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The State of Open Source 3D Modeling
gmueckl writes "Since Blender was released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modeling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the community and supporting organizations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on it have either been blocked or have failed in the past (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core, which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D, and Moonlight|3D. Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"
As much as people may hate Blender, the main advantage of the program is that it is there, and that most things work. Some parts are even great. Personally I happen to like the poly-workflow, which is very fast. The main problem with blender for most users is that it takes a while to learn, but once it's learnt, it has a very effective workflow.
I think that the OP is very optimistic when he sais that it takes only a few months to port everything (and the kitchensink) to another app, that is just impossible, even with open code.
I dont think blender code is that arcane, i know Tom was doing some rewriting, they are aware that the core needs updates and they are doing it, it just needs time. Game engine was coded again with a different engine, render path it hink got updated too.
It's easy to pick on the XML bit (though I don't understand why XML is so awesome it has to be used), but that's a pretty small demerit compared to all the major feature enhancement Blender has attained over the past few years.
l ender-243/
It's earned a fluid simulator. Particle effects have been dramatically improved, yafray integration was a huge improvement for rendering, materials can now be created with a node based system.. the list goes on and on. The feature enhancements that went into the latest point release is worth an essay all on their own:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/b
Blender stays afloat because it's seeing active development and is already a mature platform. People are used to the interface (one that newbies hate, but veterans fall in love with), and it runs on all three of the major operating systems.
I don't think an aging codebase is a critical flaw. Too often people think redesigning the wheel is a panacea for repairing a kludgy system, without realizing that all code projects fall prey to this at some point in their life. Sure we could rewrite Blender.. but to what end? It'd take another 5 years to get where we are now.
So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve?
/. until now.
Because the issue hasn't been posted to the front page of
This is not the greatest
There have been huge changes to Blender over time. For example, the physics engine in the game engine was replaced with a much better one. The original poster is apparently wound up about some XML import/export thing, which is minor. You can write Blender import/export filters in Python, and many such filters exist.
Blender has some problems, but converting its files to an XML format isn't one of them.
I dont't see any open source competitor for blender any time soon.
blender already has quite a lot of features, not to mention game engine and other tools.
plug the fact that it's light weight, fast and cross platform. (while maintaining the same UI everywhere.)
blender may have some old cruft every here and there.
but it doesn't really bother me.
so what do these are "not yet here" apps offer me?
Well instead of trying to match Blender, maybe it would be a good idea for them do do everything right that Blender does wrong.
But it doesn't matter anyway. Basically, the hype and bullshit surrounding the 3d modeling app market is already so saturated and misinformed, it makes a SNES vs. Genesis debate in the cafeteria in the 6th grade look like a congressional fact finding comittee. Almost anyone involved in 3d modeling as a hobby develops their own ideas about what is good and what is bad for their way of working. Most of the time, Open Source modeling apps fall in the "bad" column.
Blender's UI is the Emacs of the 3D Modelling world, it's got a steep learning curve but when you get it(in the three or so years it'll take), boy will you be marginally productive.
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/dublinclontarf
...if the author included the correct URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/k3d/
I looked at K3D for a bit...one of the most awesome features I saw was the record/playback used for tutorials. The K3D interface, at the time, also needed some work. However, over the last couple of years, I see it has come quite a ways as well. I think there's room for both- they both use different approaches, and will appeal to different kinds of users. K3D needs something to boost its profile - Blender had the Orange project, as well is the rich history that went with going commercial, and then eventually being released as an open-source project after collecting donations from users over a very short period of time.
Blender also had quite the community - where's the K3D community? Where is that being nurtured/grown?
your question isn't so much a question as much as it is whinging... maya and lightwave and studiomax are also showing their age based on a mature code base, but consistency in the user experience, incorporating improvements into the base application without jepordizing usability are stilll very important. and just as these applications have improved over the years, so has blender. i haven't seen alot of improvements with AOI...
Blender probably "owns" the open source 3D graphical modeling scene because it's the most complete, full fledged, and the most mature of all the applications out there, with the exception of POVray. aside from blender(combined with yafray), the only other apps i use(and would consider recommending) would be wings3d(currently testing sunflow). typically i'll start with wings, import into blender, and use yafray for rendering. this combo seems to work well, wings is superior to blender in certain types of modelling. i don't think the other apps you mentioned play well with other apps, maybe that's the problem...
i've tried many of the OSS 3D apps out there(including AOI, have not tried k3d or moonlight thou) and the problem was often that the user interface was clumsy, the code was only available on one platform(i.e. moray), or the project was not mature enough for real work.
blender is'nt the easiest 3d app to work with, but then again 3d modelling in and of itself is not an easy task. since this discussion is about 3d modellers, it's important that an artist is able to navigate, switch tools, and move around an application in as smooth and fluid like as possible. it might seem like an oxymoron, but it is possible to do this in wings and blender(i never thought it would be). blender especially is a steep curve application, but once you get to know the most basic commands of edge/vector/face selection, creation and editing of primitives and vertices, things start moving quite well. there is a lot of thought that went into both blender and wings UI to make them easy to use. can you say that about k3d/aoi/moonlight?
you complain about the underlying architecture, but it's not the code that a user is interfacing with, and the interface is what is driving a highly graphical app like blender. it helps when architecture and UI are both well conceived.
does that answer your question(s)?
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Blender isn't well thought out - it's evolved. The user interface is still pretty terrible. Python scripting totally sucks - the interfaces change with every release (often in ways that break existing script), are very poorly documented and yet never seem to keep up with the functionality in the core package. The code base is a terrible mess. People I know who have wished to write significant additions to blender's core have found their work rejected.
But the problem is that it's just barely good enough - such that developers simply don't feel it worth the (not inconsiderable) effort to do something truly world-class to replace it. Artists eventually learn it's weirdnesses.
If blender mysteriously vanished overnight, we'd be in a terrible state for the next year - but what would emerge as a result would be a hundred times better.
Tricky.
www.sjbaker.org
Well, all I can say is that Blender rocks. It has its unique UI, which is fine for me, but maybe instead of thinking about core code, how about making UI derivatives without messing with the functions? As I said, I like the UI but others may not. But what I think that is missing from the open-source scene is something so crucial, I can't do but wonder why it doesn't exist: an OPEN-SOURCE PARAMETRIC 3D MODELLER! Please!!!!! I'm an Industrial Designer and I'm obliged to have Microsuffer Winblowz just because of one single type of program. I wish I could go all OSS, but this is my main brake. So I ask you, Slashdotters! Who's willing to help and start a OSS Parametric Modelling program? (like Solidworks, Alibre, Pro/Engineer, etc.) Thank you for your attention!
This is a fairly timely post for me. A few weeks ago I was interested in creating some fairly simple 3D objects, the first piece of software I tried was Blender 3D. After about a night's work of playing around with Blender I still couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to. A few days later, I came across Art of Illusion, and within an hour I was able to create what I wanted. It may be that Blender may be better for the more experienced user but Art of Illusion was a lot more intuitive and productive for the casual user.
I would disagree, you can't sit a grandma down and have her learn 3DS max in a few minutes, nor can you with Maya either. It's just a different interface. With each release more keyboard-only commands are now mapped to menu entries. If you watch "pro" users of 3DS max and Maya you'll notice they use keyboard shortcuts like crazy.
- Each of them: great, there are three projects offering equivalent functionality, each hoping to supplant the current favorite? And which, pray thee, should an experienced developer contribute to? "Any of them"? --- bzzt, wrong answer. You're asking somebody to contribute when there is a 2 in 3 chance the contribution will be dead code when one of these emerges as a favorite? A born-into-money aristorcrat who doesn't have to make his own living can do that; the rest of us have more limited time and can't. Hint: companies pay product managers quite a bit to keep developers from doing wasted work, partly to avoid overhead but partly because wasting a developer's work is the fastest way to kill any enthusiasm. Picking one option (even if it's wrong) is better than indecisiveness. And if you truly think multiple options are the best, then find a way for them to coexist (pluggable rendering cores) instead of killing each other off.
- modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful: all of these are in the eye of the beholder. But here's an opportunity to defend yourself: if these new architectures are that much more powerful, it must be possible to implement the blender architecture with them. Which happens to be a sane migration path, instead of the throw-away-anything-old not-invented-here approach of an entirely new project. Blender is open source: fork it and insert the new architecture, instead of griping about how somebody else should do something better. (I know full well this isn't as simple as I'm making it out to sound. But you know full well these new architectures aren't unambiguously better than the old.)
- could match Blender in a couple of months' time: such a confident development-time prediction! Anyone with predictions that solid should be administrator of a project already! Now that I'm done being sarcastic, "a couple of months" is totally unrealistic. Every additional developer needs ~1 month to get up to speed on a new codebase (and understand what Blender does), another X months to implement the new functionality to match Blender, and 2X months to work the bugs out of the new functionality. Wine has been a few months from being usable for general apps for years; Gnome has been a few months and a few developers from being able to replace Windows for years; Windows has been a few months from being bug-free for a decade.
I don't mean to degrade the whole idea of finding something better than Blender. It's a fantastic goal, advances the state-of-the-art, and all sorts of other good things. I do dispute the misrepresentation of the ease with which it can be done: if it were even a tenth that easy, it would already be done.Developers are willing to put up with the arcane code base because (1) it works, (2) it's Good Enough, which means anything newer has to overcome the training / usability barriers associated with switching, and (3) the newer options are not unambiguously "better". Remember: if app Bar (Blender) is already the standard, app Foo (these alternatives) not only has to be better for someone just starting, but also has to be better for an experienced user of Bar.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Any modeler/artist worth their salt is using mostly key shortcuts - at least to enable a tool. It's simply too inefficient to use the mouse to perform an action. With there being more and more modeling tools than ever before, it can simply be too cluttered to have everything on screen, which means navigating through various tabs/menus/etc. In modo** and Maya, I'm enabling every tool I use with a click of a key, a mouse gesture, etc. That said, if Blender wants to appeal to more newbie hobbyists, it should have a decent GUI that'll let them get started. (Disclaimer, I haven't used Blender in years, so I'm saying this on what you said about the need to learn keyboard shortcuts)
**I'd like to see a freeware/OSS project take the approach Luxology is taking with modo. First, they baked out the modeler end of the app in the first release. Then in the second major release we got a render engine and texturing/painting tools (and of course refinements and improvements to the modeling end of things). Presumably, in the third major release we'll get animation (and other improvements to modeling and texturing and rendering). I personally like this approach because instead of stretching yourself too thin focusing on everything at once, you start off by getting the basics of each "component" right. This seems to be a result of their Nexus core, which from what I gather is a developmental platform, where they can "bake" out various versions of the program.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I have attempted to use K3D and blender, and still play about with them. Blender is a nice looking interface, but it is daunting and has a tall learning curve. It uses massively complicated menus and certainly to someone who was taught on 3DS MAX a difficult interface and no foreseeable improvement to MAX from the get go. K3D, however, I liked. It has a simple interface, and its tree set-up for objects is a good way to edit and change objects settings. The only problem that I could see with this program was that the interface looked old and felt cluttered even on the 21inch screen I was using. I would hope that developers could look at K3D more and develop it further, as I believe it has the potential to rival 3DS MAX, Maya and Blender
Thanks,
Badspyro
Their main problem is the interface, which they are attempting to fix IIRC.
Just do the modeling with Wings 3D, or whatever you happen to like, and do the rest with Blender. It's a very capable piece of software.
And many artists use many applications to do their work, for example, they could use Modo for modeling, Lightwave for rendering, etc. So it would be perfectly normal if you use Wings for the modeling, some other application for animation, Blender for rendering, etc. This way, you are using the parts you think are better, or you are more comfortable with, from each application.
Blender has a rather unintuitive interface and most of the documentation is not that great. Fortunately I came across this excellent tutorial . The file is a pdf. It took me about a month of evenings and weekends, but once I was through the tutorial I was quite comfortable with the interface. It is really amazing what you can do with Blender once you get over the learning curve.
Inkscape is making moves toward 3d. Just being able to produce a wireframe in Inkscape would take much of the pain out of using Blender. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Su mmer_Of_Code#3D_Tool IMHO Blender and the deranged robot of the same name have a lot in common.
My daughter just attended a seminar where the UI expert posited the three Es. Ease of use, ease of remembering and something else that translated as power. The way the presenter described it, you couldn't have all three. Bullroar. A good program is one that I can use intuitively. If I am going to use the program a lot, there are shortcuts available. For instance, my students can get something to work with menus and the mouse. I can do the same thing two or three times as fast from the keyboard. I guess the thing is that a decent program has more than one possible UI.
If you use software as a tool in your work, engineering, modeling, etc, you know shortcuts are necessary, even gaming needs shortcuts to be efficient, your not gonna win on a multiplayer starcraft game using only your mouse.
If you want a nice natural intuitive modeler, look no further than Wings 3d:
Wings3D
It has some strange dependencies, but you might be able to find a precompiled version for your platform. (It's in Gentoo's portage for example).
Indeed. I use modo and Silo for modeling hard surfaced objects, and rendering in modo or Maya (via Mental Ray). Then there's sculpting specific apps like Mudbox and ZBrush (which also does texturing).
You'll rarely, if ever, find a studio using one program. Certainely none of the bigger ones, and I don't even know of any smaller studios that rely on one piece of software for all their needs. For the hobbyist though, this isn't always a viable option due to the costs associated with some of the software.
Modeling especially, seems to be segmented. Model a base mesh in modo/Silo, bring it into ZBrush/Mudbox for sculpting, rebuilding topology in modo or Silo again, and then bringing it all together into Maya/XSI/3DS/LW/etc.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
This is to all those people who claim that you just have to learn to use Blenders user interface: My question really was initially not that much about the user interface, but the user interface really is at the core of the problem, but not in the way you probably expect.
The alternative applications that I have pointed out are really designed for a job. They adhere to basic MVC patterns and whatever else you would expect from such a big application. These patterns really are a big advantage when it comes down to coding stuff. Blender on the other hand has a "user interface driven design", as Ton once said. And this term fits well: the user interface - and I almost literally mean the buttons on screen and whatever event handling that is attached to it - are the only glue that keeps everything together. So when you talk about the user interface you also talk about Blender's internals. There is not much of an abstraction between the user interface and the data that is manipulated. So the bottom line is that any change to Blender's user interface is a change to Blender's design.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
Dont forget that Blender came from professional roots. NeoGeo actually USED this software for their work, back when it was purely internal.
Most everyone else is coming from a hobbiest viewpoint. and are most always doomed to stay there, if they manage to survive at all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Kdawson submitted some anti-Blender tirade written by gmueckl. Fair enough, the guy has a right to his opinion.
I want to check it out so I go to the never-changing site of AoI and look at the gallery. Well, maybe they keep their best stuff somewhere else....That stuff has been there forever.
Next I go to K-3D, fondly remembering the build-in tutorials in the 'old' K-3D, the one before the never-ending refactor. Site doesn't load.
Head over to Moonlight3D. Hey, I remember that from about 10 year ago! Sad story: guys write Moonlight (closed source) Later they come up with Moonlight Atelier. Loads better but still closed source. (Linuxgraphics.fr had a nice Moonlight section) They open source the old code base, lose interest in Atelier and that's it. End of story. OK, so some guys decide to try to revive the old codebase, did some hacks and changes. Project died. This seems to be the legacy. Go look at news. Hey! Who's that posting there? It's our old friend gmueckl! So the anti-Blender tirade looks like a serious bout of jealousy to me...
If that is the competition Blender has, I suspect it'll be on top for quite a bit longer.... Just compare development pace, feature set, support (2 modern Blender books with a third one on order), roadmap.
Tablets are (IMO) a must for sculpting and texturing, but I don't like them for hard surface style modeling. I'm more comfortable using a keyboard for hotkeys than the programmable buttons on the Wacoms. I also have a wider range of keys available for assigning shortcuts to via the keyboard as opposed to the programmable buttons on the Wacoms. I also like to keep my hands on the keyboard because I tend to keep things very organized, and that requires naming/typing (material names, layer names) things. Not to mention I'm often inputing specific values (moving someting .222 units over, etc). Some people prefer modeling with their tablets, but I don't know anyone who relies solely on their tablet for everything. Usually, the tablet just replaces the mouse, not the mouse AND keyboard.
As far as multiple monitors, I generally work almost exclusively on a single widescreen monitor, sometimes moving preview render windows over to the secondary monitor. Modeling IMO benefits more from a single, larger monitor than two seperate displays - especially when I can get rid of tool tabs (by using hotkeys) and enlarge the 3D viewport.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
As far as I can tell K3D and Moonlight haven't moved an inch in the last 5 years. They both look like students summer projects to me.
Blender has weedy parts in its codebase, everyone knows that. Any programm this complex and mature has those. But they are being replaced fast and thouroughly by a thriving core team lead by the founder of Blender. Blender runs out of the box on 7 plattforms and has a featureset that closely competes with current topline commercial tools. Try to catch up on that alone 'in a few months' Mr. Smartass. Blender is responisble for the recent price drops in the 3D tool industry alone and when it eventually fully supports Renderman yet some toolmakers are going to have to redo their businessmodel big time.
The usual UI bickering is bogus aswell. Apart from being just as hard to learn as any tool of same capabilities, blenders UI has been comletely OpenGL accelerated from the begining - one of the things it's unique in iirc. Blender's learning curve is steep, as with any high-end 3D tool without a stack of books. But with the amount of material and books available on the web for free nowadays makes this learning curve not nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. The featureset is breathtaking and has commercial providers such as Newtek struggling to catch up in some areas (notice the recent addition of an improrved node editor to Lightwave 9 - nothing but a response to Blenders node editor). Sidenote: I own a professional licence of LW 8, a commercial licence of Blender (from the NaN days) *and* use Blender since back in the days of 1.8. I haven't updated to LW 9 for the very reason that Blender 2.43, a few little things aside, offers everything professional 3D needs. And then some - an full-blown integrated compositor for instance.
Blender is as mature and developed as any open source project could wish for. As *any* software project could wish for actually. Features and improvement are being added on a regular basis and it's fully backwards compliant with any blender file, and it's professional roots not only show but have become more and more visible.
Bottom line: The submitter of the above article either doesn't know what he is talking about or is a troll. Or both.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Some guy has been working pretty hard on a new 3D solid modeling CAD program over the past few months called avoCADo. It is geared more towards 3D CAD engineering and design, but I thought it deserved mentioning. Does avoCADo have potential? or is it just another modeling program doomed to sinking in the sea of open source 3D apps? http://avocado-cad.sourceforge.net/
My main three complaints, as a new user, were that:
- Mouse gestures suck and should be disabled by default.
- Mouse gestures suck and there should be a WAY to disable them at all.
- The widgets are crude to the point of crying, and it's hard to manipulate things using them or get a bearing from them.
As far as 3d goes, it's very very powerful. As powerful as the commercial apps in most respects. Certainly, unless you're working for Pixar or Blizzard, it has everything you need, and then some. You tend to specialize in 3d work anyway, learning to model machines or humans, or monsters, or being an excellent animator, or kicking butt at textures and/or lighting. You tend to learn one method of modeling as your main method. And you most definitely get picky about which suite you're using. The point is, few people actually use more than the smallest subset of the suite to do their jobs. You don't really need 98% of what a 3D suite is capable of. And so, even though there are a few things you might not have in Blender that you have in Max or Maya, by the time you get to that point where you actually would feel the lack of them, you'll likely already have them. Blender is, after all, actively developed.Honestly, the primary reason Blender doesn't have a larger following in the industry is momentum. Learning a 3D suite is a task comparable to learning another language. Most people don't have the time or will to do that.
For anyone wanting to learn 3D, brace your shoulders and push past the month or two it will take to feel comfortable with Blender. If you don't have what it takes to learn Blender, you're going nowhere in 3D anyway. And you'll find that, whiz-banginess aside, Blender can do what Max can do. And in my opinion, it's faster.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Well, I *am* a 3D professional, and what you are saying is bull. 3D applications are enormously complex and there is no way in hell anyone could remember all the shortcuts you need. A good 3D app should allow you to work on it without having to commit all of its UI to memory. I work mainly with 3DS max where you have about 30 separate things you can do just with editing vertices, which is just one out of four different ways of editing meshes, which is just one out of 40 something possible mesh object modifiers, and mesh objects are but one of many types of objects, and this is just modeling, there's also animation, rigging, lighting and rendering. Do you think I remember all of it? Hell no. But 3DSmax helps me by being layed out in a logical manner so I know where to search for what I need, and it lets me configure the UI so I can have icons for the most common tasks. I do use about 15-20 keyboard shortcuts, but being so complex, you can't possibly map even 5% of a 3D app's functionality to the keyboard and expect to remember all of it. And this is where the graphical UI comes in, and believe me, 3DSmax and Maya artists spend a LOT of time just setting up the interface and sometimes even creating their own menus and drawing their own custom icons. The good news is that the developers of Blender are aware of it and are going to address those issues in version 2.50. Blender has made great strides in its UI recently, and more is to come soon. I'm afraid this article is just going to cause developer's time and effort to be wasted on other less developed projects, when they should be volunteering to help with Blender's UI coding.
Perhaps he's hoping to drive traffic to his empty user forum which has all of 20 posts.
Gmueckl can say anything he wants about Blender, but he should do so with full discosure. I think this story should be amended to reflects the bias of the story submitter.
Have you actually looked at blender's code? I haven't seen it in about 18 months, but when I did look through it, interested in adding a feature, it turned out to be a complete mess. I haven't read the post of the person you're replying to, but (s)he might have said "It started to outgrow itself", because it's obvious that the code has had many things tacked on wherever it works, rather than through a cyclic (re)design-document-implement-test-release process.
For instance, the feature I was planning to add was video codec support for input (sequencer, textures, etc.) and output (sequencer, rendering). Now, importing/saving video is essentially a process of loading and saving frames, and there were other video APIs already used in blender on other platforms, such as quicktime on OS X, and directshow (or whatever it's actually using) on Windows. In well-designed code, it would basically be a matter of finding the video modules, copying one, cutting out the quicktime/dshow stuff from the video setup/save frame/load frame methods, and implementing the equivalent methods using the gstreamer API instead. Obviously, it's never going to be quite THAT simple, but it can and should be close.
I looked into the code for doing this, and it was a total mess: the code to output one video format was spread over many files, and the UI stuff (output file type selection, etc.) was spread over some more.
The UI stuff should have been easy, too. If you look at the plugin system of something like 3D Studio Max (or, indeed, K-3D), it's obvious that plugins can create their own "property pages", which just hook into the interface, presenting any new options that plugin might want to offer the user. In blender, I knew this wasn't the case (as plugins tended to have horrible, inconsistent UIs). That was understandable though, as work was actively going on to improve the UI stuff. Note that this still hasn't completed, however: blender 5 is going to work on this again, after blender 3 was supposed to be focused on sorting it out! I've no doubt that the blender coders work hard -- some of the improvements they make in short turnaround times is amazing. BUT, this either means that the code is a mess because things like UI API improvements take so long, or that the code is a mess because lots of things are done quickly without long-term design considerations.
Speaking architecturally, I, for one, would be very happy to see K-3D win out over blender. For the moment though, blender has the huge advantage --- actually being nice to model in (at least up to a certain complexity level, and if you don't need procedural modelling too much). Everything else though... plugin support, material editing, rendering quality, distributed rendering support, video IO, integration with other apps, basic interface usability and discoverability, is seriously hampered by the code, imho.
K-3D *is* a parametric modeller. Blender, in fact, is gaining parametric features, slowly. However, k-3d is quite fully-fledged, with parameters that take inputs from and provide output to other nodes, etc. It looks like a great solution, except... well, it still feels very awkward to model with, for some reason. Maybe I just haven't given it enough of a chance yet. Also, the UI in K-3D has a perfect structure, but is much to space-consuming (see how the node properties panel/toolbar needs around a third of a 1024 pixel-wide screen to show all the widgets at once, for instance!)
p.s.: 3DS Max (at least) and Maya (I think) are also parametric -- it's not just Pro/E etc. Also, don't forget that high-level CAD apps are available as Open Source for Linux, if not as Free Software.