10 ms·

Open-Source 3D Graphics Design: Where to Begin

85 points by sf_tony 10y ago

Pica_soO 10y ago
Blender is simply bad UI-Design. It has nothing to do with a learning curve. I ve used alot of open source software, and the UI is usually the equivalent to english-aristocratic mansion, where every late addition is glued to the main house like a little bay window. And the first strange keyboard and control preferences (can we put a terminal in for that), will be forced down your throat. And i can handle this. Usually you find the configs and tailor them to something more adhering to common user-expectations. But then all the tutorials become useless for you. And that is where its over. I would really have loved this project to succeed. And in parts it has. There are awesome plugins for nearly everything. (Evolutionary Algos for Animation creation for example) But its completely disregard for UX-Standards have prevented it from making a industry-impact. A 3 year subscription to the max, is more expensive then it was 1990. http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html That's how a self-inflicted defeat looks like.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI. I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats. You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training. But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me. So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics. So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    Right now you can sit down in front of Maya, Houdini, or Modo and, knowing one of those packages, figure out how to navigate the UI in maybe 10 minutes. A few months ago, firing up Blender, I had to go watch some YouTube videos to figure out how the hell the UI worked.
    - zokier 10y ago
      Being different does not make it worse. You could argue that emacs ui is bad because vim user would struggle in it, or vice versa, but I think most people would agree that wouldn't make a lot of sense
      - gcp 10y ago
        If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.
        wtetzner 10y ago
        > If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular. Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
        Pica_soO 10y ago
        No, they are not. He is arguing that you throw away years of user-experience for no apparent reason. Those people don't have the luxury to retrain for a same-function-framework just because some dev can dance. They are part of a pipeline, they have work to do, and insulting them as unwilling-to-learn, is simply missing the point.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. 3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow. For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.
    - macawfish 10y ago
      That's because there are some people who strongly disagree that it's simply "bad". If it was as simple as "Blender's UI is bad", then there wouldn't be so many people who absolutely love it ;)
      - Pica_soO 10y ago
        Those strongly disagreeing people could post some strong arguments for where the UI is better then Max/Maya.
- vmarshall23 10y ago
  I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach. Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does. I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!) Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)
jaclaz 10y ago
I am missing the "3-D" in Inkscape, Gimp, and in the "honorable mentions" Paint.NET, Krita and IMagemagick ... Title: "A Guide To Open-Source 3D Graphics Design" Real title:"A LIST of open source graphical programs, some of which offer 3-D capabilities"
- vvanders 10y ago
  You need something to texture with, most 3D artists I know spend almost as much time in photoshop as they do in Max/Maya/etc.
- randomdata 10y ago
  Inkscape has the 3D box tool.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  And not a single mention of any of the open source CAD tools available. Pointless article.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    3d ARTWORK. Not 3d work. Do you know any artists who work in BRL-CAD?
- rzzzt 10y ago
  My suggestion to the "honorable mentions" section would be Anim8or: http://www.anim8or.com/index.html#Features http://www.anim8or.com/index.html#Features It's tiny, but offers a decent amount of features for 3D modeling.
tobltobs 10y ago
All those "the Blender UI is awful" might be correct, I don't know because I don't have a comparison, apart of freecad, which has a possible even more awful UI. But what I love about those two projects is the UI mode where you can open a console which shows the API calls which are triggered if you make an UI action. This enables you to easily write some scripts making the UI obsolete. Of course you still have to understand the UI which sometimes needs a lot of googling.
- gcp 10y ago
  It's true that typically "craftmanship" (I don't know a better word) software has a "terrible" UI in the sense that it doesn't follow typical (let alone platform) conventions, has bad discoverability, etc. The issue is that these tools are used in day in and day out by a specific audience that is willing to make the investment to surpass the bad parts of the UX. It's not like a 3D artist can choose to skip using a 3d package - and in many cases the choice which one will also be dictated by external factors. Once the initial hurdles are surpassed, the UX of the tools does work well for that flow. It has to, because that's the customer base. Basically, these tools can afford to suck in the basic UX because they can't really "bounce" users there.
  - zokier 10y ago
    I think it is reasonable to judge the merits of professional software by its usability for trained/experienced professional users. And then suddenly many UIs that might superficially appear bad become very efficient tools. I do believe that by that metric Blender UI is not that bad.
- vvanders 10y ago
  That's also the case with Maya, it's all melscript/python under the hood.
- 127 10y ago
  Only improvement I would personally want is addons being able to use PyQt and the operator options and parameters being a popup window on mouse location (or something as accessible). Building a good 3D modeling package UI is really difficult. Just look at MAX, Maya and MODO. Blender isn't really much worse. Some consider it better.
exDM69 10y ago
Is anyone aware of a project that would be creating an open source alternative to SketchUp? It's one of the two pieces of proprietary software (other being Mathematica) I rely on day-to-day life. I've even considered starting such a project, but it's near the end of my very long TODO list and I'm unlikely to have time to make it into something usable by the general public. I really enjoy using Blender for my more art-oriented 3d needs, but I use SketchUp for more engineering oriented tasks like making drawings for my woodworking projects.
- zokier 10y ago
  Would a full-blown CAD like SolveSpace be overkill for your uses? http://solvespace.com/ http://solvespace.com/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650290
  - exDM69 10y ago
    Yes, it's probably overkill. What I'm after is the simplicity, even if it comes with limitations. My woodworking plans are pretty simple, and I have no need for fancy shapes or parametric stuff (I can't design more complex things than I can cut and chop with chisel and saw). I wouldn't go designing fancy shapes for machining with SketchUp, but it's great for doing plans for simple projects.
    - tshannon 10y ago
      Yep, Sketchup is excellent for planning out woodworking. It lets you figure out how everything will fit together in 3d space, and then you can just measure all your cuts in your finished design. I really wish there was an open source alternative, or at least a linux one (Sketchup works ok in wine).
      - exDM69 10y ago
        I've been really considering starting a SketchUp -style 3d drawing program project. I have a background in 3d graphics and data structures/algorithms, so it would be right down my alley. But I don't have a lot of time on my hands :(
nothis 10y ago
>If you’re sensing we don’t recommend Gimp very highly, we don’t. Gimp’s downside is difficult to discuss tactfully. Gimp suffers from forever living in the shadow of Photoshop. Gimp’s development is also closely tied to both Richard Stallman’s GNU values and the GTK+ widget toolkit. For the final time, your humble author will quit trying to rewrite this paragraph to explain what’s wrong with Gimp, and just scream “POLITICS!” and then run away. You figure it out. Heh. Whenever you ask someone who doesn't work with image editors professionally (that doesn't mean "use it quite often", it means, having real-world deadlines depend on productivity), they'll point out how many "features" Gimp shares with Photoshop. But features don't mean shit. The interface is a bulky mess. Tons of "little" things don't quite work as expected. And then, when it comes to the truly heavy-weight features, of course Gimp doesn't compare. Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit. Free/open software projects are so idealistic, I kinda want to support it. But it's so rare that anybody in these communities gets interface design. It's not unheard of (Firefox is a positive example in my book) but it's rare. Photoshop's main advantage is it's clean interface: http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interface.jpg http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interfa...
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yup, summed up much better than I could. FWIW Joel's coverage of user design is a great read for things like this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html > Most flame wars you read about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That's missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond? Most open source tools tend to be written by developers for developers and very rarely take into account the usage patterns of users in the domain which the tool fits. Want to know why Slack is tearing into all these areas that IRC could never get a foothold? You have the answer right there.
valine 10y ago
> Blender suffers from the habit of redesigning its entire interface every other version, although it seems to have calmed down lately. I think this is a bit misleading. The last major UI overhaul was in 2011 with blender 2.57. Since then the UI has changed very little. There have been many new features, sure, but I can't think of anything that would be exceptionally disorientating.
- onion2k 10y ago
  Recent versions of Blender have some really annoying usability issues though. For example, various panes work differently depending on whether you're using the Blender Internal engine or the Cycles rendering engine. To a new user that means you can be following a tutorial and just not have a button or an option available because you haven't swapped to the right renderer - it would make sense to group renderer specific options in a way that make it clearer why you don't have something available.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Cycles is the way to go. The legacy engine is included as a default for reasons unknown. They honestly should make it an optional plugin to avoid confusion.
    - valine 10y ago
      Cycles is definitely the way to go for most projects. Although I've found the blender internal engine can be significantly faster for simple renders. It's nice to have for those rare occasions when cycles is overkill but you still need actual reflections or sss (ruling out OpenGL).
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      BI is still there because it has a wealth of functionality that Cycles doesn't yet, and because it's really fast by comparison.
      - 10y ago
colinthompson 10y ago
I think the biggest thing missing on the list is a full featured compositing package. Fortunately there's Natron: https://natron.fr https://natron.fr
CyberDildonics 10y ago
Blender: reinventing their UI wheel, never making it round.
jordigh 10y ago
> Gimp’s development is also closely tied to both Richard Stallman’s GNU values and the GTK+ widget toolkit Gimp is indeed tied to the Gimp Toolkit+, but it has almost nothing to do with GNU anymore (and it never had much of anything to do with rms, so trying to smear Gimp by association is kind of mean). In fact, the Gimp developers themselves are quite hostile to the idea of doing things like changing the language to fit GNU recommendations. When I suggested that they shouldn't refer to it as "open source", they were the ones who shouted "POLITICS", refused, and ran away. So, if you dislike its UI, don't blame GNU or rms. Probably shouldn't even blame GTK+. Just blame Gimp.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  POLITICS seems like a good file to include along with README, LICENSE, etc.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
tonyplee 10y ago
Recently, Disney/Pixar open source their USD and other tools: https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD Very good demo Video from SigGraph 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo Pixar Courses at Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar
gima 10y ago
No love for MyPaint? :( https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint
Pica_soO 10y ago
Trying to be constructive: How much work would it be to rip the current UI out of blender and replace it with one, that adheres to humanity's standards and defaults?

85 points by sf_tony 10y ago

Blender is simply bad UI-Design. It has nothing to do with a learning curve. I ve used alot of open source software, and the UI is usually the equivalent to english-aristocratic mansion, where every late addition is glued to the main house like a little bay window. And the first strange keyboard and control preferences (can we put a terminal in for that), will be forced down your throat. And i can handle this. Usually you find the configs and tailor them to something more adhering to common user-expectations. But then all the tutorials become useless for you. And that is where its over. I would really have loved this project to succeed. And in parts it has. There are awesome plugins for nearly everything. (Evolutionary Algos for Animation creation for example) But its completely disregard for UX-Standards have prevented it from making a industry-impact. A 3 year subscription to the max, is more expensive then it was 1990. http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html That's how a self-inflicted defeat looks like.

moron4hire 10y ago
Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI. I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats. You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training. But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me. So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics. So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Right now you can sit down in front of Maya, Houdini, or Modo and, knowing one of those packages, figure out how to navigate the UI in maybe 10 minutes. A few months ago, firing up Blender, I had to go watch some YouTube videos to figure out how the hell the UI worked.
  - zokier 10y ago
    Being different does not make it worse. You could argue that emacs ui is bad because vim user would struggle in it, or vice versa, but I think most people would agree that wouldn't make a lot of sense
    - gcp 10y ago
      If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.
      - wtetzner 10y ago
        > If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular. Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
        Pica_soO 10y ago
        No, they are not. He is arguing that you throw away years of user-experience for no apparent reason. Those people don't have the luxury to retrain for a same-function-framework just because some dev can dance. They are part of a pipeline, they have work to do, and insulting them as unwilling-to-learn, is simply missing the point.
vvanders 10y ago
Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. 3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow. For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.
- gcp 10y ago
  Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.
  - macawfish 10y ago
    That's because there are some people who strongly disagree that it's simply "bad". If it was as simple as "Blender's UI is bad", then there wouldn't be so many people who absolutely love it ;)
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Those strongly disagreeing people could post some strong arguments for where the UI is better then Max/Maya.
vmarshall23 10y ago
I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach. Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does. I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!) Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)

jaclaz 10y ago

I am missing the "3-D" in Inkscape, Gimp, and in the "honorable mentions" Paint.NET, Krita and IMagemagick ... Title: "A Guide To Open-Source 3D Graphics Design" Real title:"A LIST of open source graphical programs, some of which offer 3-D capabilities"

vvanders 10y ago
You need something to texture with, most 3D artists I know spend almost as much time in photoshop as they do in Max/Maya/etc.
randomdata 10y ago
Inkscape has the 3D box tool.
hacker_9 10y ago
And not a single mention of any of the open source CAD tools available. Pointless article.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  3d ARTWORK. Not 3d work. Do you know any artists who work in BRL-CAD?
rzzzt 10y ago
My suggestion to the "honorable mentions" section would be Anim8or: http://www.anim8or.com/index.html#Features http://www.anim8or.com/index.html#Features It's tiny, but offers a decent amount of features for 3D modeling.

tobltobs 10y ago

All those "the Blender UI is awful" might be correct, I don't know because I don't have a comparison, apart of freecad, which has a possible even more awful UI. But what I love about those two projects is the UI mode where you can open a console which shows the API calls which are triggered if you make an UI action. This enables you to easily write some scripts making the UI obsolete. Of course you still have to understand the UI which sometimes needs a lot of googling.

gcp 10y ago
It's true that typically "craftmanship" (I don't know a better word) software has a "terrible" UI in the sense that it doesn't follow typical (let alone platform) conventions, has bad discoverability, etc. The issue is that these tools are used in day in and day out by a specific audience that is willing to make the investment to surpass the bad parts of the UX. It's not like a 3D artist can choose to skip using a 3d package - and in many cases the choice which one will also be dictated by external factors. Once the initial hurdles are surpassed, the UX of the tools does work well for that flow. It has to, because that's the customer base. Basically, these tools can afford to suck in the basic UX because they can't really "bounce" users there.
- zokier 10y ago
  I think it is reasonable to judge the merits of professional software by its usability for trained/experienced professional users. And then suddenly many UIs that might superficially appear bad become very efficient tools. I do believe that by that metric Blender UI is not that bad.
vvanders 10y ago
That's also the case with Maya, it's all melscript/python under the hood.
127 10y ago
Only improvement I would personally want is addons being able to use PyQt and the operator options and parameters being a popup window on mouse location (or something as accessible). Building a good 3D modeling package UI is really difficult. Just look at MAX, Maya and MODO. Blender isn't really much worse. Some consider it better.

exDM69 10y ago

Is anyone aware of a project that would be creating an open source alternative to SketchUp? It's one of the two pieces of proprietary software (other being Mathematica) I rely on day-to-day life. I've even considered starting such a project, but it's near the end of my very long TODO list and I'm unlikely to have time to make it into something usable by the general public. I really enjoy using Blender for my more art-oriented 3d needs, but I use SketchUp for more engineering oriented tasks like making drawings for my woodworking projects.

zokier 10y ago
Would a full-blown CAD like SolveSpace be overkill for your uses? http://solvespace.com/ http://solvespace.com/ discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650290
- exDM69 10y ago
  Yes, it's probably overkill. What I'm after is the simplicity, even if it comes with limitations. My woodworking plans are pretty simple, and I have no need for fancy shapes or parametric stuff (I can't design more complex things than I can cut and chop with chisel and saw). I wouldn't go designing fancy shapes for machining with SketchUp, but it's great for doing plans for simple projects.
  - tshannon 10y ago
    Yep, Sketchup is excellent for planning out woodworking. It lets you figure out how everything will fit together in 3d space, and then you can just measure all your cuts in your finished design. I really wish there was an open source alternative, or at least a linux one (Sketchup works ok in wine).
    - exDM69 10y ago
      I've been really considering starting a SketchUp -style 3d drawing program project. I have a background in 3d graphics and data structures/algorithms, so it would be right down my alley. But I don't have a lot of time on my hands :(

nothis 10y ago

>If you’re sensing we don’t recommend Gimp very highly, we don’t. Gimp’s downside is difficult to discuss tactfully. Gimp suffers from forever living in the shadow of Photoshop. Gimp’s development is also closely tied to both Richard Stallman’s GNU values and the GTK+ widget toolkit. For the final time, your humble author will quit trying to rewrite this paragraph to explain what’s wrong with Gimp, and just scream “POLITICS!” and then run away. You figure it out. Heh. Whenever you ask someone who doesn't work with image editors professionally (that doesn't mean "use it quite often", it means, having real-world deadlines depend on productivity), they'll point out how many "features" Gimp shares with Photoshop. But features don't mean shit. The interface is a bulky mess. Tons of "little" things don't quite work as expected. And then, when it comes to the truly heavy-weight features, of course Gimp doesn't compare. Out of curiosity, I tried installing Gimp to see how much has changed (for the better?) since I last checked it out. The tool interface doesn't quite fit into its window by default so you have a tiny little scrollbar at the bottom that you have to scroll to see the full text. I resized it. After popping out a submenu, it once again didn't fit. Free/open software projects are so idealistic, I kinda want to support it. But it's so rare that anybody in these communities gets interface design. It's not unheard of (Firefox is a positive example in my book) but it's rare. Photoshop's main advantage is it's clean interface: http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interface.jpg http://f64academy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Interfa...

vvanders 10y ago
Yup, summed up much better than I could. FWIW Joel's coverage of user design is a great read for things like this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html > Most flame wars you read about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That's missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond? Most open source tools tend to be written by developers for developers and very rarely take into account the usage patterns of users in the domain which the tool fits. Want to know why Slack is tearing into all these areas that IRC could never get a foothold? You have the answer right there.

valine 10y ago

> Blender suffers from the habit of redesigning its entire interface every other version, although it seems to have calmed down lately. I think this is a bit misleading. The last major UI overhaul was in 2011 with blender 2.57. Since then the UI has changed very little. There have been many new features, sure, but I can't think of anything that would be exceptionally disorientating.

onion2k 10y ago
Recent versions of Blender have some really annoying usability issues though. For example, various panes work differently depending on whether you're using the Blender Internal engine or the Cycles rendering engine. To a new user that means you can be following a tutorial and just not have a button or an option available because you haven't swapped to the right renderer - it would make sense to group renderer specific options in a way that make it clearer why you don't have something available.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Cycles is the way to go. The legacy engine is included as a default for reasons unknown. They honestly should make it an optional plugin to avoid confusion.
  - valine 10y ago
    Cycles is definitely the way to go for most projects. Although I've found the blender internal engine can be significantly faster for simple renders. It's nice to have for those rare occasions when cycles is overkill but you still need actual reflections or sss (ruling out OpenGL).
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    BI is still there because it has a wealth of functionality that Cycles doesn't yet, and because it's really fast by comparison.
    - 10y ago

colinthompson 10y ago

I think the biggest thing missing on the list is a full featured compositing package. Fortunately there's Natron: https://natron.fr https://natron.fr

CyberDildonics 10y ago

Blender: reinventing their UI wheel, never making it round.

jordigh 10y ago

> Gimp’s development is also closely tied to both Richard Stallman’s GNU values and the GTK+ widget toolkit Gimp is indeed tied to the Gimp Toolkit+, but it has almost nothing to do with GNU anymore (and it never had much of anything to do with rms, so trying to smear Gimp by association is kind of mean). In fact, the Gimp developers themselves are quite hostile to the idea of doing things like changing the language to fit GNU recommendations. When I suggested that they shouldn't refer to it as "open source", they were the ones who shouted "POLITICS", refused, and ran away. So, if you dislike its UI, don't blame GNU or rms. Probably shouldn't even blame GTK+. Just blame Gimp.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
POLITICS seems like a good file to include along with README, LICENSE, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
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tonyplee 10y ago

Recently, Disney/Pixar open source their USD and other tools: https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD Very good demo Video from SigGraph 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH4KYcmHOo Pixar Courses at Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar

gima 10y ago

No love for MyPaint? :( https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint

Pica_soO 10y ago

Trying to be constructive: How much work would it be to rip the current UI out of blender and replace it with one, that adheres to humanity's standards and defaults?