Unless you know how to use them. And even before they got cleaned up in recent versions, they were very powerful and clean, when you know how, were and when to access them.
But that is not the point. The point is a node system behind the scenes is not new. It has been around, I would say easily more than a decade.
And to the exact point, one of the largest features coming to Blender is Everything Nodes. That is a direct copy of other solutions that exist…
In other apps.
There are a lot of other examples. And you could dissect Blender if you wanted to and point to the source of probably 98% or better, of the features and find they were copied.
The remaining 2% or so, if even that, a large percent of these have even come under scrutiny since 2.8 and defaults are changing…
Within that small percent that are “Blender only” you can find some very powerful and unique ideas. But even some of those main features for us Blender users, we found that others simply don’t see the same value in. So again options are needed and defaults get reviewed.
So in the end the idea that it is a sound argument to say someone is just trying to make Blender a copy of “fill in the blank” is really not true.
What is happening is that these people see value in a given feature. And their experience should be viewed as valuable input. And from which Blender can improve.
However, the onus is on these people to win the argument based on the value of that feature to others. Not the value to themselves. And that is where people usually fail.
By the way something that occurred to me while writing the above post. I think a lot of the frustration that you experience is that you put a lot of emphasis on your personal workflow.
But just step back for a moment before you get too defensive… lol
Stay with me here.
It is absolutely true that for every one of you there are others who feel the same way. So your voice does represent its own crowd, if you will. And there is nothing wrong with showing how you like to work. Actually this is the essence of good feedback.
But I think to get traction on your requests, you need to be more persuasive in regards to the value of that feature to others. This is why some developers use a voting system for feature requests. The features that win the most votes are the ones that get bumped up the list.
But what happens when you start on that road, is your request comes under great scrutiny. Because, there may already be ways to do it. Or people don’t find the value in it for some reason.
That is the problem. And the solution to that is not walls of text (like I prefer…lol). That is the lazy way. (speaking to myself here as well).
A better way is to present good examples and videos. And also show you have researched it fully and can present a better solution. And also knowing in advance what the push back is going to be, and having a good sound argument - in examples.
Just getting frustrated and claiming you won’t compromise on your workflow, is not going to be enough.
Can´t agree on that, for me I heard this many times before…you got to drop your lightwave wish for blender sort of.
These issues with the viewport isn´t a unique wish refered to a certain software like Lightwave in singular, it is from all the other 3D tools out there, so that holds no truth.
And you honestly refer the blender viewports to be more functional in it´s current static state than lw viewports which are dynamic…and don´t confuse or go off topic to other things withth the viewports, keep it focused, the fact is the viewports are limiting blender as software, not making it better because you then have to use other ways to use it.
Absolutetely,
But I mentioned before that I will try and get the time to make a website for this…
hopefully very soon to discribe the issues and workflow…with some youtube vids as well.
And it will also cover where I think Lightwave needs to work more like blender, I am utterly convinced most of you wouldn´t arguee anything about that in such case, and I think that has nothing to do with blender being perfect…more rather than how blender percieves blender, I bet none of you would say…if you were to look at it from lw point of view, and say…you have to drop the blender workflow thinking ad adapt to Lightwave workflow thinking…all that is a very generalization in the mind process that really doesn´t make the technical issues become more valid.
And I will probably put upt some hair pipeline tips for getting lw guides to blender and hairnet, and getting blender hair to lightwave etc…but that is slightly different.
I will probably start with some basics like how to add a backdrop environment in lightwave and how you do it in blender, followed by camera targeting, and somewhere along the line describing the viewports issues… which aren´t specific to Lightwave, the issue is still that blender is doing it differently than all the other major software.
So I will try and cover that on both modeling issues and staging a scene issues with only one viewport vs multiviewports.
It´s so much of generalization as a whole with this comment of making blender a carbon copy of lightwave, copying a single good features doesn´t make blender a carbon copy, so if blenders viewports …which are static and can´t be mazimized with a button click on the choosable viewport and they can not be rescaled…if that were to be changed, would you consider blender suddenly as a whole have turned in to a carbon copy?
That is simply not true, and it´s hardly like the viewport would have lost functionality, on contrary…the functionality of the viewports would be better.
What about fractals, would there still be a stubborn, that´s not how blender does it…if you could get access to special designed fractals that does the job, without the need ot mulitplying a multiverse of the same nodes, but with math, vector and other nodes to construct an even more powerful node?
How many iterations of thread postings did it take to get away from the default cube?
Good to see that the copied? or blenders own design of naming conventions for “lamp” has ended, and it is now also called a light…like in most other software.
The thing with data tools…and mostly in general actually, while evolving…most of them will becom similar, it´s evolution where functions, features are discarded as not adaptable and sustainable…so there lies no surprise in that software in 3D businesses will be very much alike, unless they are targeted towards different nishes.
I think it is more of a personal workflow thing. In in my case, I stopped using quad views in LightWave primarily way before I even touched Blender. The only exception was with tools like Bend that you had to use an ortho view port in some cases. You could use a perspective view with snapping and that would work in some cases. Modeler was designed initially as a very view port-centric app. And there were times I would choose a view to do a specific action because I needed that view to perform it. But this was only a LightWave thing. It was not because of my personal preference.
Once I started using Blender and I could snap to the orientation of my choice, I completely forgot about quad views.
When I first started using Maya it used to default to Quad View. I always found myself going immediately into Perspective View. And then directly into an ortho view as needed. Rarely two at once, if at all. Ever.
Finally they started shipping Maya with the perspective view as the default. And since that time I have never seen any app open in a quad view and I have never felt the need to have one. And I never see any current videos with people using them or saying how great they are.
In Blender this became very efficient to use my way of working which was to use one ortho view at a time. It is literally all I ever need, or want. But if I do need more than one view it is usually camera view and a perspective view. Rarely if ever any two ortho views.
I think generally the trend these days is perspective. Maybe two views max.
My strongest argument I can think of is, if you are going to have a quad view. Make it a proper quad view. Not the useless thing they have had up to now. Either rip it out. Or replace it with a proper quad view.
So…
That is the gist of the push back you are going to get. It isn’t just a Blender thing. And it isn’t about all apps. Because I don’t see anyone expressing this as a technique or value.
So. That is your challenge.
How are you going to sell the value of it to people who don’t have an interest?
Richard, I do not need to sell anything…either the blender community and devs find it worthwile to improve viewports or they dont´t …if not…they probably just loose out eventual customers who wants to leave…but jump back to the other software again.
I just got a warning today about promoting a competing product on Newtek forums, Paul Boland a lightwave user said in a thread he started, that he must retire lightwave cause so much has changed in workflow and some slider issues never fixed.
I adviced to go for blender (and that is where moderators jumped in and said I was violating forum rules) which I really do not agree with…he had already made up his mind and my call toward him was for him personally, not aimed to promote in a group.
Then again…Paul would perhaps feel lost in blender too, since there is very much of nodal workflow there as wel, but I explained that the nodal expose and handling of nodes is much better.
yes I know how many of you are trying to say they are comfortable with one ortho view, and I suspect that is because you often model something…but doesn´t overcome the situations when you need to have more viewports, as described many times before, you can not possible see a paths full trajectory as you may need in one single ortho or perspective view…You just can´t…and for me that is important when designing a path or motion…you may survive with one viewport…but it will not give you the full datarange of the environment you are working with…and thus you are lesser capable of being accurate and effective.
And that is only for the staging, there are modeling situations when there is a need of at least 2 viewports…despite you guys declaring you have never come across it.
Think it as 3d mental state of designing something with the visual feedback of mulitple views VS a one dimensional view that needs a shortcut switch to find the other dimensional description of the stage.
But Ivé been discussion this to boredom in another thread…just let it drop now till I can showcase it through vids.
should drop it as I said myself…but just found this older blender thread about per viewport maximize, there are other ways to do it of course in blender, though I agree with the request in general, that is one thing…the other would be to resize the windows by moving the split window borders…without the need to go and setup a new window for each view, should be built in…it won´t make blender lesser useful, just better.
I think it would be more useful to spend time learning the software which will also have its shortcomings, and then start talking about what you can’t do with the software. Blender Fundamentals 2.8
Blender has a very flexible view system with which you can have any configuration
Not that they (Blender devs) are unique in that aspect, but they are particularly bull-headed about their mistakes.
The reason I gave up on LW, which HURT, is that they didn’t fix EASY things. They continuously worked (hard) on rocket-science stuff, while things like, ohhh, the LWM Layer Panel stayed the same for DECADES. While the renderer got better and better, things that could be solved with scripts went begging. But to me, with all the excellent 3rd party renderers around, perfecting another seemed like a mug’s game, when with a lot less effort they could have been making the program itself slick as ice and just made good pipelines to other renderers.
BTW, one thing I do miss about LW is the Camera: to me, they got that right, right out of the gate. It seemed like a real Camera, not some b.s “viewpoint” that is forced into a camera-like box. That’s engineering, CAD, not movie-making.
So why not create a simple workspace called “Quad”, set up the viewports as you desire, and then simply switch to that workspace whenever you need to see the scene from different angles while working?
And hovering the mouse cursor over a viewport + CTRL-SPACE will maximize that viewport.
That is what I did. I also had the left top viewport set to Top, left bottom one to Front, and the right bottom one to Right orthographic views. This mirrors the numpad setup, which is easy to remember that way.
Hovering the cursor over the top left viewport, and hitting the CTRL-numpad7 key then shows the bottom view.
I found this setup to be working quite well. Works faster for me than that dreadful cumbersome Layout dropdown menu with two levels (first trying to click that tiny button on the right of the viewport shading menu, and THEN a second viewport submenu, THEN having to click the very last Quad entry… That is pretty bad GUI design there.)
I think what it comes down to from my perception is that while the render engine was good, it was falling behind. And also, while on the one hand you can say there are so many around. Well, that should tell you how comparatively easy it is to write a render engine than to write an entire app from scratch that is unified. Much less the nightmare of merging them.
So I think the render engine for them was like low hanging fruit. By the time people were using LightWave only for rendering, it was too late. They had already missed the boat. The animation ship sailed already.
They were not going to be able to fix those little things, and they knew it. And they knew they were stuck really. But I don’t know. Denial, whatever. But no real commitment to the product. The entire last 20 years has been low hanging fruit, milk it for what they can, sprinkled with some fantastic and unrealistic notions of re-imagining LightWave with not even a hope and a prayer of being able to do it.
Not sure about this myself. I liked LightWave’s fields (coming from animation), but to me it always felt strange that properties like resolution are part of the camera instead of the scene properties. I like the scene metaphor in animation software, and LightWave lacked (lacks) that.
Which is interesting, because Layout calls the file a 'Scene", but it is not possible to switch between scenes, or duplicate a scene with different output settings. Lightwave solves this with its camera system, but it just feels off to me. In Blender I can create many scenes in a file, and switch quickly between those, and reference scenes in other scenes
Also, if a camera is selected, the camera perspective is used with 2x, or G + Z it reacts the same as LightWave’s camera. May want to hold down for finer control.
Just so, I think it’s going in a good direction and is becoming “familiar” enough that those from other packages can get to grips with it far easier. Though as I said, personally, having ditched my preconceptions I found it only took a few hours of really working the program to start to understand it’s flexibility. I can say there are probably only 2 or 3 actions from LW I miss, most of the stuff in Blender I had been wanting in LW for ages.
I agree that personal “need” sometimes clouds objectivity, plus of course, “need” itself is subjective, after all, Lightwave was famous for it’s workarounds, to the point some saw them as “features” and certainly they became staples of some vfx.
Because blender has shortcomings with viewports…from what I asserted, it´s not saying anything bad about the other good things with blender viewports…make a distinction about that, but what I said about viewports…no matter of learning…that´s not gonna change learning blender.
And for your understanding …to correct…I do not spend hours…so if you do not understand that…it is understandable…hope you understand that:)
it´s like I would in a ridiculous way …counter with…why do you persist on spending hours telling me to learn blender instead of just accepting the blender viewport dynamic changes shortcomings?
You mean learning blender will fix the viewports to be better? Not likely.
