside of Edit Mode, which I think should be addressed as well). Retopology is a lot more primitive, however; and needs a massive overhaul with a dedicated work space and more automatisation to speed up the entire process.
I think some of the UX stuff he brought up can however be fixed if you do some of your own tinkering, even without using add-ons (I know I fixed a bunch of issues I had on my own). While I think addressing stuff with the baseline settings are of course appreciated, I do think it is kind of unavoidable that you change settings to accomodate your personal needs. If someone is able to tell him on that forum, please tell him that you can actually add your favourite modifiers into your favourites menu, which you can use instead of the original menu while your mouse is inside the Properties window. Most likely he will use only a select few most often, so using the favourites menu is a very time efficient way to add modifiers quickly. This method works in some of the other tabs in Properties as well.
Also, you can add a 3D Viewport in the Rendering tab and work from there. Although it is a bit odd that you can’t do the same in the regular render window that opens up, despite being able to switch to the 3D Viewport.
on UV mapping
Someone made a video about UDIM support for 2.81 that I saw earlier today:
What is SLIM exactly? Don’t know all the terminology yet. 
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Cool! How do you know that it’s getting added in 2.81? The thread is pretty old and I can’t see any specific updates about a 2.81 released.
I don’t know, it was a hopeful prediction 
I would like to add that what he said about the modifiers AND the gizmo for bend, is solved by this addon, mimicking one of the few things Max does well Modifier List 1.3.1 (Improved Lattice + other stuff)
William kisses a bunch of duplicate entries in sculpt mode goodbye.
https://developer.blender.org/rB4c9fe657458fe710448fc9a56079af16d8d12dac
https://developer.blender.org/D5420
One less thing for the BForArtists guy to fix when he rebases to 2.81 
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I figured this would be as good a place to ask as any, since it’s supposedly an up and coming feature in 2.81.
What exactly are static overrides? I see them mentioned all the time (may have even read a vague explanation that’s long since slipped out of mind), but I’m not exactly sure what they do.
Why is it such a nice feature to have, and why is it so closely related to the materials browser we may also be getting in this up and coming version?
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… and if possible assign a color to a tab so that we can visually find what we look for…
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I never understood if static overrides are also the overrides for the rendering settins of single objects or not …
in many cases I have the need to “override” some object options, such as turning off the volumetric emission of a single object light when I activate volumetrics and things like that … "
I created a post about this …