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I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists. Open

by keyle 2y ago

I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists. Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?
- somat 2y ago
  I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe. But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    The best thing they did to make blender more approachable was defaulting to left-click selection.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real. The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions. How was the UI made slower?
    - somat 2y ago
      Blender is still a mismash of hundreds of semi random buttons and options, That is a core feature of a professional UI, In order to cater your tool to a user that will spend many hours operating it the most critical aspect is to reduce friction, flatten operation, bring everything out front where it can be seen and accessed in one operation. It's ugly, intimidating, hard to learn and makes the designers cry, but it is very fast and efficient exactly what you want when you are going to be using it for multiple hours a day every day. Is this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/rate_my_incomplete_work_out_of_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/r... really that much cleaner than this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/the_iconic_scene_made_in_blender_10_from_1994/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/th... Sorry for the reddit but it was the best examples I could find with an actual working ui shot. You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        The material system in Blender 1.0 was vastly simpler than it is currently. If you want to use a panel instead of nodes, the material panel is not that dissimilar from the 1.0 screenshot. That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful. AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
      - DonHopkins 2y ago
        What do you really know about user interface design and usability, if you falsely claim GIMP has had pie menus from day one? Do you really expect us to take your criticisms and questions seriously, or are you just trolling? You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671 Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus. If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD? You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you. Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus: https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870#a154 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception... As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9: https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_... While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
- psygn89 2y ago
  Not exactly what you asked for but this video has a little bit of everything Blender UI/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
  - sam_bristow 2y ago
    Blender 2.5 was another big UX milestone. Since then my impression is that it's been a case of steady refinement and a few key changes to defaults.
- jampekka 2y ago
  The major overhaul was Blender 2.8. You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
shadowgovt 2y ago
Thing is... UX is terrible everywhere in the 3D editing space. That's not even criticism of Blender as far as I can tell!
- ardupper 2y ago
  Perhaps it’s high time to admit that nobody has a great solution for 3D editing quite yet :P
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
  - nonchalantsui 2y ago
    I wouldn’t go that far to say that they have fantastic interfaces. Tolerable? Better than what free options existed at the time? Either way, there is a lot of room for improvement but it’s also an extremely challenging environment to get interfaces right. We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
    - CyberDildonics 2y ago
      except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling I think you're mistaking the necessity of not straying too much from the actual math going on underneath with an attachment of old tools. eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits! Go ahead and give an example of 'a Logic' so you can show some evidence for this.
nukem222 2y ago
> They've turned it around Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
  Nah, the original blender interface is night and day when compared with the modern one. People who complain should be forced to spend a day with Blender 2 (I think that was the version I tried first)
  - nukem222 2y ago
    Eh i've also used since the beginning. People love to complain. I put zero weight on this hypothesis. Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.
    - progmetaldev 2y ago
      I personally think you're both right, but it depends on when you first started using Blender. You're 100% correct that interfaces at the time when Blender was released were completely experimental, and I'd compare it to trying to navigate AI as an uninformed end user when it first was introduced, versus now. That's where I would put Blender when it was first released. The interface was good for what it was compared to the other popular 3D software at the time, but it's so much better and more evolved now. I'd say that you mentioning shortcuts makes you a power user, which should be the goal when you use any piece of software for your career. I just don't think that people bother to learn as much as you did back when you started using Blender, which I think shows your dedication, but also shows a lack of deep knowledge most (not all) people that start with a new technology have currently. It's not unknown to get a fresh graduate or self-taught person that wants to deep dive into the software they make use of daily, but I feel like it's far more uncommon that it was 20 years ago or more.
  - SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    I thought the modelling workflow at least, has been fundamentally unchanged. The common hotkeys like G for Grab, S for scale, X for extrude, etc. Not sure about the more advanced features like sculpting
reactordev 2y ago
It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita). I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  It kicks Biped right between the Bip01 L Thigh and Bip01 R Thigh, where the Daylight System doesn't shine!
mattl 2y ago
Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL. Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.
- schoen 2y ago
  Also historically true of OpenOffice.
  - mattl 2y ago
    Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too. And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using. (Hi Seth!)
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced. Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing. I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
agumonkey 2y ago
UX and math wise they're regularly pushing their limits in serious ways I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
- throwup238 2y ago
  > I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    I have no idea how much it helped them, but they didn’t start from zero. Since it was a commercial product that was open sourced, it already had users.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Recently, sure, but blender has had a huge, active community for around 20 years. I remember first running into blender in 2009
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.
blooalien 2y ago
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
- whstl 2y ago
  IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do. I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
  - abustamam 2y ago
    I still have trouble creating issues in Jira because it's never where I expect it to be. I know it's at the top bar somewhere, but even after years of it being there, I don't expect it to be there because it feels so unnatural.
  - blooalien 2y ago
    > IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do. I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
- danielbln 2y ago
  I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.
kstenerud 2y ago
I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  If you're looking to do art, you may find Krita to be closer to what you expect. It's another FOSS project, except instead of trying to do everything, it's geared to painting and other art stuff.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    Note though that AFAIK the official reason for Krita "not trying to do everything" isn't because they don't want to do everything but because most users and devs are interested in digital painting. AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
    - rongrobert 2y ago
      There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program. Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
philsnow 2y ago
How has Blender succeeded here where Gimp failed? Is there some unsung heroic person who has imbued Blender with a sense of taste?
- preciousoo 2y ago
  Taking the feedback about UI seriously was probably huge
  - Nesco 2y ago
    Unfortunately it’s the reason indeed
  - sam_bristow 2y ago
    I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    Basically. This is the same problem with FreeCAD. They just don't care.
    - omnimus 2y ago
      I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects. FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
  - Maken 2y ago
    Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2]. [1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465 https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465
mobiuscog 2y ago
The 'Industry Standard' option in keymaps, made a huge difference to many. The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example. It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.
superidiot1932 2y ago
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.
sbuk 2y ago
Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.

by keyle 2y ago

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?

somat 2y ago
I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe. But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  The best thing they did to make blender more approachable was defaulting to left-click selection.
- jampekka 2y ago
  This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real. The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions. How was the UI made slower?
  - somat 2y ago
    Blender is still a mismash of hundreds of semi random buttons and options, That is a core feature of a professional UI, In order to cater your tool to a user that will spend many hours operating it the most critical aspect is to reduce friction, flatten operation, bring everything out front where it can be seen and accessed in one operation. It's ugly, intimidating, hard to learn and makes the designers cry, but it is very fast and efficient exactly what you want when you are going to be using it for multiple hours a day every day. Is this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/rate_my_incomplete_work_out_of_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/r... really that much cleaner than this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/the_iconic_scene_made_in_blender_10_from_1994/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/th... Sorry for the reddit but it was the best examples I could find with an actual working ui shot. You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      The material system in Blender 1.0 was vastly simpler than it is currently. If you want to use a panel instead of nodes, the material panel is not that dissimilar from the 1.0 screenshot. That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful. AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      What do you really know about user interface design and usability, if you falsely claim GIMP has had pie menus from day one? Do you really expect us to take your criticisms and questions seriously, or are you just trolling? You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671 Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus. If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD? You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you. Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus: https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870#a154 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception... As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9: https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_... While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
psygn89 2y ago
Not exactly what you asked for but this video has a little bit of everything Blender UI/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s
doctorpangloss 2y ago
They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
- sam_bristow 2y ago
  Blender 2.5 was another big UX milestone. Since then my impression is that it's been a case of steady refinement and a few key changes to defaults.
jampekka 2y ago
The major overhaul was Blender 2.8. You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/ It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/

shadowgovt 2y ago

Thing is... UX is terrible everywhere in the 3D editing space. That's not even criticism of Blender as far as I can tell!

ardupper 2y ago
Perhaps it’s high time to admit that nobody has a great solution for 3D editing quite yet :P
CyberDildonics 2y ago
This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
- nonchalantsui 2y ago
  I wouldn’t go that far to say that they have fantastic interfaces. Tolerable? Better than what free options existed at the time? Either way, there is a lot of room for improvement but it’s also an extremely challenging environment to get interfaces right. We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling I think you're mistaking the necessity of not straying too much from the actual math going on underneath with an attachment of old tools. eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits! Go ahead and give an example of 'a Logic' so you can show some evidence for this.

nukem222 2y ago

> They've turned it around Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.

LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
Nah, the original blender interface is night and day when compared with the modern one. People who complain should be forced to spend a day with Blender 2 (I think that was the version I tried first)
- nukem222 2y ago
  Eh i've also used since the beginning. People love to complain. I put zero weight on this hypothesis. Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    I personally think you're both right, but it depends on when you first started using Blender. You're 100% correct that interfaces at the time when Blender was released were completely experimental, and I'd compare it to trying to navigate AI as an uninformed end user when it first was introduced, versus now. That's where I would put Blender when it was first released. The interface was good for what it was compared to the other popular 3D software at the time, but it's so much better and more evolved now. I'd say that you mentioning shortcuts makes you a power user, which should be the goal when you use any piece of software for your career. I just don't think that people bother to learn as much as you did back when you started using Blender, which I think shows your dedication, but also shows a lack of deep knowledge most (not all) people that start with a new technology have currently. It's not unknown to get a fresh graduate or self-taught person that wants to deep dive into the software they make use of daily, but I feel like it's far more uncommon that it was 20 years ago or more.
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  I thought the modelling workflow at least, has been fundamentally unchanged. The common hotkeys like G for Grab, S for scale, X for extrude, etc. Not sure about the more advanced features like sculpting

reactordev 2y ago

It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita). I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.

DonHopkins 2y ago
It kicks Biped right between the Bip01 L Thigh and Bip01 R Thigh, where the Daylight System doesn't shine!

mattl 2y ago

Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL. Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.

schoen 2y ago
Also historically true of OpenOffice.
- mattl 2y ago
  Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too. And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using. (Hi Seth!)
progmetaldev 2y ago
Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced. Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing. I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.

agumonkey 2y ago

UX and math wise they're regularly pushing their limits in serious ways I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down

throwup238 2y ago
> I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I have no idea how much it helped them, but they didn’t start from zero. Since it was a commercial product that was open sourced, it already had users.
- dartos 2y ago
  Recently, sure, but blender has had a huge, active community for around 20 years. I remember first running into blender in 2009
DonHopkins 2y ago
Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.

blooalien 2y ago

> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.

whstl 2y ago
IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do. I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
- abustamam 2y ago
  I still have trouble creating issues in Jira because it's never where I expect it to be. I know it's at the top bar somewhere, but even after years of it being there, I don't expect it to be there because it feels so unnatural.
- blooalien 2y ago
  > IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do. I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
danielbln 2y ago
I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.

kstenerud 2y ago

I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).

StableAlkyne 2y ago
If you're looking to do art, you may find Krita to be closer to what you expect. It's another FOSS project, except instead of trying to do everything, it's geared to painting and other art stuff.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  Note though that AFAIK the official reason for Krita "not trying to do everything" isn't because they don't want to do everything but because most users and devs are interested in digital painting. AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
  - rongrobert 2y ago
    There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program. Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.

philsnow 2y ago

How has Blender succeeded here where Gimp failed? Is there some unsung heroic person who has imbued Blender with a sense of taste?

preciousoo 2y ago
Taking the feedback about UI seriously was probably huge
- Nesco 2y ago
  Unfortunately it’s the reason indeed
- sam_bristow 2y ago
  I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Basically. This is the same problem with FreeCAD. They just don't care.
  - omnimus 2y ago
    I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects. FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
- Maken 2y ago
  Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2]. [1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465 https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465

mobiuscog 2y ago

The 'Industry Standard' option in keymaps, made a huge difference to many. The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example. It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.

superidiot1932 2y ago

> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.

sbuk 2y ago

Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.