Simple Blender for Brilliant Minds

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

Sausages:

Designing a simplified UI for Blender and submitting it to a forum such as this would truly be pointless and self destructive. Before I ever lifted pencil to paper for such an endeavor, I would “test the waters”, just as I have done here to see if there exists any kind of consensus, yea or nay.

The consensus I have witnessed, both in this thread and in my first thread, “Simple Blender for Simple Minds”, is that very few, if any Blender users see the value in allowing for the development of a simplified interface in the nature of customizable task overlays featuring a combination of icons and simple text - hiding all numerical and cryptic parts of the interface in layers that can be exposed at will.

Since you, the Blender public, have overwhelmingly expressed your dislike for the idea, I have no reason to go any further with such a proposal.

For some reason, even though I tried to stress in every post that this “proposal” has nothing to do with eliminating any parts of the interface, only allowing for an adaptable, Python based overlay scheme, people have assumed that I am proposing a total redo of the interface, depriving you, the Blender public, of all the things you love.

People do not read thoroughly. Many look for any reason to attack the messenger, and then lay into them without mercy. You know who you are. Resorting to name calling and personal attack is the lowest form of currency here on these forums.

This also confirms, once and for all, to me, that those who think “gratitude” for your contributions here in this wonderful, open community, is enough to motivate any serious endeavor and investment in manpower, time and money are completely delusional.

Greg Smith

42

I don’t think it’s that we don’t see the value in allowing a simplified interface, otherwise they wouldn’t be making Blender more customizable so users can make it… simplified… for them. Indeed I think it is certain attitudes that are not valued and such attitudes tend to shed a negative light on what people have to say, whether warranted or not.

That said, I think what you’re asking for is already possible in one way or another that most would be content with, as some have already pointed out. Why do the work twice instead of compromising a little and learning to adapt?

Since you, the Blender public, have overwhelmingly expressed your dislike for the idea, I have no reason to go any further with such a proposal.

Dude, no one’s stopping you from doing it yourself, for yourself. It’s not like it’s closed source or anything.

43

Bruce, what you’re proposing is extremely difficult to visualise as it is a big departure from the workflow of all the apps out there. (as you said a few posts back all of the big apps are too complicated…Ok.

How does it work? you haven’t said. so we have very little to go on other than you’re talking about hiding stuff.

Well, of course that sounds bad! it’s tough enough finding mistakes in your setup as is. How else would you expect anyone to react?

Unless you show us you could only get one reaction…
but then you just get rude …about the GPL, the developers, peoples abilities…peoples goodwill… it is this rather than the proposal that attracts the flames… If you have a proposal rather than a vague notion then share it.
…else…???

44

Yes, I’m confused by many of the reactions here too.

He’s talking about making a custom simplified interface, not changing the default interface.

From his original post:

I think there may be a paying job for someone willing to use 2.5’s flexibility to create a “for profit” artist’s interface for Blender.

EDIT:
But as Michael W pointed out above, you did shift topic to talking about how the GPL isn’t a sustainable license, how Ton isn’t rewarded, the rest of the devs aren’t rewarded, etc. etc.
That’s a good way to derail your own thread from its original topic.

45

You’re being melodramatic. If you really believe in what you are saying then why are you even bothering to make a “proposal” to begin with? Either do the coding yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. Are you expecting that you will simply convince others to the coding in your stead because of how seductive your ‘arguments’ for it are?

Looks like you just want free labor but when you run into a bunch of of counter arguments instead, you freak out and start writing flowery prose about the future while finally resorting to playing victim, instead of truly writing a real ‘proposal’.

I’m skeptical of what you say because it doesn’t make much sense (so far, to me). And I think that’s what has some people riled up. It’s easy to point out the fact that something isn’t perfect, but everyone already knows that. What’s you’re point though?

That’s number inputs are scary? That’s nonsense.

46

2.5 mailing list seems to be currently(a few months now) collecting lots of mock ups and proposals.

47

Cessen:

I’m glad you are confused at the response, as well.

No, I’m not trying to solicit free labor, quite the opposite, really. I’m trying to determine if there is a paying audience for an artist’s, (or anyone else desiring simplicity and elegance in interface), interface. If there is such an audience, does it exist among the Blender users? Obviously not. The responses here thoroughly satisfied my curiosity on that point.

On the other hand, I’m not through looking for that audience elsewhere. If such an audience exists, Blender is an excellent platform from which to build. The GPL, however, is not friendly toward any “for profit” enterprise that seeks to dedicate serious resources in the form of paid programming talent, and this is the reason I suggest that it may be time for the Foundation to consider alternate licensing schemes.

Had there been a sufficient number of interested Blender users here, and had the licensing scheme encouraged it, the community might indeed be surprised at what kind of real investment might have cropped up to fill the desire and the need.

Tisk, tisk.

Greg Smith

48

I’m interested. =]

Though as far as paying for something like that I’m not sure about. If it really made a huge difference and required custom script and GUI work that goes beyond what we’ll be able to do in 2.5 ourselves I might be interested. But to be honest, part of what attracts me to blender these days is the open source aspect of it all. I’m even looking forward to seeing what I can contribute myself at some point.

49

lol - you don’t see how melodramatic you’re being? Did you even bother to make a poll before deciding that you’d heard the voice of the entire blender community?

No, you didn’t make a poll because you never bothered to even make a concrete proposal to begin with.

Tisk, tisk. Right back at you. :wink:

50

No need for a poll. If my assessment is correct, this thread will quickly die, and that will be the end of it.

Greg Smith

51

Sorry for disagreeing with your nonexistent proposal…goodbye thread. Goodbyeeeee…I hardly knew thee…

52

Famous last words. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind a for-profit organization working on blender, but with a caveat: Blender has to remain free and open source, and said organization can’t claim patent on its contribution. A significant amount of resources went into making Blender open source in the first place, and heaps of additional resources in the form of programming talent have made it the great app that it is.

Look at what’s happened with these big movie and game projects the past few years and tell me again that we need a new license, or that we need something more palatable to for-profit enterprises. Look at the kind of investments that have cropped up to fill the desires and needs. I think we’ve shown quite well enough what the Blender community is capable of without for-profit organization intervention (other than generous sponsorships, of course)

53

The GPL is totally compatible with for-profit enterprises. You are free to make money with it. And you are free to pay people to develop it in ways that you need.

You seem very stuck on the idea that financially-backed development can only come from the commoditization of software. But that’s simply not true. Even right now Blender has two full-time paid developers working for the Blender Foundation (Ton and Brecht).

And as more studios continue to adopt Blender into their pipeline in various ways, I suspect we’ll see more development coming from them. Not because they want to sell the software, but because they use it to make money, and therefore it’s worth paying their coders to develop Blender in the ways that they need.

You can also see things like the Bmesh fund, where people are directly and collectively paying to have a developer work on a much wanted feature.

54

Cessen:

It is only compatible with “for profit” enterprises if said enterprises do not wish to make a profit. That is the conundrum with the GPL license.

Because, if you must, by agreement with the GPL license, publish all of your source code that is built on top of Blender, then you have just eliminated your ability to make a profit.

Anyone can then do anything they want with your source code, so thus ends any motivation a “for profit” enterprise would have.

Greg Smith

55

Red Hat would like to have a word with you

56

So would IBM. And Novell. And several others.

Frankly, anyone who still thinks the GPL is incompatible with business must have been living under a rock for almost a decade.

57

Eye208:

I’d like for you to explain, in detail, for the benefit of everyone so inclined within the Blender community, how this business model works.

It’s the least you can do.

I’ve been living under a rock for almost a decade, so don’t expect me to do it.

Greg Smith

58

Here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redhat#Business_model

Also, like I said before, you’re assuming that the financial profit of Blender needs to come from commoditizing the software. But if you’re an animation studio, the profit comes from the results of using it. This is also a for-profit model, that also creates real financial backing for development.

59

And This is the reason why I post here,to balance this kind of influences.
2.5 is allready what you want,the guys have lost time in things that personally I find not so useful only to improve the user experience for people like you.
There are several issues in trying to do things easier,you can’t do a simplification from some part keeping power.
For example,you don’t like numeric fields.
Did you know that,for material stuff,they are clamped?(0 to 1)
Do you think I’m happy about this?
No,because if I want to have some object to reflect much more than another I can’t without tricks.
But this simplification is needed to avoid people bothering about numeric fields(maybe also to helps antialias,at least in the past).
Spend time in learning,maybe you could start to find it interesting(the more you know,the better work you can do)

60

I also don’t understand the reaction as regards to making a customised simplied interface, but as far as the gpl license. Man if it wasn’t for Blender been opensource you would squash half my dreams of turing 3D work into a carrear. Coming from a developing country I can tell you straight up that software like 3dmax is just out of most peoples budget here where salary scales don’t match those of the developed world. The full price of the max is around $3375 to $4290, according to some googling I did. if I take the $4290 that’s a little under a quarter of what I make in a year clearly I couldn’t in anyway justify spending that much of my money on any piece of software.

But because of FOSS the idea of me doing free-lance 3D illustrations or making indie games is very real. making and distributing animated shorts for mobile devices is another idea I have been toying with all these things are only possible for me because Blender exists as an opensource program. You can make money with GPL but you just need to approach things differently than when selling closed source software. IBM is one company that has invested heavily in FOSS am sure they do this because they know the can make a return on their investment.