5 ms·

Side note: It is very interesting to see how pro-blender everyone is. You know how there is almost always a group of people who will say something bad about an

by gtsop 5y ago

Side note: It is very interesting to see how pro-blender everyone is. You know how there is almost always a group of people who will say something bad about an open source project (disclaimer: not judging the people or their potentially legitimate complaints, also I may be part of such groups). With blender, it's hard to see such a group. Maybe I am missing it? Maybe blender is actually doing incredibly well compared to othee projects? Not sure

jolmg 5y ago
I think I remember seeing people complain about its interface, but it's changed so much since then, I don't know if there are still people complaining.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Yeah they've done a remarkable job with the 2.80 update, the UI is pretty decent now. Also its competitors are buggy-ass insanely overpriced monthly subscription proprietary editors, so no surprise there. There are still things to complain about, like the undo speed, CSG modifier unreliability, lack of certain features, but none of them are strict deal breakers.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Well, i do have complains about Blender's new interface: the new one feels "off" compared to 2.7x (something i never felt with the 2.4x -> 2.5x transition). But it is minor... and i can still use 2.79 anyway :-P
themodelplumber 5y ago
IMO the Blender project psychology gets this reception in part because it works very similar to general "doin' business" service psychology. Features requested are built; money requested is donated; resources are used for additional upgrades; industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is tracked, open, and accountable. If you want a critical take on Blender therefore, for one you ought to look outside a community of business-minded devs. Look where artists hang out and you'll find a less rational take that is based on individual likes and dislikes. Where logic doesn't matter so much--it's how you feel. That's where you'll get into it. And if you look at other FOSS graphics software communities where the project lead is someone who just does whatever they want, even better, you'll find a group of users who either adapt or leave, and that's quite different from Blender's psychological development ecosystem in a lot of ways. Alternately you could go more-business and go ask a SolidWorks user group to tell you how great Blender is. They will probably tell you how business is done properly and why the Blender way is clueless in various ways. It so happens I ran an online community for another FOSS 3D package for over a decade. We got some people who were anti-Blender, and some who were pro-Blender. Often the anti-position was based in prefers-underdog reasons, which I understand. Even in FOSS there are some clear underdogs and people get upset when they like the underdog and continually see another project winning attention instead. We also got some people who were pro-Blender, who thought that our community must be anti-Blender, because we were obviously "competitors in the space." In fact there was never a competitive mindset, it's more that people who lean into that business psychology of "here's how you win" think more often in terms of competition. BTW Blender is definitely an awesome project, I've used it since 2002 and on various commercial projects in addition to hobby stuff.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  > it works very similar to general "doin' business" service psychology. Features requested are built; money requested is donated; resources are used for additional upgrades; industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is tracked, open, and accountable. That sounds more like FLOSS done right than most "doin' business" available these days. If most "doin' business" worked as you describe, FLOSS wouldn't have eat so much market from them.
symlinkk 5y ago
It’s because they see Blender as “fighting for open source” against 3DS Max and the others. People do the same thing with Godot. You used to see it with Firefox before some of the recent bad press.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I assign Blender success to first passing the "good enough" bar and then focusing on being attractive to beginners. Once enough beginners became addicted, there was no turning back and Blender slowly started to eat other communities. Development then was financed and a virtuous cycle started that made Blender the 3d modelling tool with the largest community of users ever.
- yAak 5y ago
  There’s been bad press for Blender? Genuinely curious!
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    I think they meant bad press for Firefox.
IshKebab 5y ago
There are definitely still some issues with it (e.g. the VSE is still not very good) but they're just so damn good at improving it how can you complain? That release video is insanely professional. It's probably the best run non-developer open source project that there is.
- follower 5y ago
  One important aspect of Blender as a project is that the technology is developed alongside a specific creative project with a specific goal (e.g. "Big Buck Bunny", "Sprite Fright"). The technology & the creative development are part of an intertwined process.
franciscop 5y ago
To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND they have a great community behind, AND they are also great at promotional bits like this page itself, AND they are being backed by large companies. So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for search, etc. The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the interface is very confusing (but this has been improved constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least softened the opinion of Blender): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too worried about that as well.
badsectoracula 5y ago
My main complaint about Blender that doesn't have to do with subjective things like the UI or whatever (which i mentioned elsewhere) is how the script APIs break all the time. I used to write scripts for it at the past but pretty much everything i wrote is now long broken and after the second time that happened i just gave up. Now if i want anything i just export to one of the formats that come bundled with Blender (most often OBJ) since these are the most likely to remain around across breakages (3rd party exporter plugins also break often) and use adhoc tools to do the processing. It does limit what i can do though. It'd be nice if they made some sort of "stable" API that plugins can rely on in the long term, even if they had another one that is "better" (whatever their current definition of "better" might be).
danbolt 5y ago
I've noticed that if someones impression of Blender is pre-2.8, they see it more akin to GIMP compared to Photoshop. Post 2.8, especially with a lot of digital artists I know, are very enthusiastic about the tool.
- alvarlagerlof 5y ago
  Yeah and on that note I really would like a better Gimp. It's too clunky.
  - ansmithz42 5y ago
    Give Krita a try, it is done in a similar manner to blender.
    - schleck8 5y ago
      Isn't it exclusively for drawing/art though?
      - Kliment 5y ago
        Not at all, though it's great for that.
  - aoms 5y ago
    I completely agree, although GIMP does seem to be getting better as well.
stevebmark 5y ago
I really like Blender, especially as a modeler. The only major downside is the nightmarish user interface, which doesn't seem like it's gotten better in this release. They reverse most UI best practices, for example they had right click to select by default up until sometime last year. Their panel UI system is kludgey and painful. There's lots of hidden and non-obvious functionality. The benefits of Blender far outweigh the pain of learning the terrible UI though.
jayd16 5y ago
I doubt the majority of the HN community does 3D modelling at a professional level so I assume most of this praise is more fandom and appreciation over direct experience. Blender is indeed great but Maya is still extremely popular and many professionals happen to prefer Maya for one reason or another. I don't often see that fine grained of a discussion of media tools here.
- kranke155 5y ago
  Maya has been getting worse. But a lot of studios have built a lot of “pipeline” (ie automation and software to move and manage large projects) around Maya and apparently the Blender API is crap somehow (because everyone keeps telling me it is?) My bet is Blender will become more standard in the next 10 years. It’s becoming big in gaming (I’ve heard)
  - shakna 5y ago
    Blender breaks their API. Maya breaking the API is huge news, and generally patched same-day. The APIs are different, with different tradeoffs, but the biggest by far is Maya isn't expected to break your automation pipeline, and that is worth a considerable amount.
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      Maya requires to recompile native plugins for each new version though (unless this has changed recently?). The reason is that the Maya devs made the decision (back in the 90's) to use C++ APIs in DLLs for the plugin interface instead of a C API. Not their best decision in hindsight.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        That is (was) a problem if it was built with MSVC. Build it with Gcc, and no. MSVC has lately been obliged to stabilize their ABI a bit, and now plugins are more implicitly stable. So, not such a bad decision. Building with MSVC used to be a bad decision, less so now.

by gtsop 5y ago

jolmg 5y ago

I think I remember seeing people complain about its interface, but it's changed so much since then, I don't know if there are still people complaining.

moffkalast 5y ago
Yeah they've done a remarkable job with the 2.80 update, the UI is pretty decent now. Also its competitors are buggy-ass insanely overpriced monthly subscription proprietary editors, so no surprise there. There are still things to complain about, like the undo speed, CSG modifier unreliability, lack of certain features, but none of them are strict deal breakers.
badsectoracula 5y ago
Well, i do have complains about Blender's new interface: the new one feels "off" compared to 2.7x (something i never felt with the 2.4x -> 2.5x transition). But it is minor... and i can still use 2.79 anyway :-P

themodelplumber 5y ago

IMO the Blender project psychology gets this reception in part because it works very similar to general "doin' business" service psychology. Features requested are built; money requested is donated; resources are used for additional upgrades; industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is tracked, open, and accountable. If you want a critical take on Blender therefore, for one you ought to look outside a community of business-minded devs. Look where artists hang out and you'll find a less rational take that is based on individual likes and dislikes. Where logic doesn't matter so much--it's how you feel. That's where you'll get into it. And if you look at other FOSS graphics software communities where the project lead is someone who just does whatever they want, even better, you'll find a group of users who either adapt or leave, and that's quite different from Blender's psychological development ecosystem in a lot of ways. Alternately you could go more-business and go ask a SolidWorks user group to tell you how great Blender is. They will probably tell you how business is done properly and why the Blender way is clueless in various ways. It so happens I ran an online community for another FOSS 3D package for over a decade. We got some people who were anti-Blender, and some who were pro-Blender. Often the anti-position was based in prefers-underdog reasons, which I understand. Even in FOSS there are some clear underdogs and people get upset when they like the underdog and continually see another project winning attention instead. We also got some people who were pro-Blender, who thought that our community must be anti-Blender, because we were obviously "competitors in the space." In fact there was never a competitive mindset, it's more that people who lean into that business psychology of "here's how you win" think more often in terms of competition. BTW Blender is definitely an awesome project, I've used it since 2002 and on various commercial projects in addition to hobby stuff.

marcodiego 5y ago
> it works very similar to general "doin' business" service psychology. Features requested are built; money requested is donated; resources are used for additional upgrades; industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is tracked, open, and accountable. That sounds more like FLOSS done right than most "doin' business" available these days. If most "doin' business" worked as you describe, FLOSS wouldn't have eat so much market from them.

symlinkk 5y ago

It’s because they see Blender as “fighting for open source” against 3DS Max and the others. People do the same thing with Godot. You used to see it with Firefox before some of the recent bad press.

marcodiego 5y ago
I assign Blender success to first passing the "good enough" bar and then focusing on being attractive to beginners. Once enough beginners became addicted, there was no turning back and Blender slowly started to eat other communities. Development then was financed and a virtuous cycle started that made Blender the 3d modelling tool with the largest community of users ever.
yAak 5y ago
There’s been bad press for Blender? Genuinely curious!
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  I think they meant bad press for Firefox.

IshKebab 5y ago

There are definitely still some issues with it (e.g. the VSE is still not very good) but they're just so damn good at improving it how can you complain? That release video is insanely professional. It's probably the best run non-developer open source project that there is.

follower 5y ago
One important aspect of Blender as a project is that the technology is developed alongside a specific creative project with a specific goal (e.g. "Big Buck Bunny", "Sprite Fright"). The technology & the creative development are part of an intertwined process.

franciscop 5y ago

To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND they have a great community behind, AND they are also great at promotional bits like this page itself, AND they are being backed by large companies. So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for search, etc. The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the interface is very confusing (but this has been improved constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least softened the opinion of Blender): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too worried about that as well.

badsectoracula 5y ago

My main complaint about Blender that doesn't have to do with subjective things like the UI or whatever (which i mentioned elsewhere) is how the script APIs break all the time. I used to write scripts for it at the past but pretty much everything i wrote is now long broken and after the second time that happened i just gave up. Now if i want anything i just export to one of the formats that come bundled with Blender (most often OBJ) since these are the most likely to remain around across breakages (3rd party exporter plugins also break often) and use adhoc tools to do the processing. It does limit what i can do though. It'd be nice if they made some sort of "stable" API that plugins can rely on in the long term, even if they had another one that is "better" (whatever their current definition of "better" might be).

danbolt 5y ago

I've noticed that if someones impression of Blender is pre-2.8, they see it more akin to GIMP compared to Photoshop. Post 2.8, especially with a lot of digital artists I know, are very enthusiastic about the tool.

alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Yeah and on that note I really would like a better Gimp. It's too clunky.
- ansmithz42 5y ago
  Give Krita a try, it is done in a similar manner to blender.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    Isn't it exclusively for drawing/art though?
    - Kliment 5y ago
      Not at all, though it's great for that.
- aoms 5y ago
  I completely agree, although GIMP does seem to be getting better as well.

stevebmark 5y ago

I really like Blender, especially as a modeler. The only major downside is the nightmarish user interface, which doesn't seem like it's gotten better in this release. They reverse most UI best practices, for example they had right click to select by default up until sometime last year. Their panel UI system is kludgey and painful. There's lots of hidden and non-obvious functionality. The benefits of Blender far outweigh the pain of learning the terrible UI though.

jayd16 5y ago

I doubt the majority of the HN community does 3D modelling at a professional level so I assume most of this praise is more fandom and appreciation over direct experience. Blender is indeed great but Maya is still extremely popular and many professionals happen to prefer Maya for one reason or another. I don't often see that fine grained of a discussion of media tools here.

kranke155 5y ago
Maya has been getting worse. But a lot of studios have built a lot of “pipeline” (ie automation and software to move and manage large projects) around Maya and apparently the Blender API is crap somehow (because everyone keeps telling me it is?) My bet is Blender will become more standard in the next 10 years. It’s becoming big in gaming (I’ve heard)
- shakna 5y ago
  Blender breaks their API. Maya breaking the API is huge news, and generally patched same-day. The APIs are different, with different tradeoffs, but the biggest by far is Maya isn't expected to break your automation pipeline, and that is worth a considerable amount.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    Maya requires to recompile native plugins for each new version though (unless this has changed recently?). The reason is that the Maya devs made the decision (back in the 90's) to use C++ APIs in DLLs for the plugin interface instead of a C API. Not their best decision in hindsight.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      That is (was) a problem if it was built with MSVC. Build it with Gcc, and no. MSVC has lately been obliged to stabilize their ABI a bit, and now plugins are more implicitly stable. So, not such a bad decision. Building with MSVC used to be a bad decision, less so now.