here’s some further information from valve on that.
I think it used to be easier, now it is somehow controlled trough steam greenlight (community votes)
But with blender being free and well-known software i see no reason for it not to get accepted.
But maybe they will consider it might damage the sales of paid software, as blender is obviously a very powerful alternative to the other software they offer.
But i think it should be tried.
Someone officially associated with blender should do that i guess, collect a few stunning renders and maybe last years blender demo reel for siggraph…
Anyone wants to contact Ton Rosendaal on twitter with that proposal?
It’s not like people who search for 3d software won’t find blender online, but its more like an advertisment seeing blender mentioned there.
I currently see quite many software offers there and most of them are programs i would never have searched for, but find useful probably nonetheless.
Having blender there would just rise peoples interest in computer graphics, i think.
Most steam users are gamers obviously and if they are getting a free software with a lot of introductional video tutorials it will just be fun to discover new software.
In case this will be accepted by valve to the steam shop, I see no negative side effects there.
I certainly don’t know, as I’m not a big Steam user myself. If it’s some free thing and easy to do though it’s just extra exposure in another marketplace. If there is a fee of some sort and it takes a lot of work to maintain it I wouldn’t see it being particularly worth it either.
At that point, i don’t think the problem is the visibility, Blender has an enormous amount of users worldwide,
In 2009 it was said on Blendernation that there had been 3.4 millions of downloads from the official website (so no counting other website on which you can get blender)
Even if let’s imagine each individual may download 10 or more times blender by years , that’s already a possible hundred of thousands users in 2009
And with Blender having got more coverage and getting better and better with positive publicity,i’m sure there’s now certainly that much users worldwide.
It’s not really lacking any coverage.
What is lacking is the actual ressources to hire more core devs full on Blender full time, as the Blender Foundation can’t afford much each years. And there i think the best way is the link Arexma posted :
Autodesk has several thousands of hired employees as a comparison.
And Blender being what it is now despite the limited ressource of the Blender Foundation is a testament of how greatly they have managed the whole development.
It is so easy to say there is no downside to something done by someone else. Why not propose instead that you will research all that is required to make it happen and then do that work yourself. Too much work and too little time? That is a negative right there…
Personally I can’t imagine a scenario where someone has an interest in the types of things that Blender is capable of, yet does not have the means to find out about it.
Sort of like feeling sorry for all the people that become plumbers instead of accountants because Steam has no spreadsheets…
I’m somewhat of a Blender novice; I’ve been working with it off and on since version 2.5. I really like Blender and it’s mind blowing to think about what it is capably of doing being a free program. Often times I think wouldn’t it be cool if Blender could do fill in the blank. But odds are it probably already does it. My own ignorance keeps me doing the same thing when proper knowledge could greatly improve my workflow. There in lies Blender’s greatest weakness. The amount of effort one must put into scouring the internet for the “right way” of doing things is much too high for a program of its caliber. The keyboard shortcuts make a lot of sense for efficient and quick editing. However, the lack of say dockable “icon based tool sets” hinders the ability of novices such as myself from discovering new tools. So what would I like to see in future editions?
De-clutter the interface. Blender 2.5 was a huge step forward and the people responsible are to be commended. Still, there are way too many items displayed competing for attention. Task specific, dockable tool palettes would go a long way toward cleaning it up. I think Rhino 3d does a good job in this regard.
Add a project browser for BLEND files. It would be awesome if you right click a BLEND file in the file browser and have a window pop-up that you could then drag and drop meshes, materials, lighting set-ups etc. into your active BLEND file.
UV editor. Blender is one of the few programs where I was actually able to successfully create UV textures for. Even so, there could be some improvement. I wish I could select a boundary on a mesh where I could delete/recreate 3d faces and have them automatically fit back into the selected boundary on the UV map. As it is now you have to unwrap the entire piece or re-stitch the faces by hand.
Context sensitive editing. I like how in 3DMAX you can “right click” and object and a local menu of commands you are most likely going to execute comes up. Very intuitive. Blender doesn’t have to mimic this feature, but many things could become more accessible to the end user if more items worked this way.
Those are all the big things I’d like to see happen. I do like the clarity of the way models are depicted in Silo while editing, a few mode like that would be welcomed by me. Some of the mesh creation tools like lofting and lathe feel clumsy on Blender compared to 3DMAX, but those are all minor quibbles.
This kind of suggestion needs concrete specific examples and possibly mockups. It isn’t enough to say “cleaner, like Rhino” but propose real changes that you think could work. For example, adding “task-specific dockable tool palettes” adds yet another thing that is “competing for attention” and so doesn’t really de-clutter anything on its own.
Yes, I tend to agree with opinions like rhettro has, it takes incredible amounts of time to learn all the things Blender has, and how things would be best done with Blender… I must admit that I have only very slight understanding what will happen if I make something - for example, when baking, what is baked in what, and where is the baked image stored. I might be wrong, but I have a feeling that if baking is not successful, there is no error messages (at least such that I saw it), just nothing happens So, I would probably appreciate any efforts to improve UI in such direction that you would know what will happen and where, when you apply the command
But let’s turn this question upside down. What I will do to Blender, if I use it long enough to get familiar enough with the code and internals to make modifications?
When I am thinking it, it is sad that I probably wouldn’t put time to improve UI that much, maybe some small things that would irritate myself. Instead, I probably would put my efforts to improve game development, and in that area, I would probably put effort to all sorts of automatization - things that I’m sketching right at this moment, but only being implemented with python at the top of BGE. Those kind of things are not probably up to new fancy coding, they are probably more like organizing projects and applying some sort of “makefile” to automatically “compile” things for game, when source is modified. Scripting, that it is, in a way or another, to automatically create needed objects from source models, something like:
I’m trying to learn all sorts of baking. My “big idea” is that I would only need to create one model with highest details needed in the game, and automatize the process to create lower-poly versions of that to be used to implement LOD. I have been playing with ideas, how details of different objects (trees, buildings) could be automatically lowered using normal maps and such when distance grows.
I’m looking ways to organize models so that I could construct things from smaller parts, and apply object-specific properties on them. For example, a game may have scene with buildings made of painted concrete. Instead of manually drawing all the different variations of colors, I would like to make a script to generate “unique” concrete-like materials (with correct texture size) with different colors, so that no single building in the scene would share exactly same flavors of colors or other things.
Trees: What I have been thinking, would be to use armature inside a tree to make variations of that, and physics engine to give branches a more natural orientation. This is possible at the moment (I think), yes, but the idea would be that in the game there is no armature and no physics, instead the modified tree is now fixed.
These things may exist in Blender already, yes, and I just don’t know them yet as it is relatively hard to learn all the things Blender has.
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding the problem, but just select the verts you don’t want to change and pin them with P. I think that’s what your looking for.
UV editor. Blender is one of the few programs where I was actually able to successfully create UV textures for. Even so, there could be some improvement. I wish I could select a boundary on a mesh where I could delete/recreate 3d faces and have them automatically fit back into the selected boundary on the UV map. As it is now you have to unwrap the entire piece or re-stitch the faces by hand.
Theres the stitch command V (I think), but it sometimes works a bit counter intuative
Context sensitive editing. I like how in 3DMAX you can “right click” and object and a local menu of commands you are most likely going to execute comes up. Very intuitive. Blender doesn’t have to mimic this feature, but many things could become more accessible to the end user if more items worked this way.
There are radial menu addons (search BA), but you have to adjust the code to add the features you want afaik. I played with one and it worked really well I forget the author. In the one I used the shortcut default was Q, but adding it to right click is easy enough
But to be honest, alot of the time I think it’s just a case of people just don’t know that a feature exists. Maybe better docs would help with that.
Either way this topic comes up so often in one form or another, with so many people asking for feature A or B, maybe we could discuss the possibility of trying to come up with a complied list in a different thread of issues that are important to us as blender users. I’m not saying we should all just start shouting I want X or Y, but how about discussing how it would be possible to compile a list.
Heres one idea off the top of my head:
We could have a thread where people list what is important to them in terms of blender development. Now I don’t know what forum software is being used here, but if theres a plugin to up rate posts for it, other users could uprate posts they agree with. Then ideas with more than say 10 votes could be compiled into a list, then put into a poll by the mods (sorry mods). Then we could vote, and the ten most popular ideas could be put to the blender foundation. Not as we want this. But rather, these things are important to us as users, and we’d appreciate it if you could focus some attention in these areas when you get the chance.
I’m not trying to sound ungrateful to the work blender developers do, far from it. I really appreciate the time and effort they put in, without them, I’d have to take up drinking to fill my spare time :p. Seriously though, it’s just this topic comes up so often, rather than so many people suggesting so many features we could come together as a community and decide what’s the most important to the greatest amount of users.
Luckily blenders devs are so good, and open that I believe they would take those considerations on board. But most importantly we all have to be patient, as I know some projects (depsgraph - not that I know what that is) take alot of time, and we should all be aware that feature X may look simple to us, but could be a nightmare to implement, or may require other things done first.
I think some work could be done on the general layouts. They seem to be pointed to the exact average user or something like it.
What I think would be more appropriate is to show it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm new users. They are the ones that needs to be convinced. Every time I’ve tried to convince anyone to start using it, their first reaction is that the don’t have the time to learn to use all these things. But at the same time they are comfortable with learning programs like sketch-up, because it leads you in in a gamification kind of way. The first thing anyone should learn is to shape Blender into what they need it for.
Having some shelves open, some closed and organized in a non alphabetical way takes a little to get used to.
It could be done with simple things, like why does the Game Logic layout have the outliner on the left hand side instead of the right as in the others? It’s not an issue for us that already know and love Blender, but for a new user, things seems to be jumping all over the place.
Maybe if we are looking for the non-user to start using it there might be some more time spent on making it easier to do really simple stuff. Like doing pie charts and what not for someone who just wants to spice up their powerpoint. Sure, it’s child’s play considering the powers that Blender has, but it’s magic to those who hasn’t learned the magic of 3D softwares yet.
As for features… well, Blender is gonna keep getting the features that the community throws at it and then see what sticks. There are so many uses for the program that just pointing at a few improvements here and there seems arbitrary to me. We all want bigger, better features all over the place. I for one have a few ‘ohh, wouldn’t it be cool if…’ moments every time I use it, knowing that the Blender community is such an awesome place. But what I really need is some backup in helping convince other people to use it. Because the more people that use it, the more awesome it will get by itself.
Honestly, I think it’s pretty damn good. It’s never going to be everything to everyone. I think if I had to say ONE thing that would improve it is… better documentation. I know that it is a thankless job and a huge pain in the ass, but some of the wiki pages still link back to 2.4 documentation that is no longer accurate after the 2.5 upgrade.
If you want adoption rates to increase, more users, more respect, etc., then there needs to be good documentation. The fact is that blender IS different from other software, it DOES have a different interface, etc. But the new user spends a lot of time stumbling through things trying to figure it out because the documentation just isn’t up to par. Without exception, I search here before I go to the official documentation.
If I knew enough about blender, I would start working on this myself. It is something that would help the entire community.
Blender above. Yes it is an exaggerated example, but it should be apparent how less cluttered the Rhino interface is. Dockable tool palettes don’t add more clutter, they let you turn off what you don’t want to see and only bring in the tools you need. The fact that the tools are organized under a common purpose (like polygon) in the Rhino example allows novices to discover tools in a contextual way. They may end up moving to keyboard shortcuts later, but the software becomes more usable from the get go.
Not sure how I could have been any more explicit by saying “this kind of suggestion needs concrete specific examples and possibly mockups.” Showing one screenshot of Rhino and another of Blender doing something entirely different doesn’t really offer anything concrete and specific.
So I’ll say it again, but differently. You can simply say “make Blender more like Rhino” and absolutely nothing will change because you are saying…absolutely nothing. It’s really no different than saying you want Blender do “have 110% more awesome”.
Instead take a lesson from what you like in Rhino and apply it specifically to Blender. What exactly would you move around, rename, hide, change into unicorns, whatever. But if you are trying to propose changes then you have to propose actual changes.
Not necessarily. More details, and specifics are always best, but what he is presenting and suggesting is equally as valid.
What comes to mind when someone says something like, “the lenovo ideapad would look better if it was more like the macbook pro”. Both are laptops, both have unique imagery in their design. Making the comparison between the two gives off a general idea of the differences and aesthetics of each.
That said he did give details which i assume must be present in Rhino.
He suggested (quoting his post now):
De-clutter the interface. Blender 2.5 was a huge step forward and the people responsible are to be commended. Still, there are way too many items displayed competing for attention. Task specific, dockable tool palettes would go a long way toward cleaning it up. I think Rhino 3d does a good job in this regard.
Add a project browser for BLEND files. It would be awesome if you right click a BLEND file in the file browser and have a window pop-up that you could then drag and drop meshes, materials, lighting set-ups etc. into your active BLEND file.
UV editor. Blender is one of the few programs where I was actually able to successfully create UV textures for. Even so, there could be some improvement. I wish I could select a boundary on a mesh where I could delete/recreate 3d faces and have them automatically fit back into the selected boundary on the UV map. As it is now you have to unwrap the entire piece or re-stitch the faces by hand.
Context sensitive editing. I like how in 3DMAX you can “right click” and object and a local menu of commands you are most likely going to execute comes up. Very intuitive. Blender doesn’t have to mimic this feature, but many things could become more accessible to the end user if more items worked this way.
Given the description and then the image posted, it seems like there is plenty of detail to go off of to see what he would like.
Understand that is a good step before actually going into how it could be implimented into Blender. Some of it will require a major official change to how Blender operates. Right clicking for context menus for example.
The concept of blender fitting in with the mainstream UI design and approach is something I wholeheartedly stand behind, not necessarily that it look exactly like one app or another. I think perhaps that is what Rehtrro was trying to get across as well as the purpose of his list of what he would have hoped to see within Blender.
First, UV changes already coded by Psy-Fy are in the works, just haven’t been finished and dropped into trunk. I think I saw the videos from GSOC and they were flipping awesome!!! There was already a version of auto-stitching I think, but I can’t find my bookmark right now.
As for the ‘clutter’ - I think that this is something can be addressed, but someone does have to do the dirty work of actually deciding where everything should go. Rhino’s example seems less about dockable pallets and more about adding an icon for every function available in menu, if you look back at the example given. Each of the functions in the Blender menus started out as scripts at one point long ago, correct? Seems to me they are organized already, but possibly to the point that there is too much overlap. Or maybe not - look again at the options for vertices there in the Rhino example closely - wth do those things mean? And they can’t possibly cover all the options offered in the Blender example. Apples and Oranges, I’m sorry to say, until someone actually makes a go at ‘designing’ the mockup that makes the idea work on paper so to say.
Context sensitive editing - I don’t follow this one. If you right click an object in my blender, it is just selected. If I right click on a tab or button, I get a menu of options that are possible, and some things I right click on and they just give me the python for it. Some of them allow me to insert a short cut key. That too would have to be figured out how to make it still be possible within the confines of existing features, excepting it cause total rewrite.
About the drag and drop -we just got some new code with this when Ton went on holiday, I remember he did something similar once before with dragging textures and materials onto objects before that. If there were to be a drag and drop ability, it might be sufficient to use the file>append>list of assets and drag them from there to the view I guess. As it is, I use the import to append a group at a time, containing all the mesh objects and the armatures, etc. into my scene, and then I go about working with it. Is it a question more of having a more visual feedback in the same process?
If only I could code… that was supposed to be on the roster this year. As it is, I’m just trying to keep up with using blender.
So, I would probably appreciate any efforts to improve UI in such direction that you would know what will happen and where, when you apply the command 
