I compare Blender to the Death Star, too many places where there aren’t any railing along the ledges. I spent hours detailing a character with texture paint then I decided to render the character because wow this looks amazing, save texture. Render! F12. I must save this render it’s inspirational. “I never saved any renders before so I’m not gonna worry about erasing a file” save image.
No you idiot!
You just saved the render in the texture folder for some reason as if Blender only knew to save there. Now I Better hurry up and paint it again while you still remember the 8 hours I spent painting this character.
Why does Blender do this to me? Why can’t Blender have breaks? Stop! Show a box that says:
“There is already a file with this name do you wish to replace it”
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
I did take breaks in that 8 hours but when I’m in the zone, I want to work, and after a few hours you get a little tired and your concentration is not there, you want to take a break so you save your work then destroy it and feel like you want to hang yourself right after. It especially hurts when you were the one who pulled the switch to destroy your creative work.
I’ve use hundreds of software programs 3D and otherwise, only Blender can bring me such anxiety. It just discourages me so much, to get me when I am at the most fatigued that I need rest is when errors will occur.
Those haunted memories keeps me from heading for the work desk because I’m not feeling confident that I will not make more idiotic mistakes. I wish Blender could accommodate and acknowledge that I am human. Or I gotta feel like nothing can go wrong or that I have the courage to endure more errors I caused.
You do have to be careful saving image files, blenders file browser will always remember the last location you saved in, and unfortunately the last file name you used. When you hit save be sure to change the file name at the bottom of the save dialog if not you will overwrite the last image you saved. I agree it is not ideal.
When it comes to user experience, Blender is still progressively recovering from its early days, where the software was a nightmare to use. When I started, Blender was a buggy mess, with the buttons placed in almost random spots. Then, over time, the 2.5 and 2.8 updates massively improved and redesigned the UI, with more changes slowly coming in still.
But there are still some things I hope will get redesigned at some point. Especially the way Blender handles data: when something is not assigned, it doesn’t get saved. That way of working does work when you get used to it and once you understand its intricacies, but it’s not exactly intuitive. And I would love for a texture I am painting to not get flushed because I forgot to actively save it.
That being said, in my case, the 3D software where I have been losing the most data for obscure reasons is Zbrush.
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
8
I’ve come to the point where I’ll just break down and cry for no apparent reason simply as a way to relieve the stress. I hear this is pretty common among Blender users.
I don’t think that’s common or healthy- if something causes you that much distress, you should take a major step back from it
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Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
10
I’m not exactly being serious here, though I do appreciate the concern.
That said, Blender has made me loudly say some pretty nasty words on occasion (usually some variation of the F word). It doesn’t happen nearly so often anymore, but it does still have its moments.
So sorry to hear this but you really do need breaks. Everyone does. It’s so important. Working non stop for a long stretch does not normally produce better work. Sustained over a longer term you will be at risk of serious burn out. It is not a sustainable way to work.
It’s different for everyone but I actually have always found Blender a joy to work with and very forgiving in this regard. With me it has more typically been Maya that gave me the most acute anxiety. If you break something down the pipeline with Maya it can really come back to bite you big time and often be very hard to fix. A lot of a good Maya workflow is safeguarding against this and building in contingency. Isolating everything modularly into groups and sub groups.
I feel Blender is more forgiving and robust like that in the same way I found 3DS Max always to be. Maya is nodes and attributes based. Blender and Max are more object /component based. This makes them both much more forgiving I think for the generalist user.
But whatever you are doing working eight hours non stop at a stretch is crazy and ( the zone ) be dammed. CGI is a very complex practice and process regardless of software. Often long days can happen due to deadlines etc. But always important to take breaks. And especially important to get up and take a breather if you about to embark on any task like exporting re importing files and assets or copying over files. Basically take breaks all the time between any important step.
In traditional art it is advisable to look away from the workspace often to keep a sense of balance and form and where you are going. Working in CGI is no different.
It’s a tool and it does what you tell it. If you are actively ignoring prompts for user input and just clicking yes on everything, you’re going to run into problems.
This may sound harsh, but user error is user error.
The more guardrails you put on every interaction, the worse the user experience is. If they replace a framing hammer with a rubber mallet so I don’t hurt my thumb if I miss the nail, it’s not going to work well as a framing hammer.
Dialog boxes to confirm things are helpful, until you get so used to ok-ing through them that it becomes automatic and then they are just an extra step that you are still likely to mess up.
A couple of horror games made me paranoid enough to do frequent hard saves (and spam quicksaves even more often). Each new save file should not have the same name as last time, so I’m cycling through Save001, Save 002 and Save003. Or make an unreasonably long list of unique saves =D
It all because of fear of being stuck (with an unkillable abomination just around the corner and no ammo), and it translates ridiculously well to modeling/painting programs.
And all the saves that eventually proved useless can be cleaned up later, when it’s all over.
Add a number to your file-name and when you press ctrl+shift+s, to save-as, press “+” in the file dialog and the number will increment.
Combine multiple saves with packed textures while you’re working on it… you can split the textures out at the end-stages as part of clean-up.
For professional work, use git. *or cloud storage
For creative/problem-solving type work breaks recommended to me that worked is 10-15min every 45-50min and an hour break every 4th break - repeat this pattern for no longer than 8 hours per day, or you are almost guaranteed to burn out. Also, recognize that everyone has bad days where you will make mistakes or have to re-do days worth of work. That’s normal and you should not be hard on yourself about that.
