How to Be a Positive Member of the Blender Community (don't be a fanboy)

[sacboi]

@JonathanW

In short, the Blender community has a lot to be proud of. However, the community has one big downfall, it’s users. The majority of Blender users are friendly, responsible, and contribute to the community and the software in positive ways. There is, however, a small minority of users that do more harm to the community and Blenders reputation than good. This group of users are generally referred to as the “Blender Fans.” They are the users that refuse to hear anything bad about Blender and will standup in blind support of it, regardless of what the issue at hand might be. As is common with these small minority groups, they also speak the loudest and often give a false impression of Blender and its community.

There was a time when painting a target on your back as a “Blenderite” would initiate a flame war of derision, via other competing communities, well as recently as five to six years ago, but nowadays due too a growing groundswell of adoption across the board plus the trend in flat earthing perpetual licencing some CG software vendors have saw fit too introduce lately, as a result Blender is seen as a likely alternative viable option more often than not.
So personally Fanboys from my POV liven up things up, also when all is said and done, pretty much harmless, on the face of it, I mean using an sporting analogy - When the season comes around, through rain, sleet or snow I along with a fair portion of humanity screaming and yelling our collective throats hoarse in support of our favourite team

Anyways - meh!..just my 2¢

[Tea_Monster]

I get stick from other soft users mostly. I get told that my stuff is good “… for a Blender user.” Then again, I remember being told to “Get off my lawn” by someone on this forum for saying that Blender needed better modelling tools. Sigh.

If you don’t want to be a fanboy and you are consumed with passion for Blender, then use some other soft. Get a month trial of Max or Maya and go through a few tutorials. I’m not saying ditch Blender, but use a few others here and there. It will give you perspective and teach you that Blender is great, but that it isn’t perfect.

[BluePrintRandom]

I help people code games, and I try and help with art with the stuff I know about (Not as much as I once thought)

I think coding, funding, documentation, and tutoring are all good things to do.

Tutor coders,
Tutor artists
Tutor social skills.

Lets face it, some people are very skilled artists, or coders, or both,
and lack social skills.

I think in life we are all students, and we can all teach.

[fdfxd]

@LiquidHelix

Huh. I more often see people from the Max/Maya communities putting down Blender and insulting it rather than Blender fanboys. That said, I see very little of both, so good for me!

I guess I should tell you why people do that, since I used to do just that in my Cinema 4D days,

You see, after you see threads like this

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=880504
or comments like this from a blender user

“Fuck cinema 4D, it’s for bad MLG gfx “artists”, blender is the real deal”(Which was upvoted 6 times mind you)

It kind of colours peoples opinion on the community,

I know it’s stupid to judge an entire community based on a few people but hey,

a few rotten apples spoil the bunch

you know, kind of like how people think Nigeria is a scammer/thief riddled country because 419

[johnthomas]

what does fanboy mean?

[LarryPhillips]

@johnthomas

what does fanboy mean?

A fanboy is a person who likes to fart in the bathtub and bite the bubbles.

[Breagha]

A Blender fanboy is a Blender stalker. Essentially, he (or she, though I’d like to think my gender is far more sensible <.< ) will follow wherever Blender will lead, never finding any faults with Blender or his own actions, and always, always be right about how perfect Blender is.

‘Blender is perfect and superior to any other tool ever created or ever being created’.

[Lykourous]

They’re Arrogant, That’s what they are.

[ADLOF007]

We tried a fun & simple experiment with pipe cleaners in a plastic bottle. You just cut the pipe cleaners into small pieces and put them inside an empty bottle. Then use a magnet to attract and

MAGNETIC SCIENCE FUN

[T_Broadhurst]

Hi I’m new to blender and even newer to blender form rooms.

I want to get some criticizes on my work but do not want to post in case I post it in the wrong place. It not good enough for the finished post.
Do you have new or fail work thread?

[Tasteless63]

Since I came from Maya to Blender a very short time ago I was wondering what the hell kept me sticking with Maya for all that time! Meanwhile I just can say- Blender- the best things in life are free! :yes:

[xol]

Well there are a number of fanboy moderators over here that support fanboys and silence and troll the “anti”-fanboys. Like father like son it is said.

[FerdinandAngell]

Very useful information. Thanks a million!

[VanitaBart]

Just spread your own personal opinion and do not let yourself be guided by opinions of others.

[zpimp]

hello everyone
i would like to make a low poly game with BGE, i may have posted the thread twice, for that i apologize

[easydream]

Hello, finally i found a thread where we can talk honestly.

I’ve been using blender since 2008. Basically in Russia we can download any commercial soft with crack and use it for free and no one here cares about it. As for me i was a 3DSMAX and Maya user from 2001 to 2008. I’m an archviz artist - archviz is my hobby and my job.
Why i switched to blender? Because MAX is very buggy. It is normal for MAX - to save a scene for 40 or 50 mins, and it is normal for MAX not to open the saved file and show a message like this http://cs406121.userapi.com/v406121080/3eb3/8Hasj7ZI6dE.jpg
Me and couple of guys were working on a huge project for Seattle city - we were vizualising the new surburb - Bellevue. And MAX’s bugs were very frustrating.
So we switched to blender 2.41 and we finished our project in October 2008
https://youtu.be/HlUOlZW6Pik

And in 2.49 all was very good - it was fast, its renderer was good and it was a great fork - that inserted GI (photon mapping and FG in BI) - http://www.blendernation.com/2009/02/03/photon-mapping-internal-renderer/ - if in 2.49 were instances and GI - blender would be totally alternative to MAX/MAYA/Cinema4d - and other commercial stuff. BC it is not crash every couple of hours.

But in 2.5 it was new interface and cycles - instead of finishing BI to make it really production renerer Blender started to make new interface and other minor stuff instead of making it is as powerfull as other commercial soft.

I think that cycles is a big mistake - it is very long, noisy, and when it comes to real commercial work it becomes unusable. Yes there is vray for blender, there is many other render engines BUT blender don’t have full instrumentary to make a commercial work out of the box - MAX&MAYA have Mental Ray that is up to 2 times faster than vray and very powerfull tool, houdini has its “Mantra” etc. But blender has only BI and Cycles and an it is not good BC BI is very tricky and we have to spend a lot of time to get a commercial result (a made couple of tutorials about it)

In fact cycles is more tricky than BI bc if you have to render 5 images in 8 hours, as it usual in archviz and any other work - you have to play with materials, lights, AO and compositing nodes to remove noise. And yes real photos have noise but real photos are abot 4600*3200 resolution and if you are rendering such resolution in Cycles with photo-like noise it will take you VERY LONG TIME even in gtx 980 ti, even on double gtx 980 ti. So in my work i use BI more often than cycles. And yes there is an alternative to BI and Cycles - POVray (yafaray is dead and it has no instances), but povray exporter is VERY RAW.

So instead of improving and integrating with POVray (it is really very fast it’s radiosity is very fast and it renders good images for minutes) blender team started to work on cycles - and it is a deadend. Cycles making blener out of mainstream softwere bc it is terribly long.

I think that blender should improve BI to make it like povray or fully integrate POVray into blender and blender will be a beast against of commercial software. BC it is stable, it has its own video editor (no Adobe premiere or Soni Vegas neded), it has its own game engine for making virtual reality tours. But it has no good renderer. BI is very old and it needs GI, Cycles is very long and even on GPU it’s speed is up to 3 times slower than vray/povray/mentalray etc…

[haunt_house]

I think this thread is on how to be a positive member, not about blender development.

A psychological explanation for fanboyism:

Certainty is a survival instict and many people treat it like that in places, where you don’t have to be all that certain anymore. The fact that school teaches fear of errors with tests and grades doesn’t help.

Doing or using the right thing creates certainty and probably significance, two main human needs. That’s why children like the best, the biggest. Which software is the best? Pretty misleading but frequent question.

Here’s the downside. If one creates certainty by doing the right thing, that means other people doing it differently must be wrong. That’s one aspect of it. Fearful, uncertain people like to bash differing opinions because it questions their way of life, their choices, their self worth and their certainty.

Another aspect is trying to protect stuff one likes. Even if it actually isn’t all that great. Try to criticise any online comic, even if you have a point, and you will get pummeled by a bunch of fans who like everything about it. Unconditional love is something most of us had for about two years, then we lost it and crave it ever since. Personally I’d start to throw stones at anybody who likes everything I do regardless of the quality. It feels cheap and kinda stupid. Flattery is awful.

That’s some aspects that might play into that behavior.

[Sanne]

haunt_house,

two good points, I agree. I also often get the impression that it’s uncertainty when somebody can’t just let a differing opinion or a different preference stand and has to put the other person down to validate his/her own way. Somebody who is able to let others have their own opinions and is able have a normal and friendly conversation about it looks like the stronger person inside to me.

Thanks for your post, very insightful and important to have in this thread.

[haunt_house]

Thanks. It’s almost a bit like in the physical world. If somebody has a low center of gravity and solid ground, you can shove them quite a bit and they won’t fall. On the other hand, if the same person balances on a dime with his right big toe…

Anger is often the attempt to regain significance. I mean, look at what happens when somebody is angry and other people complain about them, calling them names, telling them where and why they’re wrong? They essentially take a person who’s on one or zero on the zero to ten significance scale and kind of try to push him below zero. Not actually knowing what they do. And they fuel the problem. Flamewar on!

Have you ever tried to be even more friendly, paradoxically even more understanding when somebody is hostile and wrong? It’s called a pattern interrupt. If you serve a good, proactive response where hostility is expected, one that the angry person can’t fight, you can disarm most people easily. Sometimes it takes continuing efforts since the unexpected behavior isn’t believable to the angry person. At first.

A while ago I made a few jokes in a thread where people were bashing something. I thought, hey, be a little ironic. Complain along in an obviously impossible, silly way. Suddenly there jumps a guy out of the bushes, quotes all my jokes and my real name, as if I was hiding it, seems to not get that they weren’t meant literally and claims, my ‘ilk’ tarnishes the community. Significance seeker at work. Since I was low on significance, I suffered from that for weeks.

A forum or chat without fun is half dead. You’d be surprised how often I make teens laugh when I teach Blender.

[Sanne]

@haunt_house

Have you ever tried to be even more friendly, paradoxically even more understanding when somebody is hostile and wrong?

Yes, indeed, I have, that’s usually my first approach. Most times it works to deescalate the situation and give the person the feeling of being heard.