I will edit for more clarity as i was implying easy to fix paper cuts.
Not every feature but some yes.
Regarding bugs… They are not located where they show up, be it the UI, or a modifier or a set of modifier working in a simulation… Many bugs are pervasive and as such depend on either conflict between functions and tools used which creates a machine state that was not foreseeable at time of development… Who can say what strange things users will engage in with the application? Also as everything evolves, CPU, OSes, GPU, motherboard, RAM, Standards and protocols, a code that is working at a given time, may suddenly start to behave differently than it was designed in the past hard ware conditions… Don’t forget that Blender support many OSes, and platforms. You have to look at the devs list of updates and modifications and read the purpose of the patch and in many cases they are dealing with new hardware specs… One case I could mentions is the release of Nvidia RTX GPU providing vector computation for Cycles… When the cards came, lots of bugs did show up… Nobody talks about anymore by now…
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I should just remove the “bug” term out of the message.
What i meant was “paper cuts” or UI stuff.
If reputed professional artist is not known as an artist knowing Blender since a significant amount of time, his views have to be confronted to artists who could enlighten him.
Someone who has decades of practice of Maya may say something wrong about Blender.
It is not because One artist says something valid for many artists that is true for all artists.
Developers are taking decisions to make an arbitration between artists. That is easier for them to be neutral. Most of time, they try to respect everyone and try to bring customization. When, they don’t : it is for technical reason that they are the most well-placed to appreciate.
When as an artist, you are annoyed by a decision they made : you can contest it, here, on developer.blender.org or devtalk forum, on blender community chat.
Developers have multiplied channels of discussion to e more effective on collecting feedback.
Most of time, when your points are clearly exposed and other artists are supportive of your remarks, you can convince developers to reconsider their choices.
That filtering does not seem pertinent to me, now.
There was a team of experienced blender artists involved into 2.8 design.
Then, when 2.8 became an alpha, a huge amount of artists not knowing Blender well enough entered into discussion. But from those users who came from other software, some had valid remarks and they changed some priorities. If 2.8 does not look completed, it is because that fruitful period took months. IMO, that is the part that was underestimated.
I think that feedback is not always pertinent when one part of design is absent.
Most of people are making smart remarks. But what developers are really missing, is just time to reach initial goals.
I said from the beginning that 2.8 was too ambitious.
If things are not satisfying, it is not because of a lack of democracy. Blender developers are open guys.
But they just can’t work at lighting speed.
I, personally, criticized their priorities along 2.8 development. That did not correspond to what I would expect about restoring basics of software, first.
But I had the feeling to have been understood and respected. They changed their organization, they put in place a curfew and adopted the idea of an LTS release.
Several of their decisions are not what I was thinking about ; but, from my point of view, I agree that is going into the right direction.
You can’t expect them to make mistakes, correct them and do all of that in same period of time than just being right from the beginning.
You can’t expect artist to agree on everything, developers to agree on everything and combination of both to agree on everything.
Democracy takes a lot of time.
Trying to speed up things by a filtering of artists emergencies seems counterproductive to me. If an artist takes time to create a thread about a subject, it is almost always one of his priorities.
If a developer thinks, that is right time for him, to solve this specific problem and he can do it quickly, I have no problem with that. I expect as many fixes that don’t correspond to my wait as fixes that do.
And any worker, in order to stay mentally sane, needs to have a minimal degree of liberty about his own organization.
If he completely stops working on a big project that I was waiting for, during months, because of that ; I will complain like anyone else who was expected this big project.
Sincerely, IMO, bugreports and devtalk threads done during few months of 2.8 development are covering lacks in 2.8. To me, developers are already aware of priorities from artists point of view.
But if things I expect the most are not the first done, it is because they have too many things to do or because priorities that I shared are not priorities of most of artists.
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Reading the discussion and successive posts, one key element to keep in mind is that Blender is not a small application anymore… If you look at the different areas that it covers, then you will understand the complexity that is already available at this time. Then you need to consider that it is and will evolve over time toward capabilities that are either equal to commercial software or beyond what those software are delivering and maybe will be implementing in the future… but Blender is design now to allow for continuous improvements and expansions or even specialization like architecture, medical, industrial design etc… If you have used other commercial or open source package, you must know that they are not full error proof or even complete in their capabilities… Nothing’s perfect… not even the user.
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You’re talking about individuals but i’m talking about absolute consensus of thousands of artists from the same profession. The arbitration could easily be done between the artists with simple democratic tools and procedures. People from blender would naturally moderate the discussion as to what is already there and as what is simple vs complex to do.
Then when consensus is reached, they send their request in a clear and precise unified demand.
The tools to achieve this are rough and some are non-existent.
I think those tools and procedures would help a lot to make the development more efficient from a user perspective. Not just for single individuals, for entire professions.
I don’t know if you guessed but I am an animator. ANY animator would tell you blender is nightmare to work with without custom/paid add ons.
It is a consensus, not my personal preferences.
Right now i’m closing my eyes/pinching my nose and jumping in cause i love Blender for all other reasons than having the most primitive animation workflow, but not much people are willing to do that (i know one animator who worked at Tangent but like i said, they have custom add-ons).
And the most frustrating part is that with maybe 2-3 months of work from a developer, animating in blender could be a charm. Animators don’t need fancy stuff to be efficient. From time to time they will want some Disney gadget (developers seem to really like those) but generally it’s only a matter of simple stuff that just need a bit of polish. I’m not talking about layers, editable motion paths or mesh controls.
I’m talking about stuff like being able to change more than one channel at a time.
Or being able to copy next key with one button.
Those two little things would take 1 week to fix but make hundreds of animator join blender.
Then you have developers “arbitration” deciding to work for months on complex stuff like already amazing playback speed (i can play stuff in eevee realtime… When i show that to fellow Maya animators they flip out).
I would rather spend time producing a clear and realistically doable list for developers to follow than go on a sub-section dump for frustrated users to complain that they worked on their own ignoring users priorities.
I know they are open but the input they get from users, as far as i know, is not clear and does not reach consensus before reaching them. That is the part where democratic tools and practices could help. For users to reach consensus.
I’m not here to invalid developers priorities, i totally trust them on that.
My problem is with the users priorities. They are disorganized. One way to organize themis using democracy. Then developers get the list.
Are you saying that if such a list would be bad? It can just help.
Upvoting stuff does take like 1/10th of a second.
Answering a survey can take minutes.
Taking the essential of Pablo Dobarro’s thread and typing it clearly in the first post or in a separated document could take a week but once it’s done, keeping it up to date wouldn’t take much time.
I don’t know why you mention that. You are talking like i’m implying developers should do only user-request based development. I will repeat again, one paper cut user defined a week!
The fact that what you are saying is unverifiable kinda proves the need for what i am talking about.
Find me a dev that choses the second one! 
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Knowing something about coding, a lot of the most important work is actually invisible, and something that might not bear fruit for a long time. Artists also do not have any idea what the technical complexity or time required to implement their suggestions are.
I’m pretty sure that the devs pay close attention to what the users want and need. It’s how they get paid: through donations by creating a popular software that people love to use.
Personally I have full confidence in the Blender devs to navigate the future of the software into a productive and powerful direction.
There are many feedback channels, like https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/, https://devtalk.blender.org/c/other-topics/user-feedback/13 which seem to work very well.
Also you can just code a little piece yourself if you have the skills and upload the patch. Many times if it’s good and can be merged with little trouble, it has 99% chance of being included, as soon as the devs have time to look into it.
I think direct democracy where the devs are forced to work on the most requested features simply wouldn’t work.
Something like donating to goals, and if it makes enough, hiring a dev for it probably would. It would require a lot of community coordination, but probably something that could be achieved.
Also from artist point of view: how many great movies were built in a board room with consensus? Versus how many simply had a very talented and hard working team that didn’t use votes to make their decisions?
Out of curiosity: which addons are you specifically talking about?
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I hope not to find one.
There are already mechanisms preventing this but what i propose here is one way of improving their efficiency.
While searching the workboard I’ve found this task:
Animation 2020 feedback from studios
I couldn’t be more supportive of such an initiative.
Sadly it has a low priority and it is set in “long term project”.
That’s a great example of a task that requires Zero energy from developers but would benefit the community tremendously.
You probably guessed but i would put this in highest priority, big red urgent one but again, it’s the developers who have the final word so now we can just hope it gets done someday…
I would gladly take that task btw but i doubt that how it works.
.
Well that was a bit of a stretch.
In 20 years i’ve worked in the animation industry (tv,games,commercials,vfx,features) i’ve only worked with one animator that had professional experience working with Blender. I asked him what it was like and told me it was fine once used to it but that they had a bunch of custom add ons as he worked at Tangent animation.
And i was talking about 3D animation.
On my last production I fought with my production to have them install 2.8 so i can use Grease Pencil.
People where looking at my screen like it was Alien technology when i was working with it.
It saved me a lot of time and it was a total charm working with it.
Probably because the developer works with total quality feedback from an amazing professional artist.
If only that process could be repeated and even improved on other branches of the software…
Took em 20 years for left click select tho. ← EDIT: it took 7 years ← EDIT2: 1 year nevermind…
We shouldn’t guess or presume that they listen to users feedback, saying things like “hopefully Ton et al have a plan” or continue to wait patiently that a detailed 4 years old RCS proposition with hundreds of upvotes gets done someday.
Everyone would benefit of greater user influence on the development if made correctly.
Wow that’s the most pathetically elitist thing I’ve seen on this site yet and it got 6 likes, no wonder people don’t want blender to be industry standard. In a more general setting this is merely called customer canvasing, of course you’d know that if you had a valuable opinion.
Yeah, because the average developer doesn’t have either a brand nor thousands of donations pouring in. No one’s disputing that development takes time, but if this is truly “open source” and they want to be an industry standard software, then BF should obviously care what their own users think.
Incorrect, if you keep telling users “your opinion doesn’t matter” then most users are not going to waste their time discussing and organizing what is beneficial to the software. If you want people to organize and facilitate a platform of this magnitude, you should be inspiring users and telling them “your ideas do matter, we want your feedback, we know your projects are important to you and we want to succeed.”
Screening and beta testing is standard practice in literally every single media-related business.
Now, should BF be obligated to oblige by what users vote on? Depends on who you ask, but for efficiency, probably not. Does that mean it wouldn’t be beneficial to facilitate some medium that collects information on what people want to get done? That’s a completely different question.
Blender market does not do a good job of facilitating resource pooling. Users can gather themselves to vote for their own sake what they want, and perhaps the BF team can allocate some portion of their funding for that and that would take the workload off the BF team.
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“…if made correctly.”
It is clear you have passion for this concept. Enough have shown that the street you are trying to build is already built and taking on a lot of traffic. That is to say, there are enough avenues for you to do as you’d like without your particular concept’s twist being applied.
Or, they have shown ways you can begin a group/forum/community, hiring a dev and begin creation of this democratic community. Marketplace has “Make Blender for You” resources available for exactly this.
The ecycles guy could be said to have done exactly this with only the renderer being the voted upon tool. There are many an example out there.
I look forward to your action on this.
Robert
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Any profesionnal would tell that. That feeling is not restricted to animation.
Often, when it can be handled by an addon, developers are more comfortable to avoid endless UI discussions and work on more vital issues.
So basically, a refactor is the only moment when users are expecting amount of necessary addons to go down.
Blender Institute is building as Blender Studio.
In normal times, developers are in contact with animators.
Those animators are probably frustrated by same things.
If developers are not fixing things for them quickly, there are probably valid reasons for that.
To me, refactor of Blender that is actually happening is the main reason.
You want to create a list of feature request. You are free to do it.
But that will not be easy to find thousand of artists with enough spare time to review it.
During 2.5 development, there was a tentative of defining priorities with blenderstorm platform. It worked at the beginning before becoming unbearable by a lack of moderators.
Nowadays, there are still RCS proposal that popular but not realist because they are too far away from what Blender is.
That is not easy to put in place a voting system that works.
And to establish that a consensus is a consensus when community is made of several thousand of people.
If a thousand of people are supporting your proposal, for sure, you made a point. But that literally means that you have to wait for thousands of people to express themselves. That is really slow.
That literally requires making a campaign to promote this kind of election.
That was the choice of developers to create such sub-section of forum.
You can produce a list for developer. At a moment, you will have to capture their attention and send it to them.
On developer.blender.org, developers are creating workboards and parent tasks.
On the top right of welcome page of this site, there are links to projects and modules feeds and workboards.
Just beyond, there are links to parent tasks of 2.8 development per module.
So, just by browsing site dedicated to development, you can see what is planned to be done.
I said it previously collecting opinions, triaging them, synthesizing hundreds of similar remarks into one point takes time.
If you want to take responsibility to do it ; you can contact Dalai through chat or mail and propose your help.
If it is you who does it, it is true that a developer will not have to do it.
Otherwise, it is not the case. And task description is, for the moment, blank because Dalai has other things to do.
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I couldn’t say better.
Are you talking about this?
For now i still don’t have a concept of how this could work but i would gladly contribute to build one. I have a strong impression that there is a need for better organization and use of users feedback but my logic is to first make sure it’s not just in my head before anything, i made that thread to verify that.
One thing i’m after thou is how the foundation has no defined mechanism making sure users feedback is considered. I like how TotalBSdf resumed this:
What prevents again BF from hiring developers to maintain certain addons?
Sorry i forgot where i saw this mentioned before.
It is great practice but it would be great if that feedback but gathering concise feedback from a larger user base and making that feedback public wouldn’t hurt. Ive found this here:
It would be easy to track those if a stronger will to moderate and organize used feedback was executed. Upvoting, surveys, official moderated thread per modules, all these could work well.
It is not easy because the lack of initiative and resources put into making in it work.
- More resources could be put into moderation
- More effort could be put into making RCS conform with Blender’s design
- More people would be motivated to put effort into helping large base of users reach consensus if “making a point” would be guaranteed to be a factor of change.
I will do it but i think that step should be part of an officials process, not an initiative of some random motivated snowflake like me.
The foundation should have a very strict procedure for “members” of a module to create such a list and make it public. It shouldn’t be random individuals initiatives
I’m actually astonished that there are no official pinned and moderated topics for each modules in the forum. I also hate that propositions are all spread apart on various platforms.
Thanks but in the links you posted nothing confirm how the priority order were established and no manifesto coming from user’s feedback is to be found guiding their priorities in any way.
No, left click select has been an option since the 2.5 series, they just added a few improvements like a dedicated timeline scrubbing area and enabled it by default.
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K my bad, i shouldn’t exaggerate and make false claims, i’ll edit my crap.
Done.
There are addons officially maintained by developers from Blender Institute.
The rest is maintained by members of community.
And there are developers from community trying to sell their addons.
Community is a great help of volunteers that are not paid from Blender Foundation.
Amount of developers that could be paid by Blender Foundation increased with 2.8 hype and amount of donations that have increased. But situation was not the same 2 years ago.
During precedent Blender years, there was will to do it. But that is not just a question of will. That is a question of manpower and spare time to do it.
Precedent attempts half failed and half succeeded (sincerely during those years, Blender was improved, anyways) because of that lack of means.
That is a little bit arrogant to make such statement without no clue about Blender community and Blender history.
During years of discussions about 2.8 development among devs, most of them were reported to users through blog of development : code.blender.org
Most of discussions between users and developers happened in comment sections of blog or developer.blender.org or on threads on blenderartists.
After a certain period, original design tasks were so far away from what desired new goals became that they were re-written.
So, yes, history of decisions building may be hard to find.
But there was no unique manifesto published one day because there were 2 years of feedback discussed point by point.
But if you search about William’s UI Design proposal on forum, you should find discussions about the starting point.
If you search about articles about Viewport on code.blender.org, you should find starting point that end-up to become EEVEE.
No, in 2.5, most of shortcuts became customizable.
But before 2.5, there was already a User Preference to be able to switch Left/Right buttons behavior and select with Left click.
So, that is an option since 2.34.
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Ah, ok. I thought it was added later than that.
This is the catch 22 because who is going to be using free and non-professional software instead of 3ds or Maya or Cinema 4D, standard software that is taught at private institutions and used at universities? People who don’t have a lot of money to spare on paid addons.
This means the market will not grow fast, it is really dependent on users building professional skills, leaving blender behind, then denoting out of pity since they feel blender helped them get into modeling but they see it’s still struggling immensely. Because that donation cycle is so slow, it makes it hard to fund development and user support of Blender into something that appears like competing software, something both studios and freelancers need to be able to rely on. Then because the support is slow, it makes the user base grow a lot more slowly.
The two options here are to either commercialize blender to gain funding, or, become a legitimate non-profit to seek grants and develop bylaws intended to preserve the benefit of blender to the public. Theoretically you could have a hybrid using a bracketed income model.
The Blender Foundation is as “legitimate” a non-profit as there is in this world. Also, why are you declaring all those who earn a living with Blender as not being professional? Commercial software vendors slap “professional” on a product as a marketing ploy, not as a statement of fact.
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