no. just be able to edit complex geometry and have dev resources focused on speeding up the actual editing tools. you never know when you need the extra performance. in comparison being able to rotate stupid amounts of polygons in the viewport with simple materials thrown on is less useful in general.
well.. i would not say its useless
iam working in the VR field and usually i need to load lot of converted highpoly CAD geometry as surroundings for my moldeling to fit my models tightly around them,
so thats nice
but if you could also workon that stuff, it would be awesome
FWIW, the UI Team (most of whom are at one remove from the Blender Foundation) are working on improving some of the "bat-sh%t crazy decisions" in the user interface. Standard LMB style selection of objects (click, drag-box, etc) is going to become default, there is going to be a home-row for the common operations, etc. The revamp is not getting (any?) priority from the Blender Foundation many outside the "Blender bubble" think it deserves, but it is making headway despite that.
Whilst not a final map, the below keymap is the kind of thing that we can expect from the new defaults when they get around to finishing it. Perhaps not everyone's cup'o'tea but nowhere near as bass-ackwards as it is now.
Taken from another thread.
What do you think of this.
Personally, I think it's cool but that will destabilize all the others who took the time to learn the hotkeys and live with them...
Personally, I think it's cool but that will destabilize all the others who took the time to learn the hotkeys and live with them...
Nothing to worry about...
Its not cool as much as it is desperately needed. We could say the same argument about the 2.5 changes btw, that the new UI and loss of some features will "destabilize" those who spent time learning pre 2.5 blender.
The fallacy of it all lays in the fact that:
1) Blender is open source and free, which means one of the perks that goes along with that classification is the ability to make more drastic changes that would normally be much harder for a commercial product, with customers.
2) The blender versions people are happy with now and have learned will not go away, they will still be around and accessible.
3) Blender power users will know how to change blender to their liking far more than new users coming to Blender and finding not only a highly unconventional convoluted (too much added over time) keymap but also no intuitive means to change it.
Working with these kinds of tools requires users to adapt at least on a basic level, being able to pick up new software and learn it. When 2.5 rolled around, when ngon support was eventually added...many of the users complained, then they adapted over time and now they dont want this version to change. Its a repeating cycle.
Also dont forget that each window/editor in which the mouse hovers over has its own set of hotkeys. So when you are dealing with a set up where there are no hotkeys left to use and you need 3-4 key combos to use something... thats generally a red flag that something went horribly wrong along the way design wise. Further more, its outright hostile to tablet and cintiq users, which are practically a common sight in a professional environment.
Both Pawel Lyczkowski and Jonathan Williamson, two users, have shown quite a bit of talent and understanding when it comes to the design goals as well as challenges facing Blender usability. The keymap you see is just one prototype from the UI team, which is really doing this voluntarily. I honestly think they should be getting paid for such a (imo) high priority part of Blender.
At the risk of going against the consensus, I actually kind of doubt that reworking the default key bindings will do much.
Put differently : I think there is no point in sticking with default hotkeys in *any* program out there ; and I believe there is no point in trying to design a set of hotkeys that fit everyone either, because everyone's usage is bound to be different.
The core of the issue is *not* that Blender relies on obscure key combinations. It is the symptom, but not the root. The actual source of the problem is the deep lack of discoverability, that is to say, the fact that there is often no way for new users to even figure out the hotkeys to begin with. For instance when a user drags on the little labels located on the top left and top right of the 3d viewport there is no way to find out that these actions are actually bound to T and N. Similarly, some often used actions like pressing Tab to toggle modes are not discoverable at all.
In short : I don't want anyone to decide if "extrude" should be bound to ctrl-E or not by default. I just want new users to be able to find "Extrude" in the regular menus and pie menus easily, so that they can then assign their own hotkey to it from there.
I sincerely hope that the guys in charge of usability improvements are aware of that - because if not, things are just going to go in circles. Now of course the need to flip around left and right click and to offer Maya-style navigation as an option without breaking everything is a no brainer, and definitely should be taken care of sooner than later.
In short : I don't want anyone to decide if "extrude" should be bound to ctrl-E or not by default. I just want new users to be able to find "Extrude" in the regular menus and pie menus easily, so that they can then assign their own hotkey to it from there.
I sincerely hope that the guys in charge of usability improvements are aware of that.
They are, one of the reasons for a more simple, streamlined and consistent keymap is that it leave a lot of unused keys in which users can set their own hotkeys. The problem they said right now is that there are no empty keys, adding your own will conflict with something else thus the resorting to 3-4 key combos.
With a streamlined keymap, kind of like what Modo has done, its makes it more accessible for users to start creating their own through discovery and adaptation. Sadly too much is hidden away by hotkeys as well and not really accessible via visual means (or UI menus).
With the creation of pie menus (still a plugin which it shouldnt be), a lot of keyboard Olympics can be cut down and organized efficiently. Its new enough that the keymap and design approach should take it into consideration, much like Maya did with their hotbox.
Anyways the most friendly thing for users creating their own or modifying their own keymap is to give them as much of an empty slate as possible to work with key wise.
Oh totally yeah - they are basically victim of themselves "trying too hard" in the past, attempting to hotkey everything ... under the assumption that power users might want that. It's all quite ironic in a way. And then many add-on creators unfortunately jumped on that hotkey train too by assigning keys to their addons. It's all been snowballing from there and that's really unfortunate since I feel like it comes from a misunderstanding. (yes, power users want hotkeys. But nope, they don't want everything to be hotkeyed by default !)
The one thing I hope they won't overlook either is the ability to jump from discovering tools from the pie menu to being able to customize/assign hotkeys to them. If the pie menus can be designed to cover everything in the program (like Maya's hotbox), and hotkeys can be seen/assigned from there, the whole problem will basically solve itself...
That being said I am personally okay with the way things are at the moment. I barely use anything from the default hotkeys, remapped everything to my own unique liking and everything is running great. I believe that the main barrier of entry really is the default navigation and selection schemes. This is the main reason that made me not want to dive into Blender in the past, and that's a bit of a shame since this is such an easy thing for them to tweak.
At the risk of going against the consensus, I actually kind of doubt that reworking the default key bindings will do much.
Put differently : I think there is no point in sticking with default hotkeys in *any* program out there ; and I believe there is no point in trying to design a set of hotkeys that fit everyone either, because everyone's usage is bound to be different.
The core of the issue is *not* that Blender relies on obscure key combinations. It is the symptom, but not the root. The actual source of the problem is the deep lack of discoverability, that is to say, the fact that there is often no way for new users to even figure out the hotkeys to begin with. For instance when a user drags on the little labels located on the top left and top right of the 3d viewport there is no way to find out that these actions are actually bound to T and N. Similarly, some often used actions like pressing Tab to toggle modes are not discoverable at all.
In short : I don't want anyone to decide if "extrude" should be bound to ctrl-E or not by default. I just want new users to be able to find "Extrude" in the regular menus and pie menus easily, so that they can then assign their own hotkey to it from there.
I sincerely hope that the guys in charge of usability improvements are aware of that - because if not, things are just going to go in circles. Now of course the need to flip around left and right click and to offer Maya-style navigation as an option without breaking everything is a no brainer, and definitely should be taken care of sooner than later.
This is very true. The first time I opened Blender I made a cube and could not figure out how to modify it in any way...ended up clicking everywhere I thought the options should be until I was in another window I couldn't exit...so I closed it completely and didn't come back for a month or two.
I'm sure this experience is not unique. It's not necessarily about "standards" but instead it's about usability. A good UI has to have some level of intuitiveness behind it.
And this is what keeps getting argued about. If Blender was a commercial app, they would lose sales and survey customers and see many leaving complained about the UI and it would change.
At the risk of going against the consensus, I actually kind of doubt that reworking the default key bindings will do much.
...
A lot of the times when we're talking Blender, things go a bit deeper than one might perceive initially. I guess it also comes down to a personal point of view, even more so because the situation is quite complex.
Let's stick just with the hotkeys at the moment, and back track a bit in the timeline.
You are aware that in pre 2.5 Blender the only way to change hotkeys was to hunt them down in the code (C) and recompile?
Keeping that in mind, the concept of being able to change hotkeys in Blender is extremely new. You have already agreed to some fallacy of the state the hotkeys are in, but let me expand on that a bit.
- Navigation - Why does every single Editor/Window has it's own unique commands/hotkeys for Navigation?! There are only 3 axis in 3D, so if you're in an Editor/Window that is 2D, you just drop the Rotation, and keep the other 2 (Pan and Zoom). Simple. Now imagine how much easier it would be to setup Maya Alt-Navigation?!
- Absence of Smart Tools in Blender.
Example:
- How many Deletes do we have? And what does it bring to the table?! As a comparison, in Silo and most other 3D appz there is only one delete (context sensitive), and with that one command you can achieve everything that Blender has HOW MANY commands for. Simple thing - Delete.
- In Silo, one hotkey, Cut Tool - is Cut, Knife, Planar Cut, Vertex Connect, Subdivide Faces, and what not compared to Blender. That is One Command, One Hotkey - compared to Blenders multiple.
- How many Extrudes do we have?
I'm sure you get the picture. Blender is not context sensitive, in turn it has a command for every single possibility out there, that you could easily consolidate under Context Sensitive Smart Tools.
What I'm trying to point out here is that the problem is not just about what hotkey is used for certain action. The problem is you run out of hotkeys, or you have to rely on Hotkey+Menu paradigm too much in order to customize Blender. I hope I was able to demonstrate this fallacy. Now taking into account that the introduction of Hotkeys and the Input Editor into Blender is so new, you can see how flawed this design is?
The problem is, making a new keymap is going to fix nothing, and BTW the reason why it's not out yet (outside of the obvious political reason) is because it's so hard to make, and anyone working on it is aware of it. It is still not going to help new users customize Blender.
In order to fix this, the developers would have to dig under the hood and make Blender Context Sensitive. Basically cut down on the number of commands by consolidating everything. If so, then it would be back to Application Design stage, for which, unfortunately, they don't have a good track record.
...
Another of many examples of flawed initial design that snowballs.
(Something I had gone into a rant in your "Customization questions..." thread on BA)
The state of the UV Editor.
It is a seperate entity.
- From some commands not being avalible in 3D View and vice versa
- The hotspot for selection is way (WAY) larger than in the 3D View. You have to make your brain used that selecting the same subcomponents in UV Editor is way different than selecting them in 3D view.
- And the biggest one (in my opinion responsible for the state of the UV Editor) - Why would you design it that you need to select faces in 3D View in order to see them in UV Editor?! Because of that initial design choice they ended up with this concept of the 2 environments acting as independent and being out of sync.
Isn't it easier to have the UV Editor display UVz as soon as you select the Object, and from there on > everything is in sync.
...
How do you make a 3D app where you can not interact with more than one object?!
...
The mess Menus are in throughout the app. Take for example the rRMB Menu Addon from PLyczkowski. That's how it's done.
...
As you might have figured, new hotkeys fix nothing. But if They try to customize Blender, to such a degree, then they might actually admit that some of the design choices were poor and make an effort to either fix it (which I doubt is possible), or design a new concept. Because the problem is, BF/BI and the insulated bubble they're in all use defaults! They don't see a problem with customization because they have never successfully tried it.
To sum it up, while at the same time Blender has some amazing things going for it, it is riddled by poor design choices, and I'm not talking GUI.
Those poor design choices are considered good by the developers and they dismiss any reports of inconsistencies as a result of those design choices. Because of all this, from my point of view, the biggest strength of Blender is in it's community, fixing and adding functionality through addons.
Having only picked up the program earlier this year I am blissfully unaware of anything that happened in its development before 2.71 If anything, the heavy retooling that you mention (around the time of 2.5) makes me confident about the future of the program - it might have taken time to get there, but there are really a lot of great things about the recent iterations of the package !
As for the multiple deletes and extrudes (and their popups !), I totally agree - but thankfully enough, this can be tweaked and fixed. And that's another thing that makes me confident in the future of the program : every little hurdle I ran into so far turned out to be fixable, as illustrated in the customization thread I had on BA.
The part about the BI/BF guys using the default hotkeys sure blows my mind though
I agree, changing the default keys won't change the situation, if the user want to change himself he won't be able to figure out how to do it properly.
About the UI, lol, is not even bad graphically speaking (there are a lot of nice looking themes too), but it's a total mess in its organization.
They need to start reorganizing Blender from scratch, building stuff on top of another won't fix the core flaws. The vertical tabs for example, are unreadable.
Imho they will fail at it again, as before. Still the same people with still the same thoughts and mindset. The first thought they had at UI redesign was to change the hotkeys ^^
You can see why, at least in my case and I am sure many others, have migrated over back to commercial applications. The consistency and need for reliability in both management and in development were just too important to leave up to blind faith.
I recommend anyone looking for a more reliable application to invest time and effort in to switch to Modo, at least for the time being... or at the very least combine Modo indie with the Blender workflow.
Put differently : I think there is no point in sticking with default hotkeys in *any* program out there ; and I believe there is no point in trying to design a set of hotkeys that fit everyone either, because everyone's usage is bound to be different.
I agree and I would very much like it if Blender were to open up some more free keys. The next best thing Blender has to a spare key is the Q, which is set to Quit, a function that you can't possibly need more than once per session. I'm afraid to say I've had little experience with remapping Blender, since I had gotten used to the default keymap back before anything could be changed, and I've held off making a new one because developments from the foundation always seem to be right around the corner.
Anyway, while I agree mostly with your post, I think it's important to consider that default hotkeys do guide a user into a certain method of using software. If, for example, the 3D cursor were not bound to a mouse button or any other hotkey, few people would think to assign it to one -- and they'd miss out on one of Blender's most important features. One of the things that bothers me greatly about the new hotkey solution that has been posted here, is that it assigns the first number keys to modes of selection. That means that hotkeyed layers are out, which I think is a shame, because I love them; they replace almost all need for hide/unhide, the Outliner and comparative screenshots. The risk you run with an empty keymap is that people will set up a Max/Maya keymap because they don't know how to make a Blender keymap.
You can see why, at least in my case and I am sure many others, have migrated over back to commercial applications. The consistency and need for reliability in both management and in development were just too important to leave up to blind faith.
I recommend anyone looking for a more reliable application to invest time and effort in to switch to Modo, at least for the time being... or at the very least combine Modo indie with the Blender workflow.
Are we talking about the same Modo here?
The one few months ago we were not sure of weather it'll be Autodesk, Adobe or whatnot?
Assuming one uses a customized Blender, there is next to nothing Modo Indie has over Blender.
Let's be fair, if we're going to be open at giving honest feedback about one, let's not turn a blind eye to the other.
Are we talking about the same Modo here?
The one few months ago we were not sure of weather it'll be Autodesk, Adobe or whatnot?
Assuming one uses a customized Blender, there is next to nothing Modo Indie has over Blender.
Let's be fair, if we're going to be open at giving honest feedback about one, let's not turn a blind eye to the other.
I think no "beginner" will customize Blender with the danger for no tuturial support. Your point of view is the old "when you customized your UI, or has learned all hotkeys" blender is a good programm. Blender is good when you can use it but when people buy commercial apps because learning Blender sucks...
I have more fun with a full Modo trial 30days then learning Blender
can you actually edit such a high density mesh though without having the app drop to a snail's pace? or is it just some caching to not have the viewport lag at every step? the latter can be found in at least a certain autodesk 3d app and is only partially useful. <bicker bicker bicker>
I'm working on sculpting a mesh that's sitting at just under 45 million quads when you count the MultiRes subdivisions.
I can get into Edit Mode very easily, and change things around without problems. Snapping back to Sculpt Mode with all those subdivision levels, though, takes several seconds. That could also be the case if I were to apply the MultiRes modifier, but I won't need to do that.
It also takes about ten seconds to save the file if I'm still in Sculpt Mode. I don't have any problems navigating in the Viewport, though.
Just one example; everyone's experience will probably vary.
thanks for the feedback! promising to hear that it works out that way. some processing time is to be expected but you'd want it to not slow to a crawl when selecting or firing off modelling functionality, making meaningful edits impractical.
are you running latest blender and what about stability with scenes that contains dozens of millions of polygons?
I haven't tried adding other high-poly objects to the same scene yet. There will be more eventually, but I'll also be baking them down to much smaller models once the sculpting's done.
Ok guys, As I am progressing and completing my first rig within the software, I am about to begin facial irgging and since my rigs has to be optimized for game engines, I haven't used a single blendshape (shape keys) yet.
However, facial rig only made of joints is tedious and hard to get right so I'm thinking of using shape keys. How well do unity and unreal manage these types of deformation?
I'm not an expert by any stretch of imagination on game engines, but last project I did where I had to make customizable avatars, where I used a bunch of blendshapes to define which features would be changeable (such as mouth width, head size, nose size, etc), Unity 5 recognized them out of the box.
I wasn't the programmer, but he didn't complain anything to me as far as blendshapes support goes.
So I've just discovered another wondrous side of Blender, it's non destructive feature.
I thought it would only apply to it's modeling workflow but even while rigging, you can always come back and fix mistakes you made.
While binding my mesh, I've just realized there was a flagrant mistake in my topology. I just went into edit mode, added a few edge loop and tweaked some verts and everything is fine now.
Tweaking vertex after binding in Maya or at least modifying the mesh is a big No-No.
Also, even after the mesh has been binded in Blender, you can move the bones and bake its postion to see if it fits better, another useful feautre that I've yet never been able to do in Maya without lsoing all my weights..
Yeah it's pretty easy when you want to do that. I wish it was easier to change bone names though, totally breaks the links to the actions and you have o relink each curve on each action.
Anyone know what the status is with baking curvature maps, would really like to not have to export to xnormal to do it. Dirty Vertex or doing it with nodes dosen't really cut it as it's based on the verts and gives weird artifacts.
I haven't worked a lot with Maya but wouldn't it work OK if you turned off history for the duration of the tweak?
Mmmh, I woudn't know anything about that.
Usually, in Maya, you would have to save you skinweight to an external file, unbind your mesh and then proceed to make the changes according to your need. I think the biggest joke here is not being able to touch/change or modify your UV's after binding ...
Hoepfully, in the future, Blender includes ''rigging nodes'' in the node editor so people don't need to open the text editor or the python console to build their rigs...
I don't do tons of rigging myself but it's really useful for custom picker UIs, and it's also the language that's used in the expression editor. You can write custom drivers in it that do all sorts of neat stuff, and it's also indispensable for dealing with large numbers of morph targets.
Blond: In Maya you can duplicate the mesh. Do your edits on the duplicate. Then bind it to the skeleton and do a copy skin weights from the original. It's a few steps yes, but this way you don't need to export/import weights and don't have to worry about UV edits.
Blond: In Maya you can duplicate the mesh. Do your edits on the duplicate. Then bind it to the skeleton and do a copy skin weights from the original. It's a few steps yes, but this way you don't need to export/import weights and don't have to worry about UV edits.
How simple. Never looked at it this way!Thx for the tip.
I think Blender kind of assumes that you'll be doing a lot of the selecting with the viewport. It's straightforward to set your mesh to be unselectable and you can set up the bones to appear as arbitrary curves so that the rig is more readable in the viewport.
EDIT: So the technique is that he uses those 'proxy' objects.
He built that dialogue out of actual 3D shapes and set up a viewport to frame it properly. Selecting one object of the dialogue selects the bone associated with it (this logic is done inside a function that is called each time the Blender scene updates, like when a mouse click happens).
Besides a viewport, you could also insert a 3D view window in some other place of the interface and save that workspace as "Character Animation" or something like that.
Well, I'm working using rigify these days, and having a picker like that instead of moving the position and zooming the character to find the controller would be really useful :P
If PyQt can be used from within Blender without too much trouble, that's probably the best way to get a custom object picker. The only con is that it's a child window that can't be embedded in the interface (because it uses another gui library).
Giving the PyQt window a background image and using a custom layout to place the buttons on specific points along the image is totally supported. For this, a visual designer tool can be used: http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/PyQt5/designer.html
Replies
well.. i would not say its useless
iam working in the VR field and usually i need to load lot of converted highpoly CAD geometry as surroundings for my moldeling to fit my models tightly around them,
so thats nice
but if you could also workon that stuff, it would be awesome
Taken from another thread.
What do you think of this.
Personally, I think it's cool but that will destabilize all the others who took the time to learn the hotkeys and live with them...
Nothing to worry about...
Its not cool as much as it is desperately needed. We could say the same argument about the 2.5 changes btw, that the new UI and loss of some features will "destabilize" those who spent time learning pre 2.5 blender.
The fallacy of it all lays in the fact that:
1) Blender is open source and free, which means one of the perks that goes along with that classification is the ability to make more drastic changes that would normally be much harder for a commercial product, with customers.
2) The blender versions people are happy with now and have learned will not go away, they will still be around and accessible.
3) Blender power users will know how to change blender to their liking far more than new users coming to Blender and finding not only a highly unconventional convoluted (too much added over time) keymap but also no intuitive means to change it.
Working with these kinds of tools requires users to adapt at least on a basic level, being able to pick up new software and learn it. When 2.5 rolled around, when ngon support was eventually added...many of the users complained, then they adapted over time and now they dont want this version to change. Its a repeating cycle.
Also dont forget that each window/editor in which the mouse hovers over has its own set of hotkeys. So when you are dealing with a set up where there are no hotkeys left to use and you need 3-4 key combos to use something... thats generally a red flag that something went horribly wrong along the way design wise. Further more, its outright hostile to tablet and cintiq users, which are practically a common sight in a professional environment.
Both Pawel Lyczkowski and Jonathan Williamson, two users, have shown quite a bit of talent and understanding when it comes to the design goals as well as challenges facing Blender usability. The keymap you see is just one prototype from the UI team, which is really doing this voluntarily. I honestly think they should be getting paid for such a (imo) high priority part of Blender.
You can read the full design proposal/logic from them here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ScPMbHv8WRCU2znB7IU2l-W9hH-NLs5weQKLkjqmgpA/edit?pli=1
As well as: https://developer.blender.org/T37417
Put differently : I think there is no point in sticking with default hotkeys in *any* program out there ; and I believe there is no point in trying to design a set of hotkeys that fit everyone either, because everyone's usage is bound to be different.
The core of the issue is *not* that Blender relies on obscure key combinations. It is the symptom, but not the root. The actual source of the problem is the deep lack of discoverability, that is to say, the fact that there is often no way for new users to even figure out the hotkeys to begin with. For instance when a user drags on the little labels located on the top left and top right of the 3d viewport there is no way to find out that these actions are actually bound to T and N. Similarly, some often used actions like pressing Tab to toggle modes are not discoverable at all.
In short : I don't want anyone to decide if "extrude" should be bound to ctrl-E or not by default. I just want new users to be able to find "Extrude" in the regular menus and pie menus easily, so that they can then assign their own hotkey to it from there.
I sincerely hope that the guys in charge of usability improvements are aware of that - because if not, things are just going to go in circles. Now of course the need to flip around left and right click and to offer Maya-style navigation as an option without breaking everything is a no brainer, and definitely should be taken care of sooner than later.
They are, one of the reasons for a more simple, streamlined and consistent keymap is that it leave a lot of unused keys in which users can set their own hotkeys. The problem they said right now is that there are no empty keys, adding your own will conflict with something else thus the resorting to 3-4 key combos.
With a streamlined keymap, kind of like what Modo has done, its makes it more accessible for users to start creating their own through discovery and adaptation. Sadly too much is hidden away by hotkeys as well and not really accessible via visual means (or UI menus).
With the creation of pie menus (still a plugin which it shouldnt be), a lot of keyboard Olympics can be cut down and organized efficiently. Its new enough that the keymap and design approach should take it into consideration, much like Maya did with their hotbox.
Anyways the most friendly thing for users creating their own or modifying their own keymap is to give them as much of an empty slate as possible to work with key wise.
The one thing I hope they won't overlook either is the ability to jump from discovering tools from the pie menu to being able to customize/assign hotkeys to them. If the pie menus can be designed to cover everything in the program (like Maya's hotbox), and hotkeys can be seen/assigned from there, the whole problem will basically solve itself...
That being said I am personally okay with the way things are at the moment. I barely use anything from the default hotkeys, remapped everything to my own unique liking and everything is running great. I believe that the main barrier of entry really is the default navigation and selection schemes. This is the main reason that made me not want to dive into Blender in the past, and that's a bit of a shame since this is such an easy thing for them to tweak.
This is very true. The first time I opened Blender I made a cube and could not figure out how to modify it in any way...ended up clicking everywhere I thought the options should be until I was in another window I couldn't exit...so I closed it completely and didn't come back for a month or two.
I'm sure this experience is not unique. It's not necessarily about "standards" but instead it's about usability. A good UI has to have some level of intuitiveness behind it.
And this is what keeps getting argued about. If Blender was a commercial app, they would lose sales and survey customers and see many leaving complained about the UI and it would change.
[ame]
A lot of the times when we're talking Blender, things go a bit deeper than one might perceive initially. I guess it also comes down to a personal point of view, even more so because the situation is quite complex.
Let's stick just with the hotkeys at the moment, and back track a bit in the timeline.
You are aware that in pre 2.5 Blender the only way to change hotkeys was to hunt them down in the code (C) and recompile?
Keeping that in mind, the concept of being able to change hotkeys in Blender is extremely new. You have already agreed to some fallacy of the state the hotkeys are in, but let me expand on that a bit.
- Navigation - Why does every single Editor/Window has it's own unique commands/hotkeys for Navigation?! There are only 3 axis in 3D, so if you're in an Editor/Window that is 2D, you just drop the Rotation, and keep the other 2 (Pan and Zoom). Simple. Now imagine how much easier it would be to setup Maya Alt-Navigation?!
- Absence of Smart Tools in Blender.
- How many Deletes do we have? And what does it bring to the table?! As a comparison, in Silo and most other 3D appz there is only one delete (context sensitive), and with that one command you can achieve everything that Blender has HOW MANY commands for. Simple thing - Delete.
- In Silo, one hotkey, Cut Tool - is Cut, Knife, Planar Cut, Vertex Connect, Subdivide Faces, and what not compared to Blender. That is One Command, One Hotkey - compared to Blenders multiple.
- How many Extrudes do we have?
I'm sure you get the picture. Blender is not context sensitive, in turn it has a command for every single possibility out there, that you could easily consolidate under Context Sensitive Smart Tools.
What I'm trying to point out here is that the problem is not just about what hotkey is used for certain action. The problem is you run out of hotkeys, or you have to rely on Hotkey+Menu paradigm too much in order to customize Blender. I hope I was able to demonstrate this fallacy. Now taking into account that the introduction of Hotkeys and the Input Editor into Blender is so new, you can see how flawed this design is?
The problem is, making a new keymap is going to fix nothing, and BTW the reason why it's not out yet (outside of the obvious political reason) is because it's so hard to make, and anyone working on it is aware of it. It is still not going to help new users customize Blender.
In order to fix this, the developers would have to dig under the hood and make Blender Context Sensitive. Basically cut down on the number of commands by consolidating everything. If so, then it would be back to Application Design stage, for which, unfortunately, they don't have a good track record.
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Another of many examples of flawed initial design that snowballs.
(Something I had gone into a rant in your "Customization questions..." thread on BA)
The state of the UV Editor.
It is a seperate entity.
- The hotspot for selection is way (WAY) larger than in the 3D View. You have to make your brain used that selecting the same subcomponents in UV Editor is way different than selecting them in 3D view.
- And the biggest one (in my opinion responsible for the state of the UV Editor) - Why would you design it that you need to select faces in 3D View in order to see them in UV Editor?! Because of that initial design choice they ended up with this concept of the 2 environments acting as independent and being out of sync.
Isn't it easier to have the UV Editor display UVz as soon as you select the Object, and from there on > everything is in sync.
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How do you make a 3D app where you can not interact with more than one object?!
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The mess Menus are in throughout the app. Take for example the rRMB Menu Addon from PLyczkowski. That's how it's done.
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As you might have figured, new hotkeys fix nothing. But if They try to customize Blender, to such a degree, then they might actually admit that some of the design choices were poor and make an effort to either fix it (which I doubt is possible), or design a new concept. Because the problem is, BF/BI and the insulated bubble they're in all use defaults! They don't see a problem with customization because they have never successfully tried it.
To sum it up, while at the same time Blender has some amazing things going for it, it is riddled by poor design choices, and I'm not talking GUI.
Those poor design choices are considered good by the developers and they dismiss any reports of inconsistencies as a result of those design choices. Because of all this, from my point of view, the biggest strength of Blender is in it's community, fixing and adding functionality through addons.
Having only picked up the program earlier this year I am blissfully unaware of anything that happened in its development before 2.71
As for the multiple deletes and extrudes (and their popups !), I totally agree - but thankfully enough, this can be tweaked and fixed. And that's another thing that makes me confident in the future of the program : every little hurdle I ran into so far turned out to be fixable, as illustrated in the customization thread I had on BA.
The part about the BI/BF guys using the default hotkeys sure blows my mind though
About the UI, lol, is not even bad graphically speaking (there are a lot of nice looking themes too), but it's a total mess in its organization.
They need to start reorganizing Blender from scratch, building stuff on top of another won't fix the core flaws. The vertical tabs for example, are unreadable.
I recommend anyone looking for a more reliable application to invest time and effort in to switch to Modo, at least for the time being... or at the very least combine Modo indie with the Blender workflow.
Anyway, while I agree mostly with your post, I think it's important to consider that default hotkeys do guide a user into a certain method of using software. If, for example, the 3D cursor were not bound to a mouse button or any other hotkey, few people would think to assign it to one -- and they'd miss out on one of Blender's most important features. One of the things that bothers me greatly about the new hotkey solution that has been posted here, is that it assigns the first number keys to modes of selection. That means that hotkeyed layers are out, which I think is a shame, because I love them; they replace almost all need for hide/unhide, the Outliner and comparative screenshots. The risk you run with an empty keymap is that people will set up a Max/Maya keymap because they don't know how to make a Blender keymap.
Are we talking about the same Modo here?
The one few months ago we were not sure of weather it'll be Autodesk, Adobe or whatnot?
Assuming one uses a customized Blender, there is next to nothing Modo Indie has over Blender.
Let's be fair, if we're going to be open at giving honest feedback about one, let's not turn a blind eye to the other.
Like for example E and F keys while sliding the vertices.
I think no "beginner" will customize Blender with the danger for no tuturial support. Your point of view is the old "when you customized your UI, or has learned all hotkeys" blender is a good programm. Blender is good when you can use it but when people buy commercial apps because learning Blender sucks...
I have more fun with a full Modo trial 30days then learning Blender
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blender+cheat+sheet&ia=cheatsheet
I'm working on sculpting a mesh that's sitting at just under 45 million quads when you count the MultiRes subdivisions.
I can get into Edit Mode very easily, and change things around without problems. Snapping back to Sculpt Mode with all those subdivision levels, though, takes several seconds. That could also be the case if I were to apply the MultiRes modifier, but I won't need to do that.
It also takes about ten seconds to save the file if I'm still in Sculpt Mode. I don't have any problems navigating in the Viewport, though.
Just one example; everyone's experience will probably vary.
are you running latest blender and what about stability with scenes that contains dozens of millions of polygons?
I haven't tried adding other high-poly objects to the same scene yet. There will be more eventually, but I'll also be baking them down to much smaller models once the sculpting's done.
However, facial rig only made of joints is tedious and hard to get right so I'm thinking of using shape keys. How well do unity and unreal manage these types of deformation?
I wasn't the programmer, but he didn't complain anything to me as far as blendshapes support goes.
I think I'll go with shapes
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On the other side of the developement, Opensubdiv is in Blender with major performance improvement (on top of the viewport enhancement) :
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Living in a college town, he is literally every vegan hipster who can grow a beard I know. Doesn't mesh well? Yes. Accurate? Absolutely.
I thought it would only apply to it's modeling workflow but even while rigging, you can always come back and fix mistakes you made.
While binding my mesh, I've just realized there was a flagrant mistake in my topology. I just went into edit mode, added a few edge loop and tweaked some verts and everything is fine now.
Tweaking vertex after binding in Maya or at least modifying the mesh is a big No-No.
Also, even after the mesh has been binded in Blender, you can move the bones and bake its postion to see if it fits better, another useful feautre that I've yet never been able to do in Maya without lsoing all my weights..
Anyone know what the status is with baking curvature maps, would really like to not have to export to xnormal to do it. Dirty Vertex or doing it with nodes dosen't really cut it as it's based on the verts and gives weird artifacts.
Mmmh, I woudn't know anything about that.
Usually, in Maya, you would have to save you skinweight to an external file, unbind your mesh and then proceed to make the changes according to your need. I think the biggest joke here is not being able to touch/change or modify your UV's after binding ...
Hoepfully, in the future, Blender includes ''rigging nodes'' in the node editor so people don't need to open the text editor or the python console to build their rigs...
Blond: In Maya you can duplicate the mesh. Do your edits on the duplicate. Then bind it to the skeleton and do a copy skin weights from the original. It's a few steps yes, but this way you don't need to export/import weights and don't have to worry about UV edits.
How simple. Never looked at it this way!Thx for the tip.
Something like this:
- http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Py/Scripts/Cookbook/Code_snippets/Interface
- http://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_75_3/bpy.types.UILayout.html
I don't think there's a way to do something with a fancy layout; at the very least a grid of buttons for each object in the hierarchy.
https://vimeo.com/96737246
EDIT: So the technique is that he uses those 'proxy' objects.
He built that dialogue out of actual 3D shapes and set up a viewport to frame it properly. Selecting one object of the dialogue selects the bone associated with it (this logic is done inside a function that is called each time the Blender scene updates, like when a mouse click happens).
Besides a viewport, you could also insert a 3D view window in some other place of the interface and save that workspace as "Character Animation" or something like that.
an example back from 25.09.2013 is the tutorial viewer;
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code which was used for the tutorialviewer example which then executes in Blender above.
import bpy from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore from multiprocessing import Process, Queue context = None class ExampleQtWindow(QtGui.QDialog): def __init__(self): super(ExampleQtWindow, self).__init__() self.mainLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(self) self.buttonLayout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout() self.CreateButton = QtGui.QPushButton("Load") QtCore.QObject.connect(self.CreateButton, QtCore.SIGNAL('clicked()'), self.testCommand) self.mainLayout.addWidget(self.CreateButton) self.setLayout(self.mainLayout) def testCommand(self): global context bpy.ops.wm.link_append(context, directory="E:/Desktop/temp/fileCompare/scaffolding.blend/Group/", filename="myGroup", link=False) def launch(): global context context = bpy.context.copy() bpy.ops.wm.pyqt_event_loop() # register class stuff class PyQtEventLoop(bpy.types.Operator): bl_idname = "wm.pyqt_event_loop" bl_label = "PyQt Event Loop" _timer = None _window = None def execute(self, context): self._application = QtGui.QApplication.instance() if self._application is None: self._application = QtGui.QApplication(['blender']) self._eventLoop = QtCore.QEventLoop() self.window = ExampleQtWindow() self.window.show() return {'RUNNING_MODAL'} def register(): bpy.utils.register_class(PyQtEventLoop) def unregister(): bpy.utils.unregister_class(PyQtEventLoop) try: unregister() except: pass register()the code to execute the tutorial viewer in Blender is available here;http://www.pasteall.org/45859/python
most recent PyQT example from 23.07.2015 regarding Blender is this one;
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"you can install PyQt4 inside the site-package folder of the Blender directory and you'll be able to import and use it."
and additionally a link on where to install the PyQT stuff.
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/9118/how-install-pyside-pyqt-in-blender
As a noncoder I don´t know if that vaguely points into the right direction or is just nonsense for a Animation picker ?
holy mother...! you call that visual mess simple? looks like one would work twice as fast just selecting rig elements directly.
Anyway, regarding tools in Blender to make animator's lives easier, I've found also this (apologize in advance if this has been already posted here):
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And the thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?350402-ANIMAT-Widgetless-On-Model-Animation-in-Blender-UPDATE-1-13-Oct-2014
Giving the PyQt window a background image and using a custom layout to place the buttons on specific points along the image is totally supported. For this, a visual designer tool can be used:
http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/PyQt5/designer.html