Statistical numbers are quite irrelevant in some situations… What if the majority are just doing it the wrong way? Yes, of course most applications use Ctrl+A while Blender uses A instead… In most applications, the letter A is normally used to input the character “a”, something we rarely need in Blender; And in terms of productivity (one of Blender’s strength), it’s a bit faster to press just A than pressing Ctrl+A, so why not use that shortcut instead?
I’m not advocating for Blender’s interface, and it sure needs a more concise ways of distributing ui elements and shortcuts… But IMHO, I think that the ones that really master some or other part of blender should meet and discuss all editors’ ways of usage.
Of course, we already have application templates. Since the UI is done in Python and there’s no need to compile the whole program, anyone is free to write a ‘new users’ interface, with more common shortcuts, bigger icons everywhere, etc… For those who complaint so much about these issues, you’re welcome to design a new template, feel free to group and organize yourselves… We won’t mind that Blender ships with a simpler and user-friendly alternative interface, for new or casual users; just like we already have to some extend some keyboards layouts. But you must remember that there are some reasons for most of the shortcuts being what they are in Blender, and they come from the experience of long time users, and aim for the faster work pace possible.
I am quoting for agreement. I came from Lightwave and, because I had grown so familiar with it, felt the Blender UI was terrible and not at all “good”. Once I shook off my bias and preconceptions and actually started to use Blender, I found not only was it not “terrible”, but started to feel much more logical than Lightwave.
Do I think it has shortcoming, for sure, there are parts of LW that Blender would benefit from workflow wise, however, if I have to move back to LW for something, I now find myself thinking that UI is clunky. I find I can shift rapidly through Blenders UI, I love the ability to setup preferred screen layouts and switch window functions at the press of a key.
It is a program that will reward you if you put the time in, but the simple truth is, it suffers terribly from it’s old reputation, I hated the 2.49 look and it was like deciphering hideen messages trying to do anything. The current layout, to me, is cloes enough to other packages that you can dive in, whilst still retaining it’s own identity.
As for having to go into user preferences to change 2 or 3 things once when you set it up, hardly a show stopper. Change 'em, save defaults, forget about it.
What if the majority are just doing it the wrong way?
It’s really depressing to see all the fanboys come out of the woodwork again.
They haven’t read (or just dont care about) the original question here, which was whether Blender is hard to learn (and teach).
Instead they jump at the chance to recount their personal experience and utter joy with the program over and over.
As shown by the quote above (and many similar statements in this thread) there’s little hope of making some people understand even the most basic tenents of UI standards, such as the fact that if ten thousand programs do a certain thing in one way, there’s no need for that one program to do it differently.
Except, of course, if you want to make Blender extra hard to learn.
I don’t see why any of these points make Blender harder to learn. Ctrl+A doesn’t select all? Oh no! Oh wait, it’s just A. I guess all those programs that use Ctrl+A have terrible UI design.
It’s the same with the other things like right vs left click select. If you don’t like it, change it in the settings, click the save settings button and you’re done. No need to use it forever. If anything if it frustrates you enough for you to learn that you can actually customize basically everything in Blender, having a strange default setting was worth it.
You can customize the headers too, if you like them at the top just right click it and flip to top. Some things (like the properties panel) are already set up this way.
That being said I prefer left click select too. The key binding system could be improved too (warning for conflicting keys and so on). But I don’t think these things make Blender harder to learn really.
It could make Blender hard to approach “? It doesn’t do what I want it to? Forgot this program!” which I guess is where all the “Blender’s UI is terrible” posts come from. But if you don’t have the patience to find how to customize the software to your liking maybe Blender isn’t for you.
I would love to change the settings to left click select and I would even love it more if I could still do everything in Blender, including weight painting and bone selection.
I am not only using Blender, but other applications too and I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally place the cursor somewhere, even though I certainly did not want to do that at all. Right click select is not an issue for me when I work longer in Blender, but when I continuously switch to other 3d applications, it is really annoying. Instead of focusing on the work, I have to focus on what I have to click.
You still don’t seem to understand that this thread is about whether or not Blender is hard to learn. Oh, well, there’s probably no way to get through to some people.
I think its important to remember that so much of this is personal and subjective as with so many things.
Discussion is good but people are going to feel differently about things, its natural. Sweeping judgments and bracketing of others surely do no open discussion any good.
As regards the comments I posted here. I try to balance my impressions of Blender as much as I can. That I have been honestly enthused by a lot of it is true. I also have been critical of aspects in the past too. I am simply giving feed back based on personal experiance. Also what I feel is a deep familiarity and long history working with other major 3D apps in the industry. So I try to focus on a lot of this stuff with a workman like attitude.
I try to stick to Blender mostly and not single out other apps too much as this is a Blender forum and I want to avoid a Blender vs a specific X type situation in my comments…
Perhaps I should customise the settings for a bit. Try the left click select for awhile.See how it goes. But that isnt the way I did it. I decided to go the Blender way and gave some feedback on how it went for me as I was learning it that way… Also how I felt about using the interface now I am more experianced and used to it. For me its mainly been a very positive experiance up until now. I kept to the Blender default partly based negative experiances of changing default settings in other apps. But I can understand if others want to change the settings to something more comfortable. Work preferences are always going to be individual and personal and also dependant a lot on the situation at the time… Its whatever is best to get the job done.
I certainly dont think Blender is the hardest 3D app necessarily. Nor possibly any harder than other apps of similar depth and complexity. But thats just my impression. Always room for improvement of course. The Blender 101 idea looks interesting.
Yes it’s probably harder to learn then some 3d packages out there
Post 2.5x seeing as most UI initiatives seem to die due to lack of interest (I don’t know how many teams we have had an official UI team that held one or two meeting then disappeared into the ether) I would say you have lemons make lemonade.
Yeah and if we look at k3d we see how well it worked out. I know I should not post this, but after reading some of these comments about the UI I asked myself if I really want to have those users in the blender community. You know this is a double edged sword, on one hand we should listen to them there are some valid points, on the other hand you can’t please everybody especially those who even refuses to change a simple option in the preferences.
I think UI wise we should actually start more to get this discussion to a task centric topic: Instead of this endless cycles about industry standards / leftrightclickselect… we should look at those other tools and try to archive tasks with less clicks / better user interaction / and more flexibility. You know a more workflow centric approach. By doing it the more elegant way we have much better chances to convince people to take a look at blender the more serious way.
I’m using left click select with weight painting without problems, I use the weight paint sample group feature though (nicer than selecting bones imo).
I don’t really understand. You mean all replies should just say “yes” or “no”? Or that I was responding to your post that was off topic?
I don’t think Blender is hard to learn. It’s harder for people to adjust to Blender if they come from some other program until they learn how things work in Blender. People often blame the UI when they say that Blender is hard to learn but it’s hard to say if they seriously tried it before them saying “Blender? no, UI is horrible”.
It is not working out of the box and it does not just work if you switch from right to left click as it should. That’s the point. That is supposed to be resolved once the new keymap is being used, but that is most likely going to be some time after the initial 2.8 release, if I remember correctly.
Good for you. I’m sure people who’re trying to learn Blender appeciate that tidbit.
I don’t think Blender is hard to learn. It’s harder for people to adjust to Blender if they come from some other program until they learn how things work in Blender.
Do you even read your own text before posting? What you’re saying here is that it’s hard to learn Blender until you’ve learned Blender. You do realize that makes no sense whatsoever?
And what do you mean by “some other program”, anyway? “Some other program” like Photoshop, Word, Inkscape, Gimp, Windows, OSX and everyother program on the globe?
People often blame the UI when they say that Blender is hard to learn but it’s hard to say if they seriously tried it before them saying “Blender? no, UI is horrible”.
Again, you’d first have to learn Blender’s UI. And that’s the unnecessarily hard part in an otherwise excellent program.
I don’t think Blender is hard to learn. It’s harder for people to adjust to Blender if they come from some other program until they learn how things work in Blender.
Actually, no. He’s saying it’s hard to adjust to Blender when coming from other software, which is not the same as saying that it’s hard to learn from scratch. Like moving from a RHD car to a LHD car. You know what everything should do, but you have to reverse half of the way you do it.
People say the UI is horrible despite having used it for only 5 minutes before closing Blender shouldn’t be completely ignored. I’m guessing a lot of users on this forum felt the same way at first but persevered and got used to the UI. One of the reasons some people don’t persevere is because they expect to be able to select and move the default cube and rotate the camera without having to read a manual only to find out that selection is the right mouse button, they need to press b to box select and the camera button is the middle button (which some computers don’t even have). Once you get past the initial alien feel due to Blender ignoring some basic conventions (I’m talking mostly about left click here), then no, it’s not so bad compared to other 3D programs, although 3D is complex, and all the 3D apps are hard to learn.
I think the problem with ignoring UI conventions for the very basics is that you make the initial experience of almost everyone who touches the program a frustrating one. Sticking with something even if it is difficult or frustrating is part of learning, but I don’t see why Blender needs to keep strange defaults such as right click select, since changing it in the settings does not appear to break the usage of any part of the program. Other aspects of the input setup, such as GRS instead of WER (which is only standard between some 3D apps), and the tiled UI are far easier to get used to, and bring their own benefits.
Speaking of my own experience with Blender, I originally tried it because I was interested in open source software, and whilst I was a Maya user, I dislike Autodesk and was not strongly allied with them or their software. It’s true that I didn’t give Blender a fair shake at first, and gave up because I was so frustrated by the default input mapping. However, I later got sick of Maya because I moved company and had to use an outdated version that was missing tools I had grown used to, and realised that I would never have the same problem with OSS like Blender, so I forced myself to learn it by doing a real project. After I got over the initial hump, and stopped getting annoyed at how I would press the wrong buttons all the time when switching between apps, I found learning Blender no more difficult than any other app. Once my frustration was gone, it was quite easy to see all the benefits of using Blender instead of focusing on all the things that I thought needed to be ‘fixed’ before it could be used seriously
