Yeah, like Gilligan’s Island, it is a three hour tour. I finished, still thinking on how to constructively respond to all that.
+1 for hotkeys. The idea for no hotkeys stems from the idea that we will all move to tablets and other touch screen media and won’t have keyboard input. I actually see these devices as consumption portals, and not really content creation stuff.
Firstly, I’ll say that it is clear that Blender has some issues not unlike any other software, especially within the realm of complex CG software. It’s also pretty apparent that there are a few highly vocal Blender users who don’t have much/any experience with this comparable software- Maya, 3DS Max, Softimage, Modo, Lightwave, Zbrush, Mudbox etc, etc. but they seem to like to offer comparative opinions anyway. I have looked at and used most of these products and guess what? They all have on going issues!
If anyone can be bothered to take the time to look they will find that the users of other CG software are regularly up in arms about the current approach of companies like Adobe and Autodesk. Complaints of bloated software, stalled development, unfixed bugs and most recently cloud based subscriptions are pretty common around the main CG forums. Check for example http://3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests/suggestions/4249552-tom-hudson-for-3dsmax-development-leadership
Ultimately, Blender is not broken and it is disingenuous and quite a sensationalist, hysterical tabloid like headline to come out with. Although, I can understand that a headline stating ‘Blender has a few UI issues!!’ is not going grab the same amount of attention. Over the past couple of years, Blender has come on leaps and bounds starting with the ground work laid down during the 2.5 series, we now have a new render engine progressing nicely, a complete reworking and improvement of the modelling toolset, retopology, a fully usable camera tracking system! The list goes on and on, people have noticed and Blender along with its development team have correctly received praise and awards because of it.
Pros don’t use Blender! Who Cares!!
‘Pros use Autodesk, Blender must be rubbish’. I don’t think anyone agrees with this statement any more, it’s pretty clear that pros use Autodesk because it’s a major corporation that got in on the act early. Through an aggressive business approach including buying out any competition, Autodesk more or less monopolised the CG industry over a period of a number of years and if someone wants to get a job in CG they need to learn what the companies hiring ask for. Yet in recent times a shift has begun to occur, companies like The Foundry and Pixologic have started to make a major dent into Autodesk. I think it fair to say that Blender is playing a part to, perhaps not in major Hollywood movies but we must realise that they account for a very small percentage of the worlds CG application.
I believe from what I read and see in a variety of sources around the net that people are looking again at Blender and are liking what they see. The quality of work being produced is climbing steadily, a look at the galleries here and elsewhere confirms this and if there’s anything that is going to draw in new users the artwork being produced puts forward a very compelling argument.
Translate: move from one place or condition to another.
Idiot proofing. I would love to be able to fly an aeroplane or perform a triple bypass but I can’t. I’m a reasonably intelligent person, I think that maybe if I went to the expense and took the time to learn how to fly a plane, I probably could master it after a couple of years. It would be nice but I’m not really that bothered. I am passionate about CG so I have put in some time and effort there, I can operate Blender pretty well and can get it to do what I want in a reasonable amount of time because I have put the effort in. I probably am not clever/disciplined enough to learn how to perform major surgery, likewise there are a lot of people who just aren’t clever/disciplined or interested enough to learn advanced CG programs.
The Blender Foundation has done an admirable job, they are not blind to problems or feedback but with limited resources they have to prioritise. Of course this software is not the be all end all, there’ll always be disagreements about what is actually a problem and which issue should be corrected first, however one thing I’ve learnt from using Blender over the past decade is that the development team are doing a pretty good job! Feedback is good as is positive, progressive change but lets not get too carried away.
+9000
Thank you for the rebuttal
Bravo!
@ Craig, same.
Tablets would be cool, but for fiddling around, maybe when you’re away from a computer, pulling up something and doing some titching. Nothing beats the keyboard/mouse interface.
I think it comes from a general over appreciation of the mouse - computers used to be straight keyboard if you really wanted to do anything, then the mouse came out. Witness Ribbon mentioned earlier - totally clickaholic bullshit.
Nothing beats the keyboard/mouse interface.
Except when painting and sculpting with a pen and tablet
“Cloud-based subscriptions” is basically the most uninformed-sounding jargony description of Adobe Creative Cloud I’ve heard. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that.
Moving objects in 3D space isn’t heart surgery. It’s something literally 100% of humans know how to do in real life and all children with computers learn how to do in video games at least. The fact is that while much of 3D CGI is specialized, it’s not actually any more technical and abstract to model in 3D than to do the same in clay. Treating it like a feat of engineering sounds to me like a way to pump your ego.
Blender doesn’t necessarily need to be a tool for studios, sure. It’s only supposed to be for the independent artist (including professionals). But if artists decide that spending a couple thousand dollars on a software license is better than investing their time in obscure software with a mixed reputation and a confusing interface, that’s absolutely not the fault of the poor stupid artist who just doesn’t know what’s good for him and doesn’t understand the glory of FOSS. When your livelihood is making 3D art, you don’t want your tools to be in your way, even if nerds think FOSS is worth the pain. A couple grand, or a few dozen bucks a month, is not a crazy maintenance fee to support your livelihood (you spend more if you drive to work). An extra two or three hours out of your day searching for obscure solutions to weird problems is.
Really? CG is innate in all of us? Everyone can do it? Wow i guess all my years of training and experience are virtually worthless then. All this time it was the software slowing me down! Stupid software! Don’t tell my boss anyone could do my job, he’ll probably drop my salary to minimum wage!
Seriously, I dont even know how to respond… You think you can get a random group of adults and kids together and conjure up the Avatar sequel? And if you can’t ; is that the software’s fault?
If you can make a living by “moving around objects”, then that’s awesome and please tell me how. But i’m sure you will agree that CG is a little bit more involved than the child’s play you describe. You can only defer ineptitude onto the software up to a certain point. Some tools and UIs can slow the artist, yes. But when we’re down to “translate is too weird a word for me” then I start to lose my faith in humanity.
(And FYI, most studios have engineers on the payroll. CG is a feat of engineering)
Again with those evil elitist nerds! with their stupid learning and knowledge. How dare they understand things! :rolleyes:
What are you reacting to anyways? No one is calling you stupid if you bought a commercial software licence.
This is where my being left-handed, but right-handed for the mouse has paid off nicely 
That’s what we generally call a straw man argument, where instead of addressing what I actually said, you pretend I said something more convenient and refute it instead.
hmmmmmmmmm
You do yourself a disservice by seemingly overlooking the amount of technical ability a skilled traditional sculptor has.
It’s also worth noting that 3D computer graphics, as an artistic field, is far more than just modeling.
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I honestly dont think Blender’s current UI is bad. Especially compared to the 2.4 series.
Also I dont think that simplifying the UI is going to lead to many new users.
Blender has hundreds of user actions to choose from. No matter what order you put them in they’re still going to be confusing for a new user.
What i would like to see is better documentation and User Guides.
For instance the new Hair BSDF is available. Why not have a basic node setup example on the Wiki page?
It would save alot of time and useless experimentation
Agree that sculpting has enormous technical complexity at a high level, but we don’t pretend that you have to have a degree material engineering to mush a glob of sticky dirt into a person-shaped lump. You also don’t have to understand the geology of clay deposits, study the economics of the mineral trade, and be a loyal exclusive customer of one particular art supply store. You don’t even have to touch a paint brush. But when it comes to Blender, some people seem to be convinced that you actually have to be thoroughly literate in geometry and programming, understand Blender’s architecture, be a devoted fanboy of FOSS, and also for good measure use and understand every tool and function.
Like I said, I disagree. There is a need for technical depth, but protesting a simple obvious change like changing the word “translate” to “move”, or using descriptive tooltips, or using art metaphors instead of obscure technical terms because “Blender was programmed which means it’s highly technical” is so transparently petty.
I see where you are coming from with the jargon. Sometimes it can be really confusing to have a highly technical term be the only term available. I’m thinking of the glossy shader options “beckman” and “ggx”. I’m sure that they are very specific terms very specifically laid out in academic literature, but I have no clue what the functional difference is. I think these technical terms have a place,a lot of the names for the settings come directly from the original authors of the algorithm. I’m sure Beckman appreciates the recognition for their algorithm, but it communicates nothing to the user. I’m sure hosek and wilkie know all about turbidity, but haziness makes more sense to more people.
I wonder if a solution could be found in translations. Blender already has the infrastructure to support different sets of words throughout the UI. What if there was a technical translation, and a more approachable translation. Like simple english wikipedia. (I’m not trying to be condescending, I really appreciate simple english wikipedia). I know that it would be a lot of work, but there is already the framework there.
Well I think it could be largely solved with descriptive tooltips. Right now the format of took tips is: Jargon Tool Name --> Longer Jargon Description --> Python Function. I can’t even conceive of a person who saw the word Catmull-Clark, wondered, “what does this do?” And was satisfied to see a tooltip that explained that it was a Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surface.
Even though it would be inconsistent, I think it would be useful to give some tools simple names with technical explanations, and some technical names with simple explanations, just because some tools are very much commonplace (eg move/translate) and some are simply technical (normals, algorithm names). I would hate if someone insisted they had to be consistent for consistency’s sake.
I believe the majority of 3D applications have used terms like Phong and Blinn at some point to describe their specular shading options, so it’s not just Blender.
Also, the difference between Beckmann and GGX have to do with how the specular effect trails off from the center of a reflection, GGX shading will tend to have a much longer trailing than Beckmann and can even make edges glow at high roughness values.
I don’t think we can easily rename everything that’s even remotely like Jargon and make it readable to artists who are getting into 3D (or computers) for the first time (who’s willing to change the name of the torus shape back to ‘donut’ like in 2.3x), and I can’t imagine that no one outside of 3D knows what you mean when you perform a translation of an object.
Well you’ve gone off the deep end with your absurd comparisons. Let me help bring you back to earth.
First lets be honest, you’re no sculptor if what you do is “mush a glob of sticky dirt into a person-shaped lump”. If you do the equivalent in CG i’m surprised you can find any work at all. You need to actually be good at it, and that requires skill. Skill is not an ethereal magical energy you randomly have or don’t. Skill is the product of experience, practice and technical aptitude. Sculptor’s have to understand form, structure and have a good bit of knowledge in anatomy. It’s not a skill that children and random people possess. So please stop embarrassing yourself with that comparison.
Yes there is a need for technical depth in CG. But if learning the word “translate” is too hard for you, you have no technical depth. The simple and universal word for linear displacements in geometry, taught in high school, sometimes elementary school. Hell, even if it wasn’t : you can clearly operate a computer and go on the internet. But you can’t get up to speed on this one word? Why should the developers cater to someone who is so absolutely entrenched in willful ignorance?
No one is asking you to learn calculus or linear algebra. But knowing the names of the three most basic transformations in 3D is pretty much bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of technical depth.
So basically if you’re not a professional you should just give up now.
Seriously that’s just elitism. If you need to spend three paragraphs proselytizing about how people are ignorant worthless fools who don’t deserve to use 3D software if they don’t remember the freshman geometry they took six years ago, you’re an elitist and I don’t value your opinion.
For everyone else, there is a clear constituency for whom renaming tools and adding useful tooltips would be useful, and there is precedent in other applications to do as much. There’s not really an especially good reason not to change it except possibly that it could divert resources from other development, though it sounds like a special developer will be hired exclusively for this purpose so it probably wouldn’t.
Perhaps I missed it when scanning the thread, but I don’t think anyone’s actually made that assertion. In the specific case of translate vs. move, the former has a very specific meaning that makes it more direct and far less ambiguous than the latter. Furthering your example into sculpting with clay, if I use a tool to roughen the surface of part of the sculpture, I would say I’m scoring it… not scratching. Scoring is the more accurate term for clearly communicating what’s being done. Jargon isn’t often there for the sake of being jargony… it’s most often employed because the existing words are insufficiently clear.
Words are tools, too. It’s a good idea to use the right one for the job.