3 ms·

You're not struggling, it's just an unwieldy application; struggling is not being able to hold a wrench, this is just difficulty with picking up an excavator.

blagie 3y ago
It's not an unwieldy application. It's an unwieldy domain. 3d is hard. Drawing apps are hard. Video editing is relatively hard. Throw those together, and you get fundamentally __hard__. The excavator is a good analogy. The best-designed most graceful excavator will still be _hard_ (at least for more complex tasks).
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Even tasks which are not 3D but are simply managing the application itself are quite hard in Blender. So you have a double hit: first 3D modeling is quite hard, but then the application itself is also unintuitive. If it were only one or the other then it would be more manageable.
  - spookie 3y ago
    It's not intuitive if you don't know it. When you do know the common keybindings you feel as if modelling by hand. There are 14 year olds making great use of it [1]. [1] https://variety.com/2023/film/news/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-hired-14-year-old-animator-preston-mutanga-toronto-1235637160/ https://variety.com/2023/film/news/spider-man-across-the-spi...
    - audessuscest 3y ago
      I think you missed what intuitive means.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        No, they didn't. As the saying goes, the only intuitive interface is the nipple - everything else is learned. Blender is only "not intuitive" if you already learned to use a different program in the same or adjacent domain (say some CAD tool, or Unreal Editor, or even Paint 3D or Sketchup), as it's not going to be similar enough. Similarity to existing software is a good thing, but not worth it if you can offer much better ergonomics otherwise. Blender could, and did.
      - spookie 3y ago
        Alright, fair enough. I might have not explained myself well then. Blender "shortcuts" are most of the time one key, followed by others, alternative variations can be achieved with modifier keys (makes sense). It takes very little time to see what the shortcuts are. Most of the time you can just hover by a tool icon, other times, menus have them clearly labelled by item. At this point, you know the basics. Your human eyes are very good at perceiving changes in your FoV, and after inputting a key, the status bar presents information on alternatives modes or filters available for that tool. Eventually, you start assuming (correctly) that other tools behave in the same fashion for a variety of things. For example, you press "Y" (y-axis) after "S" (scale), and you scale on that axis! If you followed that by a number, you scale by that scale factor! And this can be applied to every other tool. Moreover, this and other combos make sense, are easy to understand. Whatever you may imagine as the effect they have on other tools is most likely the exact outcome. Blender is very sane, it does exactly what you tell it to do. You do have to make the call, but when that is at a distance of a finger, it isn't an issue. You can learn by just using it. Information is laid out to you clearly. Modifiers/filters are consistent, making their knowledge easily transferrable to different tools. It cannot get more intuitive than this.
- krageon 3y ago
  With respect, a lot of the founding priciples are not especially complicated. Of course you can keep adding detail and ability, that will make any domain hideously complex after some time. That doesn't make it fundamentally unwieldy.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Why not both? 3D is hard but Blender has some very peculiar UX choices that require a lot of memorization of iconography and hotkeys to make use of. BforArtists specifically exists to provide better surfacing of interaction to Blender https://youtu.be/0vEtTP0C0Cs?si=comeTyStz98t9-a0 https://youtu.be/0vEtTP0C0Cs?si=comeTyStz98t9-a0 Granted Blender 2.8 onwards and even 2.x onwards are huge steps up from the 1.x days, but it still has one of the most opaque interaction models of any of the common 3D DCCs
  - michaelbrave 3y ago
    Have to second this, it's rare for an applications UX to piss me off enough to start looking into modding it or creating a fork but blender is at the top of that list. Just having a better way to customize hotkeys would go really far, and I want to my mouse and movement controls to be roughly the same as unreal engine. Until those two things happen I use blender but I'm always angry when I do.
- dev_slash_null 3y ago
  Except I've been able to do medium complexity tasks in various Autodesk products(Inventor, 3ds Max) within minutes of opening the program for the first time, without looking at any documentation. While I struggle to do even simple tasks in blender, even with many hours of going through tutorials. I try to pick it up again every few years, and inevitably give up several weeks in.

blagie 3y ago

It's not an unwieldy application. It's an unwieldy domain. 3d is hard. Drawing apps are hard. Video editing is relatively hard. Throw those together, and you get fundamentally __hard__. The excavator is a good analogy. The best-designed most graceful excavator will still be _hard_ (at least for more complex tasks).

zarzavat 3y ago
Even tasks which are not 3D but are simply managing the application itself are quite hard in Blender. So you have a double hit: first 3D modeling is quite hard, but then the application itself is also unintuitive. If it were only one or the other then it would be more manageable.
- spookie 3y ago
  It's not intuitive if you don't know it. When you do know the common keybindings you feel as if modelling by hand. There are 14 year olds making great use of it [1]. [1] https://variety.com/2023/film/news/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-hired-14-year-old-animator-preston-mutanga-toronto-1235637160/ https://variety.com/2023/film/news/spider-man-across-the-spi...
  - audessuscest 3y ago
    I think you missed what intuitive means.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      No, they didn't. As the saying goes, the only intuitive interface is the nipple - everything else is learned. Blender is only "not intuitive" if you already learned to use a different program in the same or adjacent domain (say some CAD tool, or Unreal Editor, or even Paint 3D or Sketchup), as it's not going to be similar enough. Similarity to existing software is a good thing, but not worth it if you can offer much better ergonomics otherwise. Blender could, and did.
    - spookie 3y ago
      Alright, fair enough. I might have not explained myself well then. Blender "shortcuts" are most of the time one key, followed by others, alternative variations can be achieved with modifier keys (makes sense). It takes very little time to see what the shortcuts are. Most of the time you can just hover by a tool icon, other times, menus have them clearly labelled by item. At this point, you know the basics. Your human eyes are very good at perceiving changes in your FoV, and after inputting a key, the status bar presents information on alternatives modes or filters available for that tool. Eventually, you start assuming (correctly) that other tools behave in the same fashion for a variety of things. For example, you press "Y" (y-axis) after "S" (scale), and you scale on that axis! If you followed that by a number, you scale by that scale factor! And this can be applied to every other tool. Moreover, this and other combos make sense, are easy to understand. Whatever you may imagine as the effect they have on other tools is most likely the exact outcome. Blender is very sane, it does exactly what you tell it to do. You do have to make the call, but when that is at a distance of a finger, it isn't an issue. You can learn by just using it. Information is laid out to you clearly. Modifiers/filters are consistent, making their knowledge easily transferrable to different tools. It cannot get more intuitive than this.
krageon 3y ago
With respect, a lot of the founding priciples are not especially complicated. Of course you can keep adding detail and ability, that will make any domain hideously complex after some time. That doesn't make it fundamentally unwieldy.
dagmx 3y ago
Why not both? 3D is hard but Blender has some very peculiar UX choices that require a lot of memorization of iconography and hotkeys to make use of. BforArtists specifically exists to provide better surfacing of interaction to Blender https://youtu.be/0vEtTP0C0Cs?si=comeTyStz98t9-a0 https://youtu.be/0vEtTP0C0Cs?si=comeTyStz98t9-a0 Granted Blender 2.8 onwards and even 2.x onwards are huge steps up from the 1.x days, but it still has one of the most opaque interaction models of any of the common 3D DCCs
- michaelbrave 3y ago
  Have to second this, it's rare for an applications UX to piss me off enough to start looking into modding it or creating a fork but blender is at the top of that list. Just having a better way to customize hotkeys would go really far, and I want to my mouse and movement controls to be roughly the same as unreal engine. Until those two things happen I use blender but I'm always angry when I do.
dev_slash_null 3y ago
Except I've been able to do medium complexity tasks in various Autodesk products(Inventor, 3ds Max) within minutes of opening the program for the first time, without looking at any documentation. While I struggle to do even simple tasks in blender, even with many hours of going through tutorials. I try to pick it up again every few years, and inevitably give up several weeks in.