Hi all,
this is just an opinion post about my recent experience with Blender.
Having spent 2 months working with blender on my free time, I feel the need to share my thoughts on it. It reminds me a lot of the U.S.A’s attitude towards the metric system:
They are pioneers in Science -which is great!- but at the same time they insist on using the imperial system -which is very bad!- and in doing so, they seem oblivious to the following facts:
they are pioneers in science DESPITE using the imperial system not because of it.
when they proudly insist that they prefer it, they do not attract admiration, but pity.
As an analogy, I feel that the blender community follows a similar path:
Blender, is an amazing amalgamation of so many people’s effort, and its out of the box thinking has made it such a versatile tool that in many areas, few other programs can compete.
still: this insistence on failed paths on so many other areas, is not a cause for pride, but rather an obstacle to blender’s acceptance and further flourishing.
Specifically:
using alternative commands to windows: Why? if it lives in windows, it should not use different commands to it. (e.g. shift clicking on a list should select all the objects in between)
insisting on not having basic conventional tools: material libraries being the most obvious but not the only one
insisting on not recognizing objects as entities that can be exported/saved/imported as standalone files (why shouldn’t you be able to save materials as files?)
insisting on not following long-established conventions, just for the heck of it, when by doing so, so many artists are discouraged from using it.
Time and time again, I ask people how do you do simple operations and I get the answer:
“That cannot be done in blender” or “this is not the blender way” well, guess what! people do not admire you for being different, they laugh. and that is the reason why the blender community remains so small after all this time.
I am not saying all this to attack blender, the opposite: I really believe that it’s an amazing tool and it deserves a much bigger audience. And I also believe it can acquire that without betraying its core values: I’m sure it can become much more palatable to the 3D community if it just follows a few norms on a surface level so that more people will be able to join the ‘gang’ and contribute with their minds and ideas…
In the mean while, I’m going to continue trying to master it, despite all this spaghetti logic. I just hope people realize that when they say “It’s the blender way” about a command that should be executed with one click and instead you have to go through 4 or 5 steps, they sound exactly like the Americans when they say: “There are two kinds of countries, the ones that use metric and the ones that have been to the moon”
P.S. I have nothing against Americans, I love them. They are just very stubborn on the metric system subject and it’s not doing them any good…
As an American, I’d rather we used the metric system. The conversions are so much easier. It’s why a lot of industries already switched to it (medical, electronics, controlled substances, etc).
It’s not a trivial thing to change given the country’s size, though (both physically and economically).
Agreed a standard system across the world of course would be better, whichever that is. In the UK of course we use both, but that’s more of an EU directive. However in some instances we use Imperial, like Pint, Oz, Lbs etc.
However metric it is not a better system just a different system.
maybe I shouldn’t have used that analogy…
the subject here is neither Americans nor the metric system…
it’s being different just for being different, even if it causes you harm…
Indeed, not using standard UI manipulation configuration excludes 90% (in my estimation) of Blender users from more powerful and efficient workflows. Box select to select multiple list items instead of shift select is one of those. I don’t think it’s a wise choice, but it’s also inertia where people closest to the core development of Blender have simply gotten used to it and think it’s a better way of doing things, or simply they are so busy that can’t focus on solving it. I’m sure if somebody fixed this and implemented it in a good way that was easily integratable to Blender the patch would be accepted eventually.
Same feeling here. If you see what a simple change to left-click select did to open up blender to the rest of the cg world, imagine what could happen if they polished and changed all the bizarre and cumbersome quirks that stayed in blender for way too long.
Proper grouping (like in every other soft)
same accepted industry standard workflows
materials library
proxy’s
-…
Like mentioned in every little feature there is a feeling like ‘why did they make it so overly different/complicated?’
I understand this when you’re inventing the first iPhone and want something radically different to make it more intuitive, but the blender way is almost always way more complicated then it should be.
I love blender more every day but for it to completely disrupt the industry it has to be polished and better thought of in the details so it can really come out of it’s hobbyist corner and embrace it’s future.
exactly!
It feels as though there is a guilt syndrome that if we do something like everybody else, we are going to become ordinary.
Searching about blender’s usage, I have found one or two ‘Blender used in Hollywood’ stories but they all concern some freelancer (or at best a small studio) using blender to perform a minor task within a movie.
And the reason for that -I believe- is that there is too much concentration in freedom and flexibility but very little in task automation and productivity:
one of the most obvious examples: NO PRESETS! if you want to load render presets, you have to have a specific scene saved with the settings you need and build on it. (as always, all other apps, offer it with a button)
Also: NO BATCH RENDERING! (sure, there are plugins, but not as sophisticated)
Not anymore as default sadly, I’ll still use right click since its so much better than left once you get the hang of.
Why do you need materials libraries when each .blend file is a library itself, and there are many addons that allow you to manage them.
Objects, materials, meshes, armatures are all separate entities, stored in bpy.data the thing is you can save them as a standalone .blend file, you dont need a specific file format for each one, .blend does just fine.
I was discouraged to use it just because of that, then I come back and tried it anyway, after a few weeks of practice, I feel windows weird, blender’s way of interaction is way more muscle memory friendly, honestly, blender can be so fast for model only because of that.
in my point of view, blender is comparable to the metric system and the rest of the world just didn’t adopt it yet. yet…
@bartv AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA! I know! Everything is all so complicated here. Doing things the easy and logical way seems to be unimaginable. And if you want things the easy and logical way, it’ll cost you…it’s so backward. So true!
