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Blender 2.8 looks like an improvement but as someone fairly adept in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3DS Max, After Effects, Ableton, Unity etc I still find it one of t

Blender 2.8 looks like an improvement but as someone fairly adept in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3DS Max, After Effects, Ableton, Unity etc I still find it one of the trickiest apps to wrap my head around. It's not that the apps I already know have an especially good UX or that Blender is especially bad - it's just that Blender makes few concessions to existing conventions and doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability. 2.8 is definitely a step in the right direction but lets not get ahead of ourselves in praising it as suddenly becoming a paragon of usability.

zamadatix 7y ago
As someone who downloaded 2.8 just to poke around a bit and see what it can do for fun can you give some examples of "makes few concessions to existing conventions"?
iamcreasy 7y ago
The only thing that I need to keep track of is that the idea of no-overlapping windows. The hotkeys behaves differently depending on which windows your mouse is on. Here is a example on the case: C on 3d windows trigger circle select tool, but C on the outliner create a new collection. But this behavior has exception. Sometimes some keys have global effect. For example, Shift Space always runs the animation. What other things you find tricky in Blender?
- truckerbill 7y ago
  One thing I've run into most recently : working with materials is a pain. There's no easy list that you can delete them in a classic-UX way (that I can find). Copying and pasting/duplicating ends up creating large numbers of identical materials and there was no immediately obvious way to prevent this. The interface for creating shared material parameters is unintuitive compared to something like Unreal.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    You can accomplish it in the Outliner, by searching for "Material". There are other ways, though I guess they could do with some sort of purpose-built view that only exists to list and show materials.
soulofmischief 7y ago
doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability Space or Shift-Space or whatever the new 2.8 default shortcut is opens up an action menu with every possible action available to you and a search bar to explore them. Actually, with this feature Blender surpasses most other creative suites in terms of discoverability. Perhaps what you are really looking for is a tutorial? They have those, too.
- Crinus 7y ago
  Yeah, back when 2.5 was new i was annoyed that space changed from showing the popup menu in 3D view to showing that action search list but this annoyance quickly went away when i realized how faster it was to find new stuff with it.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Shift+A makes sense for the new default 3D menu though, it's Shift+A(dd)
    - Crinus 7y ago
      IIRC the pre-2.5 menu wasn't just for adding stuff (though it was its most common use).

zamadatix 7y ago

As someone who downloaded 2.8 just to poke around a bit and see what it can do for fun can you give some examples of "makes few concessions to existing conventions"?

iamcreasy 7y ago

The only thing that I need to keep track of is that the idea of no-overlapping windows. The hotkeys behaves differently depending on which windows your mouse is on. Here is a example on the case: C on 3d windows trigger circle select tool, but C on the outliner create a new collection. But this behavior has exception. Sometimes some keys have global effect. For example, Shift Space always runs the animation. What other things you find tricky in Blender?

truckerbill 7y ago
One thing I've run into most recently : working with materials is a pain. There's no easy list that you can delete them in a classic-UX way (that I can find). Copying and pasting/duplicating ends up creating large numbers of identical materials and there was no immediately obvious way to prevent this. The interface for creating shared material parameters is unintuitive compared to something like Unreal.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  You can accomplish it in the Outliner, by searching for "Material". There are other ways, though I guess they could do with some sort of purpose-built view that only exists to list and show materials.

soulofmischief 7y ago

doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability Space or Shift-Space or whatever the new 2.8 default shortcut is opens up an action menu with every possible action available to you and a search bar to explore them. Actually, with this feature Blender surpasses most other creative suites in terms of discoverability. Perhaps what you are really looking for is a tutorial? They have those, too.

Crinus 7y ago
Yeah, back when 2.5 was new i was annoyed that space changed from showing the popup menu in 3D view to showing that action search list but this annoyance quickly went away when i realized how faster it was to find new stuff with it.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Shift+A makes sense for the new default 3D menu though, it's Shift+A(dd)
  - Crinus 7y ago
    IIRC the pre-2.5 menu wasn't just for adding stuff (though it was its most common use).