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Blender 2.8 project status
- biocomputation 10y agoI know that it's not really something that can be changed on a whim, but I feel like Blender's UI is deeply strange and often quite dreadful.
- melling 10y agoAndrew Price would complain about the UI in his podcast. I guess the community eventually wore him down. Here's one of the episodes: https://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/podcast-jonathan-williamson-on-blenders-interface/ https://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/podcast-jonathan-willia...
- greenknight 10y agohttps://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/podcast-interview-with-ux-software-designer-duncan-macneil/ https://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/podcast-interview-with-... He followed up with a actual UX designer, who pretty much told him that his proposal was the wrong way to think about it (objectively, not subjectively). He admitted that his proposal at the blender conference was more of a discussion about the way of the future -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw After that, he stopped pushing so hard on the UI/UX problems of blender. I believe he is still part of the UI committee, but isnt pushing it as hard in his podcasts as he realises he doesn't have the answers.
- melling 10y agoDon't think he thought that he had the answers. Simply that the UI was bad and it needed to be fixed. He wanted to have a discussion.
- greenknight 10y agoThis was his suggestion to how to fix blender -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk
- melling 10y agoSo, people just told him he was wrong? End of story. When someone throws out their ideas, people get to shoot them down then the status quo continues. I listened to all his podcasts. It was meant to be a conversation.
- thomastjeffery 10y agoNot at all true. He was wrong, but he wasn't shot down in the slightest. One of the main focuses in development right now is the workflow/UI. https://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-release/ https://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-re... https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/
- foxfired 10y agoit's true, but when you figure it out, you wouldn't have it any other way. I remember how much I hated the UI, but like with any tool the more you use the better you get at it. For example, I find the left/right mouse buttons completely natural now.
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- mungoid 10y agoTotally agree. I use 3ds Max a lot for work and I have modified as much as possible in those settings to work like blender. It baffles everyone else I work with.
- geoka9 10y agoExactly, it's like most of my programmer co-workers getting baffled when they see somebody using a keyboard/command-line-oriented linux setup instead of a mouse-oriented mac.
- parenthephobia 10y agoHow does one define deeply strange? It's right to say it's not what we're used to. But I think if there was some fundamental wrongness with it, I'd have problems switching between Blender and other software with similar uses. e.g. I often use Blender and Unity in tandem and I don't find myself trying to use each the wrong way when I switch between. OTOH, I disable the left-click to set the cursor because I find it distracting and very rarely want it - only when I want an arbitrary pivot for transforms, or to align vertices from different meshes. It irritates me deeply that there's no way to hide the cursor without also hiding e.g. the selection outline and the grid.
- dispose13432 10y agoGood UX means to make simple thing simple, but permit complicated workflows. What I want is to make simple things (basic modeling, materials, colors) to be a simple one click away.
- geoka9 10y agoHonestly I haven't seen a 3d tool like that. Perhaps it's just the nature of the beast and I should be glad that in Blender at least the complicated workflows are smooth once you get past the "bootcamp" stage.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago> Honestly I haven't seen a 3d tool like that. Perhaps SketchUp comes close?
- stan_rogers 10y agoIt's been a while, but the trueSpace UI (the "classic" version that went back to Caligari on the Amiga) would be a pretty good match for that. It got a bit hairy with deformations (which is why a different UI mode was added to later editions), but basic geometry, extrusions, lathing, booleans and bones were a breeze either numerically or by click-and-drag. Simple things really were simple.
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- dispose13432 10y agoIt's something everyone knows about, and nothing can be done. As I heard, it's almost a full rewrite.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoAt least the Python API is deeply strange. Stuff is undocumented to out here, uses different units for input from the UI even though function name is the same, and API actions in a script depend on mouse focus... But despite it's flaws, I love Blender.
- mungoid 10y agoBefore 2.5 I hated the UI. But after 2.5, I realized I could work so much faster once I learned the keys and layout. I have used 3ds Max for years and even knowing a lot about that software, I still find myself exporting to blender so I can do something. Usually I can do something in blender with only a couple key presses where in other software I have to click a few different buttons in various popup windows, etc. I do think some of the UI needs to be a little more logical, but aside from that I honestly want to see their UI in more.
- zem 10y agoit's basically the vi of 3d modellers (:
- dispose13432 10y agoI wouldn't call it vi. I'd call it the Windows API of 3d modelers. vi is easy. Type vi file.txt 1. To delete, type x. 2. To insert, type a. 3. To save and quit, type ZZ. 4. To move up, down, right left (in "classic" vi), use "KJLH" There. You can be productive. Not fully, but enough to get basics done. To use blender's relatively basic tools, say to draw a glass wall, you need a step by step guide, using quite obscure commands. Reminds me of Windows API (or GIMP, by the way)
- Tarean 10y agoIt is very close to vi/vim's philosophy - different modes for different task, key bindings are mnemonics, you combine basic commands to more complex tasks. Even window manipulation is the same with the hierarchy of content->splits as viewports->layouts. It is harder to do work without understanding these concepts in blender because editing text is simpler, though.
- notheguyouthink 10y ago> To save and quit, type ZZ I've been a 100% Vim user for ... man, 6 years? Including partial vim usage for another few years before that? And `ZZ` is entirely new to me haha. This is a weird problem for me with Vim. I love it, but it's an issue of "i don't know what i don't know". I really need to setup a Vim "key combo of the day" or something. Preferably something that has a JSON API so that i can pipe it into my vim-startify.
- AWildDHHAppears 10y agoIt's not that bad.
- njharman 10y agoI haven't used blender in years, so don't know about recent UI. But I totally loved the interface of the first opened version. It seemed optimized for power users, not casual users. So, steep learning curve but very rewarding/powerful if you invested time to learn it. Reminds me of vim.
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- thomastjeffery 10y agoIt seems like no one commenting here knows anything, so I'll just leave these here: https://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-release/ https://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-re... https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/ Right now, the main focus is in the (already fantastic IMHO) UI.
- yowlingcat 10y ago"Better news: the Blender Game Engine project might be getting a revival. The UPBGE team is very motivated to keep Blender engine work, and help with aligning BGE with the goals we set for 2.8 – at least to use the new viewport and pbr shader system. A new logic system is still undefined." Very excited about this. I deeply want to use Py with BGE, but I had been worried about learning a soon to be deprecated game framework. There have been a couple tickets open on the main blender tracker about completely deprecating BGE and it seemed like a lot of core developers were in favor of doing that so as to not divert away valuable dev time from core development.
- imaginenore 10y agoI feel like Blender Game Engine is a massive waste of dev resources. There are much better game engines out there. I wish Blender concentrated on their core software. Full OpenCL support in Cycles would be nice.
- yowlingcat 10y agoI don't think it's an unreasonable position, and I have read similar arguments on the mailing list. I think you're correct that there are much better game engines out there. But, I like that BGE is open source, I like how well it integrates with Blender, and I like that it has Python as a first class citizen. For that reason, I don't know if it necessarily has to compete with other game engines, especially AAA ones. It could just be something which integrates well with numpy, SciPy, etc.
- rubber_duck 10y agoIronically the license (GPL) is one of the biggest show stoppers for BGE to get taken seriously. I feel like building the engine in to blender is not very viable because of the GPL license, but using Blender as a game editor is not a bad idea at all - so if you're going to do an OSS game engine I think the best solution would be to start with a more permissive license (eg. MIT or something like that) and not have any dependencies on blender in the actual engine, instead the blender integration code should be strictly separate, that part would be covered by GPL, but the engine core would still remain MIT as it's not derived from GPL code, so you could distribute your game without releasing the source.
- oelmekki 10y agoThis is fantastic news! I use mostly blender for 3d printing, but I expect the 3d scene to get quite frantic when mixed reality will be around. Really hope we may get an opensource alternative to Unity3d (even if Unity is great by itself, but you know, competition never hurt users).
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThe opensource alternative to Unity is Godot. The 3D isn't great yet, but they're working on it.
- philipov 10y agoThe open source alternative to Unity is UnrealEngine4. Epic's licensing is royalty based, if you make more than a certain amount per quarter. Unreal has both a mature AAA-grade toolkit, and a convenient graphical language for quickly prototyping before optimizing into the C++.
- Intermernet 10y agoUnrealEngine4 isn't open source. Just because the source is available doesn't make something open source. The source code to Windows 2000 is available but it's definitely not open source. The agreed definition is "Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."[1] There is a modern trend to redefine it as "something for which I can freely get the source code" but that ignores the original ideals of collaboration and cooperation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
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- santaclaus 10y agoI don't see Rust in their timeline, this must be a project for old people.
- Ericson2314 10y agoI was just thinking it would be neat to get some Rust in there. Yes, very predictable I know.
- Ericson2314 10y agoDownvotes on a mea culpa? Sheesh.
- rcarmo 10y agoOne thing I'd love to see is better distributed network rendering. Right now it's neither easy nor intuitive to set up, and last time I tried it (a year or so ago) I couldn't get distributed still rendering to work...
- AWildDHHAppears 10y agoWe switched from Modo to Blender after the 2.7 release. Blender is one of the few open source projects for a desktop application that's clearly better than much of the commercial alternatives.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoExciting! I do wish we'd get "everything nodes," but I understand why we can't. It's also nice that the VSE isn't getting cut (as was hinted might happen at one phase).
- twisterge 10y agoYes. We are reviving the BGE. But we need the collaboration from the community (make games so the engine doesn't die). Currently it suffers from abandon syndrome, where every user abandon it to use other engines. If you want to ask questions (in real time), just join #upbgecoders on IRC (freenode). We will answer all the questions :) Thanks for mentioning us!