5 ms·

Blender can do a lot, but I really hate the interface. I'll stick with C4D.

logicallee 10y ago
it's an unbelievably bad interface, I mean to the point that it's unbelievably bad even for experts [EDIT: for the sake of the thread I'll keep this, but I shouldn't speak for "experts" - only myself and the days I poured into it.] It's not about being, erm, "differently intuitive", or requiring learning - it's simply broken. Imagine if while you were typing into this text box (as I am) the cursor would randomly move up a line, down a line, right a character or left a character and you had to manually put it to where you wanted the next character to go - the cursor didn't stay at the end of the line you were typing, as one might "expect". (This is just an analogy for nothing working the way anyone might reasonably use it.) That's how broken blender is. It's hideously painful. If this text box were Blender, it would have taken me about 148 minutes to type this reply, with a random adjustment or undo or redo every letter of the way, I would have been fighting with this text box the whole way.
- mkishi 10y ago
  I can't figure out what you're referring to with this analogy.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    The frustration with trying to enter what I'm entering or edit what I'm editing. I am not exaggerating with how many hours it took to do something. If this text box were a 3D object instead of a text field, it would have taken 2-3 hours of my time in blender (analogy). Maybe saying that it applies to experts is going too far, since I'm not a blender expert and can't speak for them - maybe after 2,000 hours i'd feel differently. I did follow hours of video tutorials and read documentation for hours though. For comparison I don't complain about vim's interface, which is very unintuitive, I don't complain about Audacity, also unintuitive and requires looking things up, I don't complain about even git's options or, indeed, anything else, to the same extent. Even with powerful tools like lightworks (video editing) that require learning powerful and unintuitive paradigms and interfaces. Blender is the only piece of software I've used in my life with such a hideously broken interface and no, the problem isn't with me. It's a trauma. It traumatized me. There is no other piece of software on the planet that I would even conceive of using a word like that for - it's the only traumatic interface I've used in my life. Nothing else compares. I am telling you my feelings as a user who accomplished what he wanted to and got beautiful results. Together with my beautiful results and outweighing them, I remember the trauma.
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      I poured days and weeks into learning it, made constant progress, enjoyed my time, and made some cool stuff. I was using it at a fairly basic level, and I don't have much experience with other 3D programs (little bits of 3ds max and gmax), and when I was learning it, I had a bunch of spare time and no financial incentive. Maybe those things are why I think of learning and using Blender as a positive experience, rather than a negative one. Then again, I tend to be the one to say that I like interfaces that most others hate. Maybe this is just another example.
- obsurveyor 10y ago
  Full of hyperbole. It's a different UI and you have to learn it. It's extremely self-consistent. Try putting a neophyte in front of ZBrush and they'd say the same thing but tons of people adapt and use it.
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    For the sake of me, after trying for hours I still couldn't understand how to do something as simple as put 2 cubes in a group and move them or resize them together in Blender and keep their dimensions with numbers that made the minimum sense while maintaining the 2 as different objects (i.e for texturing purposes). Seriously, it's just that non intuitive. In the beginning I thought it was perhaps because I was used to C4D, but after that episode, I realised some things in blender simple don't make sense for someone that thinks in objects the mathematical way. On a side note, I started 3D with POV-Ray many years ago, and, although not having a UI, at least the text description of the scenes was perfectly intuitive... I just can't reach that point with Blender.
    - evincarofautumn 10y ago
      Part of the confusion might be that a “group” in Blender is not like in other applications, and should probably have been called something else—a “grouped selection”, say. In Blender terms, you probably wanted to create a “parent” (typically an empty) for your objects.
    - obsurveyor 10y ago
      Sounds like just typical struggle with learning terms from a new software. You're looking for Parenting in blender it sounds like, much like the grouping you're talking about. How to do what you wanted: Shift-A Cube Shift-A Cube G to move second cube(assuming you don't want them stacked) Shift right click to select other cube Ctrl+P select Object to parent one to the other(you would use Keep Transform if you wanted to keep them together but move/scale/rotate separate) Look in the Scene graph on the right, they're still separate objects so you can assign different materials to their faces, unwrap, un-parent them with Alt+P, whatever. If you wanted to merge the geometry, you'd use Ctrl+J to join them.
- macawfish 10y ago
  I think you just never got the hang of the interface. A lot of people really like it. I used to use Maya. It's very different. I prefer Blender's interface, personally, and can get things done very quickly and smoothly with it. if Maya is emacs, Blender is vim. Neither of them are Sketchup, and neither are trying to be. By the way: I used to hate vi, cause I never gave it a chance. Recently I buckled down and learned how to use it. Now I think it's awesome, and I've hardly scratched the surface. But I finally got over the steep hump, and it was worth it.
  - psyc 10y ago
    With Blender, it's more than that. I've been a 3D person for almost 30 years, and I've never encountered an interface as user-hostile as Blender's. Never. In 2001, it took me less than a week to get super-productive with Maya, and it was like a dream. Just off to the races. I use Blender constantly now. I did get the hang of it, and I'm very productive with it now. I still consider it hostile. It fights the user every single step of the way until you learn all of its irrationality by brute force.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      I agree with this sentiment and nobody should downvote it - it's not unusual. The downvotes might be due to the fact that this article is about a blender release so will attract readers as expected.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Interesting. I shouldn't have spoken for experts, since I'm not one. How long did it take you to "like" blender's interface?
    - JTxt 10y ago
      I started in 2001, with some autocad, 3ds r4 and 3ds Max experience, I struggled with the blender interface for many hours over a year or two. It was not designed to be easily learned, but the ui is fast to use once you learn it. One hand on the keyboard hitting memorized hot keys, the other on the 3 button mouse... What drove me to learn was that I could use a powerful tool, that's improving at a fast rate, legally, for free. I since used lightwave, maya, sketch up, newer 3ds max... inventor. I still go back to Blender because it's faster for me. Since 2.5, command and hotkeys in the interface, there's undo, much more friendly to new users, there's much better learning resources. If I was starting now, I'd probably become proficient 5 to 10 times faster.
IshKebab 10y ago
I find the main problem with the interface is lack of documentation. Take a look at this screenshot: https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does. It's (probably) an advanced feature, sure so maybe you can't expect to know at first. But why is there no way to find out other than googling?!! No little help icon next to anything. No simple tooltips, let alone rich ones. There's zero discoverability.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does That's a weird approach to using software. Most people do not launch an application to twiddle with sliders and buttons but to accomplish a task. You can safely leave the correction slider alone until the day you need it (Googling will help), or until you read the manual. Several posters have already compared Blender with vim - incidentally, vim also has zero discoverability, but once you're familiar with the vernacular, you will be unstoppable.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    People do learn how to use software by twiddling with sliders and clicking buttons to see what they do. They only read the manual if the software is so unusable that it requires it. Have you ever seriously read the PowerPoint manual for example? There's even an xkcd about this.

it's an unbelievably bad interface, I mean to the point that it's unbelievably bad even for experts [EDIT: for the sake of the thread I'll keep this, but I shouldn't speak for "experts" - only myself and the days I poured into it.] It's not about being, erm, "differently intuitive", or requiring learning - it's simply broken. Imagine if while you were typing into this text box (as I am) the cursor would randomly move up a line, down a line, right a character or left a character and you had to manually put it to where you wanted the next character to go - the cursor didn't stay at the end of the line you were typing, as one might "expect". (This is just an analogy for nothing working the way anyone might reasonably use it.) That's how broken blender is. It's hideously painful. If this text box were Blender, it would have taken me about 148 minutes to type this reply, with a random adjustment or undo or redo every letter of the way, I would have been fighting with this text box the whole way.

mkishi 10y ago
I can't figure out what you're referring to with this analogy.
- logicallee 10y ago
  The frustration with trying to enter what I'm entering or edit what I'm editing. I am not exaggerating with how many hours it took to do something. If this text box were a 3D object instead of a text field, it would have taken 2-3 hours of my time in blender (analogy). Maybe saying that it applies to experts is going too far, since I'm not a blender expert and can't speak for them - maybe after 2,000 hours i'd feel differently. I did follow hours of video tutorials and read documentation for hours though. For comparison I don't complain about vim's interface, which is very unintuitive, I don't complain about Audacity, also unintuitive and requires looking things up, I don't complain about even git's options or, indeed, anything else, to the same extent. Even with powerful tools like lightworks (video editing) that require learning powerful and unintuitive paradigms and interfaces. Blender is the only piece of software I've used in my life with such a hideously broken interface and no, the problem isn't with me. It's a trauma. It traumatized me. There is no other piece of software on the planet that I would even conceive of using a word like that for - it's the only traumatic interface I've used in my life. Nothing else compares. I am telling you my feelings as a user who accomplished what he wanted to and got beautiful results. Together with my beautiful results and outweighing them, I remember the trauma.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    I poured days and weeks into learning it, made constant progress, enjoyed my time, and made some cool stuff. I was using it at a fairly basic level, and I don't have much experience with other 3D programs (little bits of 3ds max and gmax), and when I was learning it, I had a bunch of spare time and no financial incentive. Maybe those things are why I think of learning and using Blender as a positive experience, rather than a negative one. Then again, I tend to be the one to say that I like interfaces that most others hate. Maybe this is just another example.
obsurveyor 10y ago
Full of hyperbole. It's a different UI and you have to learn it. It's extremely self-consistent. Try putting a neophyte in front of ZBrush and they'd say the same thing but tons of people adapt and use it.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  For the sake of me, after trying for hours I still couldn't understand how to do something as simple as put 2 cubes in a group and move them or resize them together in Blender and keep their dimensions with numbers that made the minimum sense while maintaining the 2 as different objects (i.e for texturing purposes). Seriously, it's just that non intuitive. In the beginning I thought it was perhaps because I was used to C4D, but after that episode, I realised some things in blender simple don't make sense for someone that thinks in objects the mathematical way. On a side note, I started 3D with POV-Ray many years ago, and, although not having a UI, at least the text description of the scenes was perfectly intuitive... I just can't reach that point with Blender.
  - evincarofautumn 10y ago
    Part of the confusion might be that a “group” in Blender is not like in other applications, and should probably have been called something else—a “grouped selection”, say. In Blender terms, you probably wanted to create a “parent” (typically an empty) for your objects.
  - obsurveyor 10y ago
    Sounds like just typical struggle with learning terms from a new software. You're looking for Parenting in blender it sounds like, much like the grouping you're talking about. How to do what you wanted: Shift-A Cube Shift-A Cube G to move second cube(assuming you don't want them stacked) Shift right click to select other cube Ctrl+P select Object to parent one to the other(you would use Keep Transform if you wanted to keep them together but move/scale/rotate separate) Look in the Scene graph on the right, they're still separate objects so you can assign different materials to their faces, unwrap, un-parent them with Alt+P, whatever. If you wanted to merge the geometry, you'd use Ctrl+J to join them.
macawfish 10y ago
I think you just never got the hang of the interface. A lot of people really like it. I used to use Maya. It's very different. I prefer Blender's interface, personally, and can get things done very quickly and smoothly with it. if Maya is emacs, Blender is vim. Neither of them are Sketchup, and neither are trying to be. By the way: I used to hate vi, cause I never gave it a chance. Recently I buckled down and learned how to use it. Now I think it's awesome, and I've hardly scratched the surface. But I finally got over the steep hump, and it was worth it.
- psyc 10y ago
  With Blender, it's more than that. I've been a 3D person for almost 30 years, and I've never encountered an interface as user-hostile as Blender's. Never. In 2001, it took me less than a week to get super-productive with Maya, and it was like a dream. Just off to the races. I use Blender constantly now. I did get the hang of it, and I'm very productive with it now. I still consider it hostile. It fights the user every single step of the way until you learn all of its irrationality by brute force.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    I agree with this sentiment and nobody should downvote it - it's not unusual. The downvotes might be due to the fact that this article is about a blender release so will attract readers as expected.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- logicallee 10y ago
  Interesting. I shouldn't have spoken for experts, since I'm not one. How long did it take you to "like" blender's interface?
  - JTxt 10y ago
    I started in 2001, with some autocad, 3ds r4 and 3ds Max experience, I struggled with the blender interface for many hours over a year or two. It was not designed to be easily learned, but the ui is fast to use once you learn it. One hand on the keyboard hitting memorized hot keys, the other on the 3 button mouse... What drove me to learn was that I could use a powerful tool, that's improving at a fast rate, legally, for free. I since used lightwave, maya, sketch up, newer 3ds max... inventor. I still go back to Blender because it's faster for me. Since 2.5, command and hotkeys in the interface, there's undo, much more friendly to new users, there's much better learning resources. If I was starting now, I'd probably become proficient 5 to 10 times faster.

IshKebab 10y ago

I find the main problem with the interface is lack of documentation. Take a look at this screenshot: https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/f/f5/2_78_env_lighting.png Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does. It's (probably) an advanced feature, sure so maybe you can't expect to know at first. But why is there no way to find out other than googling?!! No little help icon next to anything. No simple tooltips, let alone rich ones. There's zero discoverability.

sangnoir 10y ago
> Ok without reading the manual, tell me what the 'Correction' slider under 'Gather' does That's a weird approach to using software. Most people do not launch an application to twiddle with sliders and buttons but to accomplish a task. You can safely leave the correction slider alone until the day you need it (Googling will help), or until you read the manual. Several posters have already compared Blender with vim - incidentally, vim also has zero discoverability, but once you're familiar with the vernacular, you will be unstoppable.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  People do learn how to use software by twiddling with sliders and clicking buttons to see what they do. They only read the manual if the software is so unusable that it requires it. Have you ever seriously read the PowerPoint manual for example? There's even an xkcd about this.