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Blender Is GPL
BartV writes with a low-key snippet from the new blender.org: ""Today, Sunday oct 13, 2002, we've launched the Blender sources as GNU GPL to the Internet. Blender has become Free Software forever!" This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware; read some of our previous postings about Blender to follow the story from idea to release.
Heh, that's very funny. I remember I tried an iMac once. I can't do absolutely anything useful with it, and I've been using computers and Windows for years. I see lots of people talking about how intuitive is $GUI. That's a plain lie. Any GUI requires getting used to it. If a really intuitive one is ever made it will work by reading your mind.
"any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design"
Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT do what they need in a signifantly more efficient manner. As far as I care, all GUI's should be more difficult to use, people are too stupid as it is.
Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?
They have been designed with only one goal in mind. Workflow speed.
Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve.
This is becouse the time it takes you to learn the app is made up for in a matter of days when you actually use the app.
You cannot claim that people must understand the app when its about 3d software. This is becouse they are in themselfs very hard apps to use. So the people using them havto be very tech friendly. They should not have any problem learning the ui nomatter how hard it is.
The people that complain about the ui eather havent spent enough time learning it or quite simply doesnt have any buisness learning it in the first place.
If you are just using a 3d app to play with and create some cool graphics you might aswell use poser or bryce.
Blender is a tool designed for fast workflow, to be used in a team environment within a company.
Can you run complex real systems without any training? Could you drive a car intuitively? Play a saxophone intuitively?
Everything else in the world requires patience, practice and knowledge to operate. Why is it that people think extremely complex machines (computers) should/can be easy enough for any retard to use?
That being said I still hate the blender GUI. I tried in earnest for 3 or 4 hours to use it, didnt make any headway and said "Fuck this, im going back to rhino"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Huh? It's fast, it's efficient and it's easy on your fingers. How is that a bad thing? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
"Steep learning curve" does not make the UI fast. It makes it slow.
It means the interface takes some time to learn. Of course, if you haven't learned it yet and have to check the docs everytime you want to do something it will be slow. If you use the program often enough that you don't forget everything between every usage, spending some time to learn the interface properly is a great investment.
If you only edit text files once or twice a week, MS notepad is all you need. If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it. But as we all know, the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it's all learned.
So, vi and Blender suck for the casual user but are perfect for anyone who uses them a lot.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
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Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
I know it is always easier to just sit back and wait for others to do things. In this case make donations. I do not use Blender, I probably will not use it in the foreseeable future, but I might end up using free software that uses Blender. Anyways, thank you folks for the donations. Every one and all of them counted :-)
What is so horrendous about ALT+LMB????
Because there are combinations that involve the middle one.
For example, if you have a middle button (MMB), then the command may be Shift+MMB. Translated through the translation you get:
Shift+Alt+LMB
Two meta-keys at the same time is BAD DESIGN, except for something rare, like rebooting (well, it should be rare in a decent OS).
Table-ized A.I.
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
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- Classical music alternates frequently between very long notes (sometimes held across eight or nine measures) and very quick notes (sixteenths very frequently, occasionally thirty-seconds or faster). Representing both of those notes in a human-readable form, without changing your scale every measure and thereby negating the whole point, would be very difficult. If you try to avoid that by defining the standard measure width by the most cramped measure, you're still in trouble because you'll end up with such long measures that you cannot easily guage the distance of your notes and therefore also negate the value of the system. In other words, you'll have to add other notations to your staff until you negate the benefit which you are proposing.
- Your solution works great for computer, but I want you to try to tell musicians who notate pieces (which would be any professional musician anywhere and any half-decent music student as well) that they should bring a ruler to practice to ensure their notes are the proper width. There is a major value to our current system, which is I can do it with an unsteady hand and a pencil on sheet music propped in front of me at 45 degrees. With your system I'd have to lay it flat, take out a ruler, figure out how wide the measures were, divide that width by the width of the note I wanted to draw, line that note up with the end of the previous note, and then draw the right length. I fail to see this catching on.
There are other problems with your system too--for example, what happened to rests?--but quite frankly I think the above two complaints are sufficient enough.