There's a pretty good discussion of this over at CGTalk. Some of the developers have been answering questions and stuff. According to them, customizable hotkeys and interface elements are supposed to be coming in the next release. They said the only reason they did this release was because of all the new tools that were written for Big Buck Bunny, and that they'd originally intended to include customization in this release.
Swizzle: Could you link to that thread? I recently sent a letter of epic proportions to the devs to see about collaborating with outsiders on making the interface more outsider-friendly. Or more specifically: more user-friendly for those who don't like the blender-interface, and who are already experienced with the terminology and conventions of other software. I never heard back, but I'm still interested in seeing what they're up to and possibly having some influence. I think Polycount is very good at formulating what's needed and what's not working well enough in software, so to have some of those devs here would be a great thing for game-developers. I think we're largely all software-agnostic, in that we use what works for us, and that could be a cool thing to apply to Blender.
Even though you can quickly edit the UI to be more user friendly to a degree it doesn't make a difference. it's still hard to get into the application.
Entity it's not about being negative, but if Blender was more user friendly like say Silo more people would go and use it. Right now I'm playing with the app and I'm trying to configure it so it suits my needs but there are simple things like making all the viewports perfectly square easily, but right now it doesn't appear like there is a function that does this, are missing. It a bunch of little things that make the user not want to use iBlender if they have the option not to. For example I didn't really need to go read a manual to learn how to use Silo, I played with a few times and when I got stuck, mostly because I was expected a function to behave a certain way and it didn't. With Blender you get stuck every five min. Zbrush suffers from the same issues with hostile UI as Blender. If Mudbox did everything that matter that is, that zbrush does, people wouldn't use Zbrush, because Zbrush is a pain to get used to. And it's not about learning curve either, it's just UI design in Zbrush case.
Swizzle: Could you link to that thread? I recently sent a letter of epic proportions to the devs to see about collaborating with outsiders on making the interface more outsider-friendly. Or more specifically: more user-friendly for those who don't like the blender-interface, and who are already experienced with the terminology and conventions of other software. I never heard back, but I'm still interested in seeing what they're up to and possibly having some influence. I think Polycount is very good at formulating what's needed and what's not working well enough in software, so to have some of those devs here would be a great thing for game-developers. I think we're largely all software-agnostic, in that we use what works for us, and that could be a cool thing to apply to Blender.
(...)but if Blender was more user friendly like say Silo(...)
Totally agree on that. If you get to know your way around in Blender you can do things fast, but it's much harder to learn than Silo or Wings (in which anyone familar with how 3d works can just jump into). Plus no app so far beats Silo or Wings in modelling. For me it feels just more "natrual" to model with those
I don't know about you but Blender is very friendly for me after learning it, and checking out Silo made me want to gouge my eyes out, it's why I am happy with Blender because it does not attempt to imitate the (bad) UIs of other programs that professionals have to tolerate for making a living off of.
I like blenders layout, but its what I learnt on. I've used other programs but I still prefer Blender, however, I am coming round to 3DS max due to necessity. But, the hotkeys in max by default just dont make much sense to me at all. W,E,R just dont make sense, but the history stack is great, I wish blender would implement something similar instead of just hammering ctrl Z.
This said its still a great program - considering its free - and for modelling I think its great, love being able to skip back and forth between sculpting just for more fluidity in my forms (though the sculpting engine is slow). Ill be downloading this soon enough no doubt.
Sage, I'd mostly agree, but I'd go so far as to say zBrush has an even harsher learning curve/more hostile layout than Blender ever has.
To be honest so far the nicest program I have found to set hot keys in has been Max. Well once you set them I mean I'm not referring to it's bloated way of doing it.Why you ask, because other programs seem to want to force the user to adopt their work flow. I have changed hot keys in Silo and to be honest it was a big freaking waste of time. I just got used to it and it's all better now. Zbrush, and XSI are the same deal, you do what they want when they want and you get results and that's the only way. Then you learn to enjoy it. With Max it doesn't matter, you go in delete all the stupidly assigned hot keys if you feel like and then you make it how you want it to be. And surprise surprise, it becomes awesome to and quick to work in. The bonus is if you do have to start using another 3d app for whatever reason if you have to go back to Max later, you can set the hot keys to how you have to work in the other program and Max doesn't crap out. That's the bonus. None of this shit of having to press three keys because the ahole developers thought it was cool. I won't say names, Adobe, with your BS short cut manager in Photoshop. Every combination requires crt in it to be a a vaild short cut, or the world ends. So Awesome and smart.
I spent about an hour just tinkering around in Blender and started to find my way around things, of course this is like the tenth attempt over the years. I have been looking at the program since it came out around 1999. The tools it has now make it pretty impractical not to look at it seriously if you have no money and want to do commercial work or just learn. Why, it's tiny, you can paint and sculpt in it and you can potentially make an interactive 3d reel of your work with it. It has a video editor. I hope it gets better an easyier to use. It can be a pain to texture and have a 3d program sometimes.
ImslightlyBored I'm not trying to be a dick with this comment, but if you don't take the time to set up Max in a way that is comfortable to you and your hands, then you are not a Max user. Nuff said.
Blender has a high learning curve because it's a powerful and complex program and also they took a non traditional way to set up their hot keys, and how the mouse interacts. Also wasting time trying to align windows isn't my idea of powerful though. It just feels have assed that you can go in an customize the entire UI at one level but then they don't allow you do place buttons however you want, which makes actually editing the entire UI a waste of time. The headers don't need to have all those freaking buttons, at least let the user decide which ones they will have there. I'll be going back to Blender and reading the manual to see what is user error and what can be improved. I would think most people find it easier to use the left mouse button than the right, maybe not.... It could be worse. It could be like a Mac that comes with one mouse button unless you buy a normal one for it. And if you wanted to make the one mouse button act like right mouse button you have to hold control. LOL I guess with all the money Apple spends on making Macs look really, really pretty they had to cut costs some where, Heh. I guess we are lucky we can buy a replacement for it that doesn't say Apple on it. Zbrush learning curve is more of get used to me or die kind of thing, not hard due to difficulty but hard because it's annoying. I'm not saying to force people who use it already to change to a different interaction. Just make it a toggle so user have the option to pick one or the other. Hell even Windows has the options to set which mouse button does what.
Leilee, Silo remind me of the Gimp in how simple and clean the UI is set up. So I really don't know what you are getting at. The UI doesn't waste space, like 90 % of the apps out there, Blender to a degree suffers from this because certain things can't be changed and they usually take up a huge amount of screen space. LOL
I wish Silo had a modifier stack that worked like Photoshop layers, you can control how much they affect things, etc. Maybe Autodesk will get a clue and add this to Max and Maya.
I have a friend who's a huge Blender fanatic (and a few of my former classmates worked on Big Buck Bunny), and when I see him working in Blender, it looks like a freaking amazing program, and when I try it myself I stumble around. But now that I'm being forced to take three classes in Maya simultaneously - I'm only used to using Luxology modo - hopefully I'll come out with a greater tolerance for convoluted, inconsistent interface design and I'll grow to count Blender's blessings rather than its faults and learn to use the damn thing.
It's probably a lot easier for someone who has never learned a 3D program to learn Blender. Blender's layout is considerably different from the standard layouts found in most other 3D applications. It has a lot of the same features, but you access and use them differently. Anyone indoctrinated in the basics of other 3D applications will be constantly tripping over themselves trying to find features where they just aren't located.
Of course, it is important to remember who is making Blender, and what audience it is being made for. Blender is an open-source project. It is developed by an independent foundation which is, for the most part, non-profit. As such, the Blender development team has no commercial liability to the end-user. More often than not, they are more focused on including new features than they are making those features user-friendly. Their targeted end-users tend to be open-source software users anyway, a group known for learning and adapting on their own. If Blender were a commercial application, it would be much more important for it to be easy to use and understand.
But this is just another rant about Blender in general. And we get those every time the software is mentioned. I'd like to redirect attention back to this latest release. I'm already getting a buzz off the plethora of new features included. The hair particle system, strand rendering, and particle editing modes are fantastic. Developing flexible hair for your characters has never been so easy.
I also noticed that they've completely overhauled the UV editing system. The archaic "face mode" is now gone. UV editing is handled directly from the regular editing mode. I haven't tried edge cut UV mapping yet, but what I've seen so far makes it seem that it will be easier than ever before. This is a substantial relief, Blender's "face mode" was always difficult and annoying to work with. It also appears that full support for baking and rendering tangent normal maps has been added. I'm going to have to figure out how to pull this off. I've been dreaming of using a feature like this ever since Blender added the sculpting tools.
The main menu bar is a lie. A LIEEEEE! There is no main menu bar in Blender, and there never has been. What appears to be a menu bar when you start up the program is, in fact, just another Blender window. It just happens to look like a menu bar in that context. In actuality, it is no different from any other Blender window.
Windows are what you make them. Blender windows are completely interchangeable. There is no one specific window type. Any given window can be changed at any time to a different window type. An image window can be changed into a 3D window. An IPO editing window can be changed into a text-editing window. All of the basic Blender windows are equal, and can be changed to any other window any time you want.
The space bar is your friend. The space bar is the go-to button in Blender for opening context-sensitive menus. If you don't know where something is, or how to access something, there is a good chance that you will learn how by pressing the space bar and following whatever pops up. This is a great tip if you haven't already learned some of Blender's basic key-shortcuts. It is also a great way of learning what those shortcuts are.
If Blender were a commercial application, it would be much more important for it to be easy to use and understand.
It did have a start as a closed source commercial modeling app many moons ago, like Max and Maya. It's been like that from 1995 to 2002. Rather than to bitrot into obscurity it was fairly recently open sourced and made Free. Unfortunately this led to the negative effect for its crediiblity in the vision of modelers because "OMG IF ITS FREE IT'S CRAP etc. Expensive 3d packages are the SUPERIORESTS. Ima downlode 3ds max because of this gun making tutorial i want to make a ak47 and a garand!11 and i need max for it etc! time to start a hl2 mod!!!"
Then again when discussing Blender what board can I count on for another sudden App War?
The space bar is your friend. The space bar is the go-to button in Blender for opening context-sensitive menus. If you don't know where something is, or how to access something, there is a good chance that you will learn how by pressing the space bar and following whatever pops up. This is a great tip if you haven't already learned some of Blender's basic key-shortcuts. It is also a great way of learning what those shortcuts are.
This is the one thing about Blender that pisses me off the most. I'm so used to the Modo way of doing things where spacebar drops the current tool and switches selection modes that I end up wanting to do that whenever I'm in Blender. It's actually a really useful way of setting it up, but... well, whatever. Once 2.5 rolls around, I'm going to download it and customize the hell out of the keyboard shortcuts. The first thing I do will be binding that contextual menu to the right mouse button so I never have to see it unless I WANT IT.
As much as I would love to be able to purchase regular updates of full commercial 3D apps, the fact of the matter is that I'm not wealthy enough to afford such an expense, especially when my skills of a modeler aren't helping to pay my mortgage. Got to prioritize, and hundreds of dollars for software that earns me no money isn't the best of investments.
In the meantime, there's Blender, which has a considerable feature set, regular updates, and doesn't cost a dime. I'm not about to claim that it is as good as 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Softimage. But once you've wrapped your brain around the interface, it is easily the best value. (the only real investment is the time you spend learning it) I've been using Blender for years, and have done all sorts of things with it. I've used it to successfully export and load props into several game engines. I've used it to construct Quicktime VR projections. I've even produced high-polycount subdivision models for animations. The potential is definitely there.
And I can say from experience that this latest release is some seriously hot shit! The features and tools that have been added are the kind that I have been salivating for for years.
Richard Kain I have to disagree with you on why Blender looks how it does. Blender was produced in an era when the 3D modeling market was flooded with terrible commercial 3D applications, so called "affordable". They were all trying to be original
Back to Blender... If I remember correctly it was an European company that developed it's own 3d app to do their work for their clients. It was tailored for their works and needs and that's mostly the reason Blender is how it is. In other words it was a custom in house product, it was never meant to be sold to the public at first. This company either went bankrupt or decided to pursue other endeavors. At some point it also decided to sell it to the public and would let users play with the demo with no strings attached, no limitations like the crap you see with Maya Ple or GMax. The group that develops Blender now bought it because they felt it was such a great program it would be a waste to lose. They are mostly programmers, not artist and are trying to build a solid app and they have. I think they have done several rewrites already. There are other powerful 3d apps out there that are really powerful like Houdini for example, and have a pretty weird UI.
I think every update I have looked at of Blender has improved the app greatly, but I find it still too annoying to use. If they keep doing what they are doing, I might have to make time to learn it. Like I said texturing with a heavy 3D app is annoying at times.
Richard Kain can you edit the headers? You know the bar filled with context sensitive buttons that you can set top, bottom, or none? It's the part of the viewport that would say top, side front, etc, in most 3D, but in Blender it doesn't. Is there a way to turn on the names of the viewports on? The reason I want to edit the headers is because I find them too full for the viewport configurations I want to use.
Sage, viewport names can be turned on in the options panel (ie, pull down the preferences window that masquerades as the main menu bar). It's to the left of the "view and controls" tab as "view name".
It did have a start as a closed source commercial modeling app many moons ago, like Max and Maya. It's been like that from 1995 to 2002. Rather than to bitrot into obscurity it was fairly recently open sourced and made Free. Unfortunately this led to the negative effect for its crediiblity in the vision of modelers because "OMG IF ITS FREE IT'S CRAP etc. Expensive 3d packages are the SUPERIORESTS. Ima downlode 3ds max because of this gun making tutorial i want to make a ak47 and a garand!11 and i need max for it etc! time to start a hl2 mod!!!"
Then again when discussing Blender what board can I count on for another sudden App War?
Anything less than everyone bowing down and worshiping blender is an App War? Most of the comments seem positive. I'm not gonna use blender :P
As such, the Blender development team has no commercial liability to the end-user. More often than not, they are more focused on including new features than they are making those features user-friendly.
I'd disagree with you there - the loss of the useless Face mode, the addition of Align Auto, the easification of Merge back in the day, all those smell like the developers using their own tools, or at least thinking about an easy workflow.
I understand that it's nasty that Blender more or less forces a workflow onto you and doesn't allow for a whole lot of customization... But in return, I found that workflow to be more efficient than anything I could ever come up with. Back when I used Max, I was never encouraged to use hotkeys and, as a result, didn't.
Blender's buttons and headers hardly ever come into play, because you can use hotkeys for most of your work. Tab switches between Edit and Object mode. Ctrl+Tab switches between Vertex, Edge or Face selection. Z and the modifier keys switch between every form of display, from wireframe to textured. Space gives a menu which is mostly used for adding new objects. A selects or deselects all. W gives a very handy menu with most of the things that I ever use, including, but not limited to, Subdivide, Remove Doubles, Merge, Set Smooth/Solid and Flip Normals. E extrudes, Ctrl+E marks things as a UV seam. R rotates, Ctrl+R adds an Edge Loop. G grabs. S scales. X deletes. F makes a face between the selected vertices/edges.
Between those, I've got 95% of the tools I ever need in the 3D window and I haven't had to move my left hand for an inch and haven't had to click any button anywhere. That's the basic idea behind Blender - Left hand on the left side of the keyboard, right hand on the mouse. X does the same as Delete (i.e. it deletes stuff), but using the Delete key would actually require you to move your hand, which X doesn't. That's genius right there, I'd say.
The result is that you don't often need the buttons window that's standard on the bottom. And with a Shift+Space with the mouse hovering over the 3D window, it's gone. If I have both a UV and a 3D window, I can make either of these full screen just by Shift+Spacing over the one I want. Note again that Shift and Space don't require me to move my hand at all. Furthermore, I don't need four windows to display my model from different angles, because the Numpad 1, 3 and 7 keys give me an orthographic view of the front, side and top of my model. Immediately, I might add, rather than Maya's View Compass with lets the camera rotate rather than just go to the view you want immediately.
In the end, you can do 95% of your work with the 3D view taking up ALL of the screen and your left hand always on the same place. That's the kind of workflow that I don't mind to be pushed into.
Blender doesn't force anything on the user any more than Maya or Max do, which is to say that it does. =] I don't really have a problem with the UI. Workflow wise I think it offers quite a few improvements even over commercial software I've used. Graphically it looks better than max, maya or xsi. It's closer to modo or c4d in terms of visual appeal and those two have the most modern GUIs I've seen - but that means little to me, being an XSI user (fugly is part of the XSI experience) I don't use software for how it looks.
I've mostly been observing blender from the sidelines too, waiting for the toolset itself to rise up to comparable quality to studio apps, especially on the animation side. Blender has long been lacking here and only recently is looking more and more viable as a pipeline tool for games for instance. Modeling wise, I've always been rather 'meh' over what it can do. It's no different than using max or maya - neither of which I enjoy modeling with either. Capable, yes - preferable, no. I don't think even the UI overhaul will help steer me away from the likes of Silo or UVLayout. Those are specialized tools, where 100% of the UI is focused on those tasks. Blender won't ever compete with that - no studio app can, simply because so much of the UI needs to be shared with the rest of the toolset. From GUI to key bindings to mouse input and even tool paradigms. It's actually pretty old school in its approach for modeling, which I don't like at all. But that's no different than max or maya.
Even the impending 2.5 UI overhaul won't do much for me. I'll take what few workflow improvements result from it, but I'm not expecting much because I don't have much of a problem with what is there now and probably won't change any of the default bindings. It's more to appease people who want it to work like max or maya (I'm not one of those). I almost always use the default UI in any app, except for Silo, due to its mouse customization (which no other app I have can do).
There is tons of good stuff in blender though... and a lot of it you can't even find in commercial software. Things like sculpting and painting need work, but they are there, and now being worked on I think and that is awesome. It won't replace zbrush for me anytime soon, but when you compare it with what modo offers now at close to 1k for a license... it kinda makes you scratch your head.
I dunno what the hell Cheap is going on about... I think he suffers from blenderhead-itis which seems like something of a cross between being persecuted for using free software and being an open source zealot - making one simultaneously defensive and aggressive =]
...Oh, One other thing I love about blender... it runs great on my imac =]
I didn't even buy that thing for 3d use, which makes it even cooler.
No that was because you made a sweeping statement without anything to back it up. I don't care if you use notepad to model with. I'd bet money that you don't even really know how to use Silo though. If you're going to compare two things, either know what you are talking about and prove it with examples or expect someone to call you on your bs.
Gwot I don't like Silo... there i said it. LOL runs away quickly... You are never going to find anything better for a long time, why because it's awesome. The developers have tried in my opinion to cram in all the goodies of other 3d apps in a good way. That said I don't really like it at times, I just seem to be able to get my models to blow up while doing sub d stuff and trying to sculpt like I would in zbrush. It usually happens if I go up and down the subd levels a lot. I wonder if it's a memory issue with my PC, since it only has 2 gigs. It hasn't happened in a awhile though. I hope they add a slice tool similar to what Maya has with constraints and all. I do mostly mechanical model work, so I miss certain things when I use the app. I'm so used to old school modeling that's what I enjoy. I remember the good old day when you tried to cut things and that the damn tool would add edges all over the place in emesh. I guess I don't miss that at all. I like how Max, XSI, and Maya look for the most part but then I just like things that work no eye candy required. What really bugs me about XSI is how wasteful the UI is, it a little too intrusive for my taste. All the damn menus (property pages) are huge. sometimes it fills like you are surfing the net and a ton of pop ups attack you. With that smaller is better, way better. I keep saying it will grow on me, but its annoying me too much so I just ignore it. The sad part is I dislike the program even more when I set on the option for them not to show up unless you hold crtl
Blender lovers that for sharing your tips. I'll have to try them.
whatchu say bout max not bein shortcut friendly?
fergin drugs, getoffem. good fer ya soul an ting.
here's my max preferred shortcuts:
1-6 switch between vertex-object mode, and click one while in mode to go to object.
v/c convert to emesh/epoly
b,p,t,f,l,ctrl+r bottom, perspective, top, front, left and right view(i work in single window)
w,e,r move rotate and scale
ctrl-z undo
a,s turn on vertex snap/angle snap.
i also have loadsa macros, and as many clickable modifiers as possible.
as for blender, watched a few tutorials, managed to create some cut blob-box thingie,
but it was as hard for me to get into it as lightwave.
silo was a lot easier on me, its basically a scaled-down max UI.
didn't have much problems liking XSI either.
buttons might be a tad big, as someone else said, but if you got a lot of screen estate, you'll want em big.
oh yeah, another thing: for rotating, angle snap is king.
i have it set as 5 degrees in max, and whenever i need it not to rotate 5 degrees at a time, i press a.
i've also set up the keyboard (i use the left hand on the keyboard)
so that the shortcuts i use the most, are furthest to the left, and the shortcuts i use the least, are further to the right.
oh yeah, another thing: for rotating, angle snap is king.
i have it set as 5 degrees in max, and whenever i need it not to rotate 5 degrees at a time, i press a.
Blender rotates with 5 degree increment whenever you hold down the Control key. This is something that's applied consistently through the program - scaling and moving happens with increments too if you hold down Control, and I've only just noticed that it increases the amount of sides for a cylinder by ten instead of one when using the slide-things for scale. Granted, I push one button more than you do in Max, but it's consistent, and the Control key is always in my reach when I press R, S, or G anyway.
meh, theres lots of things i hate with max. the "generate mapping coords" button is useless,
"real world map size" is a sucky feature since it doesnt do anything,
UVW mapping gets stuck in corners when i use unfold, and it seems to choose unfold edges randomly, also it should be obvious that long edges should have priority over short edges when stitching together the unfold, peltmap is clumsy, i hate that i have to click 5 times to get it to pelt (maxscript bleeds out of the ears whenever i try to script it)
and pelt is way slower than unfold, even with all the stitching operations,
i mean seriously, why in fucks shitty name do i have to click pelt, then edit pelt map,
then the "simulate pelt pulling" button, then X, and then "unclick" pelt again?
what is the purpose of all that extra shit, like iterations samples pull strenght.. BAH.
blablabla, i only need the damn thing to pelt damnit!
and i use it to get planar maps not to idiotically stretch to fit the damn UVW space.
the worst part is that i encounter these flaws every damn second i spend unwrapping,
since thats basically what i end up doing.
select faces, pelt, E (for relax dialog) select faces, planar map, best align, pelt, close pelt dialog.. meh. its like they had monkeys design the UI.
i've noticed the final version crashes more than the release candidates, especially in sculpt mode
weird.
That is weird. Blender hardly ever crashes for me. It's one of the things I really like about it. Of course, if it were to crash, it would probably be in sculpt mode. (one of the more recent and performance-intensive features) How much memory are you running on?
I actually got a chance to test Blender's new normal-mapping features the other night. It's been a long time coming, but Blender now has a complete normal-mapping pipeline. You can construct a high-poly model and low-poly model, accurately bake the tangent normal map from the high-poly to the low-poly, and then accurately render the normal map applied to the low-poly model using Blender's own renderer. Blender has had normal-map support in the past, but not the tangent-space normal mapping that is commonly used in today's game engines. And it has never before been able to render tangent normal-map effects in the renderer, severely limiting the use of normal maps to cut down on render times.
The sculpt mode in Blender is still a far cry from more dedicated modeling programs like MudBox or Z-Brush. But anyone without the funds for those programs now has a free normal-mapping solution for game engines.
Replies
Pretty exciting stuff.
Nope because I can't code python worth crap
being familiar with Quakes hurt
Although to be honest it's not a bad program.
Alex
The link is: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=59&t=633266
Have you seen http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/2.50_UI_design_proposal_and_discussion ? The discussion page has also an interesting discussion about the UI.
Totally agree on that. If you get to know your way around in Blender you can do things fast, but it's much harder to learn than Silo or Wings (in which anyone familar with how 3d works can just jump into). Plus no app so far beats Silo or Wings in modelling. For me it feels just more "natrual" to model with those
This said its still a great program - considering its free - and for modelling I think its great, love being able to skip back and forth between sculpting just for more fluidity in my forms (though the sculpting engine is slow). Ill be downloading this soon enough no doubt.
Sage, I'd mostly agree, but I'd go so far as to say zBrush has an even harsher learning curve/more hostile layout than Blender ever has.
I spent about an hour just tinkering around in Blender and started to find my way around things, of course this is like the tenth attempt over the years. I have been looking at the program since it came out around 1999. The tools it has now make it pretty impractical not to look at it seriously if you have no money and want to do commercial work or just learn. Why, it's tiny, you can paint and sculpt in it and you can potentially make an interactive 3d reel of your work with it. It has a video editor. I hope it gets better an easyier to use. It can be a pain to texture and have a 3d program sometimes.
ImslightlyBored I'm not trying to be a dick with this comment, but if you don't take the time to set up Max in a way that is comfortable to you and your hands, then you are not a Max user. Nuff said.
Blender has a high learning curve because it's a powerful and complex program and also they took a non traditional way to set up their hot keys, and how the mouse interacts. Also wasting time trying to align windows isn't my idea of powerful though. It just feels have assed that you can go in an customize the entire UI at one level but then they don't allow you do place buttons however you want, which makes actually editing the entire UI a waste of time. The headers don't need to have all those freaking buttons, at least let the user decide which ones they will have there. I'll be going back to Blender and reading the manual to see what is user error and what can be improved. I would think most people find it easier to use the left mouse button than the right, maybe not.... It could be worse. It could be like a Mac that comes with one mouse button unless you buy a normal one for it. And if you wanted to make the one mouse button act like right mouse button you have to hold control. LOL I guess with all the money Apple spends on making Macs look really, really pretty they had to cut costs some where, Heh. I guess we are lucky we can buy a replacement for it that doesn't say Apple on it. Zbrush learning curve is more of get used to me or die kind of thing, not hard due to difficulty but hard because it's annoying. I'm not saying to force people who use it already to change to a different interaction. Just make it a toggle so user have the option to pick one or the other. Hell even Windows has the options to set which mouse button does what.
Leilee, Silo remind me of the Gimp in how simple and clean the UI is set up. So I really don't know what you are getting at. The UI doesn't waste space, like 90 % of the apps out there, Blender to a degree suffers from this because certain things can't be changed and they usually take up a huge amount of screen space. LOL
I wish Silo had a modifier stack that worked like Photoshop layers, you can control how much they affect things, etc. Maybe Autodesk will get a clue and add this to Max and Maya.
Alex
I have a friend who's a huge Blender fanatic (and a few of my former classmates worked on Big Buck Bunny), and when I see him working in Blender, it looks like a freaking amazing program, and when I try it myself I stumble around. But now that I'm being forced to take three classes in Maya simultaneously - I'm only used to using Luxology modo - hopefully I'll come out with a greater tolerance for convoluted, inconsistent interface design and I'll grow to count Blender's blessings rather than its faults and learn to use the damn thing.
Of course, it is important to remember who is making Blender, and what audience it is being made for. Blender is an open-source project. It is developed by an independent foundation which is, for the most part, non-profit. As such, the Blender development team has no commercial liability to the end-user. More often than not, they are more focused on including new features than they are making those features user-friendly. Their targeted end-users tend to be open-source software users anyway, a group known for learning and adapting on their own. If Blender were a commercial application, it would be much more important for it to be easy to use and understand.
But this is just another rant about Blender in general. And we get those every time the software is mentioned. I'd like to redirect attention back to this latest release. I'm already getting a buzz off the plethora of new features included. The hair particle system, strand rendering, and particle editing modes are fantastic. Developing flexible hair for your characters has never been so easy.
I also noticed that they've completely overhauled the UV editing system. The archaic "face mode" is now gone. UV editing is handled directly from the regular editing mode. I haven't tried edge cut UV mapping yet, but what I've seen so far makes it seem that it will be easier than ever before. This is a substantial relief, Blender's "face mode" was always difficult and annoying to work with. It also appears that full support for baking and rendering tangent normal maps has been added. I'm going to have to figure out how to pull this off. I've been dreaming of using a feature like this ever since Blender added the sculpting tools.
The main menu bar is a lie. A LIEEEEE! There is no main menu bar in Blender, and there never has been. What appears to be a menu bar when you start up the program is, in fact, just another Blender window. It just happens to look like a menu bar in that context. In actuality, it is no different from any other Blender window.
Blender Tutorial #2
Windows are what you make them. Blender windows are completely interchangeable. There is no one specific window type. Any given window can be changed at any time to a different window type. An image window can be changed into a 3D window. An IPO editing window can be changed into a text-editing window. All of the basic Blender windows are equal, and can be changed to any other window any time you want.
Blender Tutorial #3
The space bar is your friend. The space bar is the go-to button in Blender for opening context-sensitive menus. If you don't know where something is, or how to access something, there is a good chance that you will learn how by pressing the space bar and following whatever pops up. This is a great tip if you haven't already learned some of Blender's basic key-shortcuts. It is also a great way of learning what those shortcuts are.
It did have a start as a closed source commercial modeling app many moons ago, like Max and Maya. It's been like that from 1995 to 2002. Rather than to bitrot into obscurity it was fairly recently open sourced and made Free. Unfortunately this led to the negative effect for its crediiblity in the vision of modelers because "OMG IF ITS FREE IT'S CRAP etc. Expensive 3d packages are the SUPERIORESTS. Ima downlode 3ds max because of this gun making tutorial i want to make a ak47 and a garand!11 and i need max for it etc! time to start a hl2 mod!!!"
Then again when discussing Blender what board can I count on for another sudden App War?
In the meantime, there's Blender, which has a considerable feature set, regular updates, and doesn't cost a dime. I'm not about to claim that it is as good as 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Softimage. But once you've wrapped your brain around the interface, it is easily the best value. (the only real investment is the time you spend learning it) I've been using Blender for years, and have done all sorts of things with it. I've used it to successfully export and load props into several game engines. I've used it to construct Quicktime VR projections. I've even produced high-polycount subdivision models for animations. The potential is definitely there.
And I can say from experience that this latest release is some seriously hot shit! The features and tools that have been added are the kind that I have been salivating for for years.
Back to Blender... If I remember correctly it was an European company that developed it's own 3d app to do their work for their clients. It was tailored for their works and needs and that's mostly the reason Blender is how it is. In other words it was a custom in house product, it was never meant to be sold to the public at first. This company either went bankrupt or decided to pursue other endeavors. At some point it also decided to sell it to the public and would let users play with the demo with no strings attached, no limitations like the crap you see with Maya Ple or GMax. The group that develops Blender now bought it because they felt it was such a great program it would be a waste to lose. They are mostly programmers, not artist and are trying to build a solid app and they have. I think they have done several rewrites already. There are other powerful 3d apps out there that are really powerful like Houdini for example, and have a pretty weird UI.
I think every update I have looked at of Blender has improved the app greatly, but I find it still too annoying to use. If they keep doing what they are doing, I might have to make time to learn it. Like I said texturing with a heavy 3D app is annoying at times.
Richard Kain can you edit the headers? You know the bar filled with context sensitive buttons that you can set top, bottom, or none? It's the part of the viewport that would say top, side front, etc, in most 3D, but in Blender it doesn't. Is there a way to turn on the names of the viewports on? The reason I want to edit the headers is because I find them too full for the viewport configurations I want to use.
Alex
Anything less than everyone bowing down and worshiping blender is an App War? Most of the comments seem positive. I'm not gonna use blender :P
I'd disagree with you there - the loss of the useless Face mode, the addition of Align Auto, the easification of Merge back in the day, all those smell like the developers using their own tools, or at least thinking about an easy workflow.
I understand that it's nasty that Blender more or less forces a workflow onto you and doesn't allow for a whole lot of customization... But in return, I found that workflow to be more efficient than anything I could ever come up with. Back when I used Max, I was never encouraged to use hotkeys and, as a result, didn't.
Blender's buttons and headers hardly ever come into play, because you can use hotkeys for most of your work. Tab switches between Edit and Object mode. Ctrl+Tab switches between Vertex, Edge or Face selection. Z and the modifier keys switch between every form of display, from wireframe to textured. Space gives a menu which is mostly used for adding new objects. A selects or deselects all. W gives a very handy menu with most of the things that I ever use, including, but not limited to, Subdivide, Remove Doubles, Merge, Set Smooth/Solid and Flip Normals. E extrudes, Ctrl+E marks things as a UV seam. R rotates, Ctrl+R adds an Edge Loop. G grabs. S scales. X deletes. F makes a face between the selected vertices/edges.
Between those, I've got 95% of the tools I ever need in the 3D window and I haven't had to move my left hand for an inch and haven't had to click any button anywhere. That's the basic idea behind Blender - Left hand on the left side of the keyboard, right hand on the mouse. X does the same as Delete (i.e. it deletes stuff), but using the Delete key would actually require you to move your hand, which X doesn't. That's genius right there, I'd say.
The result is that you don't often need the buttons window that's standard on the bottom. And with a Shift+Space with the mouse hovering over the 3D window, it's gone. If I have both a UV and a 3D window, I can make either of these full screen just by Shift+Spacing over the one I want. Note again that Shift and Space don't require me to move my hand at all. Furthermore, I don't need four windows to display my model from different angles, because the Numpad 1, 3 and 7 keys give me an orthographic view of the front, side and top of my model. Immediately, I might add, rather than Maya's View Compass with lets the camera rotate rather than just go to the view you want immediately.
In the end, you can do 95% of your work with the 3D view taking up ALL of the screen and your left hand always on the same place. That's the kind of workflow that I don't mind to be pushed into.
I've mostly been observing blender from the sidelines too, waiting for the toolset itself to rise up to comparable quality to studio apps, especially on the animation side. Blender has long been lacking here and only recently is looking more and more viable as a pipeline tool for games for instance. Modeling wise, I've always been rather 'meh' over what it can do. It's no different than using max or maya - neither of which I enjoy modeling with either. Capable, yes - preferable, no. I don't think even the UI overhaul will help steer me away from the likes of Silo or UVLayout. Those are specialized tools, where 100% of the UI is focused on those tasks. Blender won't ever compete with that - no studio app can, simply because so much of the UI needs to be shared with the rest of the toolset. From GUI to key bindings to mouse input and even tool paradigms. It's actually pretty old school in its approach for modeling, which I don't like at all. But that's no different than max or maya.
Even the impending 2.5 UI overhaul won't do much for me. I'll take what few workflow improvements result from it, but I'm not expecting much because I don't have much of a problem with what is there now and probably won't change any of the default bindings. It's more to appease people who want it to work like max or maya (I'm not one of those). I almost always use the default UI in any app, except for Silo, due to its mouse customization (which no other app I have can do).
There is tons of good stuff in blender though... and a lot of it you can't even find in commercial software. Things like sculpting and painting need work, but they are there, and now being worked on I think and that is awesome. It won't replace zbrush for me anytime soon, but when you compare it with what modo offers now at close to 1k for a license... it kinda makes you scratch your head.
I dunno what the hell Cheap is going on about... I think he suffers from blenderhead-itis which seems like something of a cross between being persecuted for using free software and being an open source zealot - making one simultaneously defensive and aggressive =]
...Oh, One other thing I love about blender... it runs great on my imac =]
I didn't even buy that thing for 3d use, which makes it even cooler.
Blender lovers that for sharing your tips. I'll have to try them.
Alex
fergin drugs, getoffem. good fer ya soul an ting.
here's my max preferred shortcuts:
1-6 switch between vertex-object mode, and click one while in mode to go to object.
v/c convert to emesh/epoly
b,p,t,f,l,ctrl+r bottom, perspective, top, front, left and right view(i work in single window)
w,e,r move rotate and scale
ctrl-z undo
a,s turn on vertex snap/angle snap.
i also have loadsa macros, and as many clickable modifiers as possible.
as for blender, watched a few tutorials, managed to create some cut blob-box thingie,
but it was as hard for me to get into it as lightwave.
silo was a lot easier on me, its basically a scaled-down max UI.
didn't have much problems liking XSI either.
buttons might be a tad big, as someone else said, but if you got a lot of screen estate, you'll want em big.
http://www.dejawolf.com/tutorials/1minuteofmaxdx.avi
hey i created video with my camera of me doing some random stuff with max!
i have it set as 5 degrees in max, and whenever i need it not to rotate 5 degrees at a time, i press a.
i've also set up the keyboard (i use the left hand on the keyboard)
so that the shortcuts i use the most, are furthest to the left, and the shortcuts i use the least, are further to the right.
Blender rotates with 5 degree increment whenever you hold down the Control key. This is something that's applied consistently through the program - scaling and moving happens with increments too if you hold down Control, and I've only just noticed that it increases the amount of sides for a cylinder by ten instead of one when using the slide-things for scale. Granted, I push one button more than you do in Max, but it's consistent, and the Control key is always in my reach when I press R, S, or G anyway.
weird.
"real world map size" is a sucky feature since it doesnt do anything,
UVW mapping gets stuck in corners when i use unfold, and it seems to choose unfold edges randomly, also it should be obvious that long edges should have priority over short edges when stitching together the unfold, peltmap is clumsy, i hate that i have to click 5 times to get it to pelt (maxscript bleeds out of the ears whenever i try to script it)
and pelt is way slower than unfold, even with all the stitching operations,
i mean seriously, why in fucks shitty name do i have to click pelt, then edit pelt map,
then the "simulate pelt pulling" button, then X, and then "unclick" pelt again?
what is the purpose of all that extra shit, like iterations samples pull strenght.. BAH.
blablabla, i only need the damn thing to pelt damnit!
and i use it to get planar maps not to idiotically stretch to fit the damn UVW space.
the worst part is that i encounter these flaws every damn second i spend unwrapping,
since thats basically what i end up doing.
select faces, pelt, E (for relax dialog) select faces, planar map, best align, pelt, close pelt dialog.. meh. its like they had monkeys design the UI.
That is weird. Blender hardly ever crashes for me. It's one of the things I really like about it. Of course, if it were to crash, it would probably be in sculpt mode. (one of the more recent and performance-intensive features) How much memory are you running on?
I actually got a chance to test Blender's new normal-mapping features the other night. It's been a long time coming, but Blender now has a complete normal-mapping pipeline. You can construct a high-poly model and low-poly model, accurately bake the tangent normal map from the high-poly to the low-poly, and then accurately render the normal map applied to the low-poly model using Blender's own renderer. Blender has had normal-map support in the past, but not the tangent-space normal mapping that is commonly used in today's game engines. And it has never before been able to render tangent normal-map effects in the renderer, severely limiting the use of normal maps to cut down on render times.
The sculpt mode in Blender is still a far cry from more dedicated modeling programs like MudBox or Z-Brush. But anyone without the funds for those programs now has a free normal-mapping solution for game engines.