Slashdot Mirror
Blender Compared To the Major 3D Applications
LetterRip writes "Recently TDT 3D published a comparison of the major 3D digital content creation applications such as Maya, 3DS Max, and XSI, and of course Blender. Blender came out surprisingly well, although it definitely still has some weaknesses."
I've 'worked' with 3d max, cinema4d and Blender.
Cinema4d gets my vote, hands down. Great usability and very fast rendering.
Blender talks the talk, but damn learn to walk and stop crawling.
I've always thought Blender to be a solid but completely useless application because for whatever reason, the developers created the most heinous god aweful UI known to man. It's a freakin eyebleeding headache that leaves one happily shelling out the hundreds or thousands of Dollars for a modelor with a usable GUI.
It's a shame. Because Blender could be a contender, but since the developers live in their own little world with the attitidude that their app is made for a "certain group of people and not everyone", the application is basically a sick joke. If you're looking for a free 3D package and don't care how painful it is to use it, Blender might be for you. Otherwise, go with Maya or Lightwave. Also, Modo is a good modeler with a great UI, if you just want to model and not animate/render.
I haven't RTFA yet, so I have a question: how many times they've used the word painful in the article?
"Blender came out surprisingly well"
Not surprisingly at all on a pro open source site...
First off, the name is a tad misleading, it's more "Major 3D Applications Comparison (including Blender)" as opposed to a focused against Blender - but that can be easily forgiven. What is good is that the author has used a wide range of industry standard tools (Maya, 3ds max and Lightwave etc) in everyday tasks, so it's not a fanboy style review where the outcome was and always would be 'Blender best'.
Blender is maturing well, especially considering if you look at the progress they've made since the code was first open sourced, and I'm confident that they will be able to continue this progress in to the future. I won't comment on the feature to feature comparison, I will just reiterate what the author said early on in the article - it's the artist not the tools - and in this case the an open source and free tool is sufficient to create some stunning art. Check out Elephant's Dream to see an example.
And my one note to those commenting later - the interface. Many people complain about the interface, how it's difficult to learn. Unfortunately, many of these people are trying to 'learn 3D' over the weekend - and I'm sorry, that won't happen, regardless of the package. To become truly proficient in any 3D software package takes a long time.
Overall however, I'm glad that Blender has progressed so well, and look forward to seeing it's progress in the future. Without it I would never have begun my exploration into 3D at all.I also see many people compare the UI disaster to that of GIMP - I don't think that's really an accurate comparison. Read reviews of people who have actually mastered the Blender UI and they will confess that once learned it is very effective. The author in the article also states this, with him saying that it's a "Fast workflow, (but) can be more intuitive".
I'm not saying the Blender user interface is perfect, or that improvement can't be made, merely that even in its current state, once learned and mastered it is a powerful tool.
Comparison lists like this are very misleading. The devil is in the details. It's not about how many buzzword columns an app can check, it's about whether the app has had a userbase that has thrashed the software through years and years of real production work and had the software evolve into a powerful tool. It's very easy to add a feature in a 3D app. Most interested hobbiest weekend coders could whip up most functions found in any given 3D app. Whether that feature is production ready is another story. Going by the list it would seem that something like Blender of C4D is on a par with Maya and Max. They're not. They don't have the huge in-depth expert user communities and the benefit of thousands of users pushing them to the limit day in and day out. If you're choosing a 3D app, talk to some real 3D artists who have been in the industry for years and depend on their 3D application system for their living. Don't compare checkbox lists.
Some people don't like blender's UI like some people don't like vi.
Once you spend the time (say a day or two) it's really quick and productive. The UI is a major asset.
I don't therefore I'm not.
"LightWave downside's is an old and slow splitted interface and a bit confuse menu / parameters."
/. For something to read while I was waiting for my lightwave test render to finish, and heres an article on /. About modeling programs. What are the odds?)
Just because you dont understand the setup, doesnt mean its broken. Not everyone works on one monitor these days. Lightwaves split between modeler and renderer is a great setup to keep your scenes properly separated from your models. If you're working on a single static scene, yeah, it's kind of clunky. But if you're working on multiple scenes with dozens of different models, the setup is perfect.
I've always been partial to LW's insanely customizable interface and overall very clean look. It makes for a somewhat steep learning curve, at first, but Maya's interface always looked kind of toyish to me (And yes, I am fully aware that Maya is a much better character modeling system than LW.)
(Wow, I fired up
It's nice to know Blender is good, but on some PCs it doesn't work correctly, including mine: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/blender/+bug/109217 :(
Maybe it's just an ATI driver problem, but I don't understand what kind of interface they are using so that it doesn't work at all while all kinds of 3D games and simple GTK/QT apps work well...
pushing polygons is wrong. It's a short term solution to a long term problem. Keeping to a poly budget is grunt work that should be done by the tool not by the artist. Programmers who think bitrot is bad should have a look at the "asset rot" of 3d models. The deprecation of graphics assets is so fast that it's a stretch to use the word "asset" to refer to them at all. A character model from a AAA title from six months ago has some value, to B quality games, but mostly none of them are reused.
For 3d models to earn their name as "assets" they need to be created with infinite resolution. This is not hard. Constructive Solid Geometry is a well understood technique for modeling and is typically used in CAD applications. An object described even at what would be considered a course level of detail of typical CSG modeling is orders of magnitude higher resolution than the typical game model. What's more, they can be incrementally improved, whereas the b-rep that is typical for a game model today is a one shot affair.
Today, the vast majority of CSG models are created for raytracing architectures which, although they give stunning results, are too slow for realtime applications such as games. Even the attempts to create realtime raytracing systems are aimed at rendering b-reps because of the opportunity to perform an acceleration stage which greatly reduces the scene complexity. B-reps are a win for realtime applications, but just because your application requires a b-rep doesn't mean artists need to get their hands dirty pushing polygons.
Two solutions exist which can render CSG models in realtime.
The image-based rendering algorithms with implementations (such as OpenCSG) which take advantage of z-buffer and stencil-buffer hardware in popular GPU cards. The image-based systems are more compatible than raytracing with the current 3d graphics rendering state of the art, but still require intricacies to integrate that have prevented them from appearing on the market.
The other option is the automatic generation of a b-rep from a CSG model. This has the advantage that it requires no change to the 3d graphics rendering in games and the algorithm can be parametrically tuned to produce b-reps that are fast for different applications. For example, the same CSG model can be used to generate b-reps of different Level Of Detail for when the object is close up vs far away, or for pre-rendered applications such as cut scenes or trailers.
It just happens to be really hard.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Nope, I've had this issue crop up on various systems of mine, none of which had ATI video cards (all NVidia with the accelerated proprietary driver). However, to be fair I haven't plugged at Blender in about the last half-year, so I'm not sure if the issue is current or not on NVidia cards.
I use 3DS Max and Blender myself and I definitely have to say Blender's UI is horrible and I mean that. I don't know what the developers are thinking, but damn they need serious help in making that user interface more friendly. The only time a I use Blender is for when I do some modeling and art for open source games and mods that have and export function for Blender (such as xmesh in Vega Strike). Other than that its 3dS max for me, though from what I've seen Maya is great too. Lightwave used to be a great program, but it seems to have performed worse in this comparison than I'd have thought.
Again, I can't stress enough what a pain Blender's UI is compared to these other programs. I normally try to recommend FOSS programs to people, but this is one of those programs I'd only recommend if the person couldn't afford one of the other programs here.
and of course the OSX version runs under X11, so that adds another level of unusability.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I think Blender's UI is very efficient, not friendly but efficent.
Its good that Blender is looked upon a viable option these days!
I've used 3DSMax and Blender extensively though learnt to be proficient in Maya.
Blender's interface is difficult at first but once learnt I found it more efficient for many tasks - especially rapid mesh-modeling. Moreso, I found Blender's interface much easier on the hands over long periods of working, namely because it prioritises keyboard useage over mouse, has one-key accessible menus (3DSMax has terrible problems here) and distributes mouse input over all three buttons. RSI is a real problem in 3D modeling/animation related work and it's here I think Blender has the one-up. Blender's many keyboard shortcuts need to be learnt for Blender to realise it's real capacity as a tool.
I say the best thing about Blender is its renderer. It has such a unique ethereal look.
Blenders interface is as good as vims or emacs. Impossible to guess, hard to learn but once you get there you will love it (and be quicker than with other more intuitive interfaces).
And mastering vim doesn't make you a good programmer - its just learning the tool you need to get the job done.
If you want to learn Blender get yourself a book and a few weeks time.
It's well over due for these applications to be put out to the pasture. They are at this point having a lot in common with a stalagmite in how the features have piled on drip by drip. And how many of them have elements that were in place when the product existed in the early Nineties? Blender is not one of the old farts but is particularly bad. Understanding how to use Blender is like understanding how to walk 2 miles with your pants stuffed around your ankles. There's a much better way to get there. There really are 3d packages out there that were created in this decade. Some of them are even only a couple of years old. It helps that their recent design takes into account the abilities 3d cards have today and also helps that they were actually designed before they were created. They are out there. Hopefully there are some new ones being designed now.
When Blender was finally ported to OS X, I gave it a try. The first thing I stumbled upon, was the lack of support for .eps or other '2D' postscript formats. To use a logo, I had to import it as a pixel image and trace it by hand.
How can it ever be a serious competitor without such basic functions?
... the fact is, Maya's UI sucks. 3d Studio's UI sucks. Power Animator's UI sucks. Cinema 4d's UI sucks. Rhino's UI sucks. Nendo's UI sucks. Silo's UI sucks. Softimage's UI sucks. Lightwave's UI sucks. ALL 3d application UIs suck ass until you get up on the learning curve, because all 3d applications do fundamental things differently.
I "grew up" with 3d Studio MAX - Maya, Rhino, etc. all make my brain BLEED - not just because they're Not MAX (the way The GIMP is Not Photoshop) but because they're Not MAX the way Emacs is Not Vi.* 3d is HARD, dammit - hard to code, hard to learn. I'm picking up Silo pretty fast, but mostly because Silo seems to make it a point to do intuitively a lot of really basic things that are a massive assraping pain-in-the-ass to do in 3d Studio MAX.
That said, I have only two complaints about blender.
1. The open/save dialogue (as has been said elsewhere) does suck a load of flaming ass. Weapons grade Anthrax ass.
2. Like almost all modern 3d apps, you need a three button scroll-wheeled mouse to get ANY use out of the app at all. Which makes the app unuseable if you're using an input device, with, say... two buttons. While that's all fine and good, it ought to be fairly trivial to poll the bus, check for pointing devices, and pop up a nice little "FOR OPTIMAL USE PLZ ATTACH 3-BUTTON SCROLLWHEEL THINGER. [DIAGRAM WITH FUNCTIONS OUTLINED]" if inadequate hardware is detected. If Blender did this, it would put it well ahead of commercial apps for first-impression useability.
* Pick any two apps that generate the same results but go about it using completely contradictory and counterintuitive methods. Same principle.
I looked at the comparison table, but couldn't figure out whether "Good" or "Robust" was a higher score...
Just because you can learn to use a harder system, doesn't mean it isn't harder. Since car analogies are popular let's go for another one: The difference between a stick and an automatic. I drive a stick, always have, always will if I can get away with it. I'm an ace at it, never causes me any problems. I don't even think about it, I just do it. However there is no way I can argue that it isn't harder than driving an automatic. There is simply more to do, more to learn, and I remember how painful learning to drive on a stick was. It certainly isn't an unusable or unlearnable system, and once you've learned it well you are plenty efficient with it, but it is not as easy as an automatic.
Well same deal with interface. Not all choices are arbitrary, it isn't as though all UIs are created equal. There really are things that make it easier and things that make it harder. Just because you spent the time learning it and now don't have a problem, doesn't mean it is easy.
Also, some things are easier for computer people than non-technical people. I've seen many things that make assumptions in relation to a level of understanding of how computers work that if you lack that, you are really screwed. A good example would be regular expressions. If you understand how a finite state machine works, regular expressions are likely to be easy for you. I remember when I learned about them and as soon as I was shown the syntax, a light bulb went off. I found them quite easy, once told how they work, but then I'd been tinkering with FSMs before I knew that term. However a non-technical person could be hopelessly lost on them because they just don't understand the logic behind them.
Trying to defend bad UIs in OSS does no good for anyone. People don't want excuses and they certainly don't want to be told that it is their problem.
I'm an active blender's user. And i find the interface very productive too..like any other "real" blender user. However, we are in a big world and , yes, THERE IS other 3D apps over there.. People spent a lot of time learning these apps, and these apps tried to UNIFY their UI. Actually,If you do ctrl+c it does copy something . When you alt+mouse , the 3D view does something.. Well, not in blender. And that's the problem, and that's why the next version is all about the new CUSTOMISABLE UI :)
Take care of blender.. it's one of the best real open source projects actually.
congrats tom, you're a big guy !
Blenders UI is fine. I've been using it since 1.8 and the fact that it appears like a 3D version of Emacs is because a professional grade 3D programm is loaded with features. 3DSMax, Houdini and whatnot have a simular learning curve when it comes to the UI. Softimages UI sux big time - allways has - but it has top grade NLA tools. That's why professionals bite the bullet and learn how to use it. In the end it enhances their workflow greatly. Same with Blender.
... The only one I can think of right now is that scrolling in the button viewport pushed tabs out of view even if there's enough space for all to be shown. ... Not really a bug to get your pants wet about.
3D kits are *complicated* and so are their UIs. Get over it. The glitches Blender has in it's UI aren't nearly as bad as those of 3DSMax.
On the other hand, Blenders Workspace management is top of the line, unmatched by any other tool I know. And it's the only 3D package out there with a fully OpenGL accelerated UI. Watch Houdini or LW slowpocke into ready-to-use-mode to see what I mean.
That Blenders learning curve is steep has to do with its speed of developement and a lack of consistent documentation. A circumstance that is rapidly changing for the better right now.
Bottom line: If you want to learn a 3D tool - ANY 3D tool - expect to burn 6 months of time and up to 200$ on generic and special documentation while doing it. Blender is no exeption to that. If you think Softimage or Maya is easyer to use just because it costs north of 3000$, you're smoking crack.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Of course, TFA simply compared several 3D apps, with no specific focus on Blender. But a Slashdot post titled "A comparison of 3D apps" isn't a clear enough signal that it's time to whip on open source again. We need to have it mention Blender in the title, so that all the industry-paid asstroturfers can come flame down open source before the people get crazy ideas about rights to computing freedom in their heads.
If Blender was produced by Adobe, it would be hailed as the greatest invention since breathing.
Yes, it can! Here is the video that apple just stealthily loaded onto my iPhone...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI
I'll think twice about modding my iPhone again
Your post got me curious, so I fired up Blender and took a look in the Import menu. There I found an option called "Paths - (.svg, .ps, .eps, .ai, Gimp)", with a tooltip stating that it's still experimental. It certainly won't import every possible postscript file (nothing will, as they can be infinite), but it's there and has been around long enough to be in a release.
"fairly trivial to poll the bus, check for pointing devices" etc... really?
I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented, but as a programmer I'd say it's not at all trivial. Sometimes not even the hardware will tell you, as in the case of my PS/2-USB mouse adaptor, and for several of the systems Blender runs on scanning the hardware buses is well outside of a normal program's capabilities.
Blender was originally developed for 3-button mice as that was standard on SGI machines. As it was ported, support for two-button mice (Alt+left click, see info window) as well as scroll wheels was added. 3-button chording, as was used in entry buttons, was removed since it proved unnecessary.
I'll agree that three buttons and a scroll wheel are tremendously helpful, but I cannot agree with your claim that they're critical for "ANY use".
I'd like to know how many of you complaining are actual 3D artists (of some sort, be it pro/student/hobbyist) of even an intermediate skill level, who actually made an honest effort learning Blender. No, opening it up, finding your left and right mouse buttons swapped, then giving up and going back to your pirated copy of Maya doesn't count.
I _HAD_ to learn Blender for an animated short I worked on over the summer. I had about 9 months of 3ds max experience behind me, and grasping the basics in Blender took me less than a week, using Tony Mullen's book Introducing Character Animation with Blender as well as whatever tutorials could be found online. Yes, the documentation is sometimes lacking (nothing new there, considering it's free software), but that mostly applies to more advanced features (NLA editing, linking animation files together, stuff like that) where you end up having to discover many things by trial and error (which is horrible if you're working to a deadline to be sure). In my experience there's no shortage of resources targetting beginners though. Just don't expect to become a master sitting around reading tutorials -- the reason 3D graphics in general and animation in particular is hard is because IT IS HARD. And it's hard even after you've mastered whatever application you're using. Getting past the user interface is the easy part.
At this point the only thing I could say 3ds max is outright "better" at is pure modelling, since Blender lacks n-gons, and even then I'd rather use Blender because the interface is just that much nicer. I haven't really used hair and fur much in 3ds max, but my understanding is that it's a fair bit more advanced than what's currently in Blender as well, although you can expect that to change soon as the Peach project gets underway. Textures, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, compositing are all things I find much easier to do in Blender.
Yes, the Blender interface is "unintuitive" in the sense that it doesn't look like anything else, but compared to the hodgepodge that is max it's a shedload more consistent and logical. Once you grasp the basics (A selects/deselects all, B border selects, G moves, R rotates, S scales...) all 3D windows, node views, curve editors and what have you work exactly the same way which is just lovely. Add to that a completely customizable workspace layout and completely zoomable/pannable windows. I cannot tell you what a shock it was to go back to 3ds max and discover that to move and zoom the timeline you had to use combinations of ctrl, alt and mousebuttons, when you're used to doing all of that the same way you zoom and pan 3D windows: scrollwheel and middle mouse button. Or that the damn thing loads for a minute and a half even on a top of the line machine, while Blender takes about 2 seconds to start. :)
That's not to say the Blender interface couldn't be improved. The default keyboard shortcuts are WEIRD -- Ctrl-W to save, anyone? -- and more importantly, not customizable. The default view control options are pretty confusing as well if you're used to basically anything else ever, but these can at least be changed. I think changing the defaults (but making it easy for advanced users to change back) would go a long way towards improving Blender's image at large, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume that the Blender developers (who btw are excellent, pay attention to users needs and release new features at a mindboggling rate) aren't aware of these things.
(Struggling with the formatting here -- first post, sorry.)Autocad? We used to dream of having autocad.
In my very first job, we used a shark's tooth rubbed down to a small point with different types of granite. We used to dip the pen in ink that we used to make ourselves on our one day off per month out of ground up soot from the cave roof mixed with tree resin and boiled fish giblets. We wrote on dried antelope hide, if we could get it. Otherwise we used the skin off our own backs.
And that's how we liked it.
At the bottom of the
Does it have a decent ice-crusher ?
Theres just so many formats... just about every modeling software, game engine, etc has their own format.
Its a nightmare to convert between formats. And when you do finally get it to export, it looses the shader info, and you end up having to redo that... the scaling is often off by a factor of 10, I'm just glad I haven't had to try an convert joints/animations.
In the end its just easier to learn the program that is best at the file format your using...
The writer of the article doesn't appear to like lightwave because of its "Text" interface, but I've used it for over 6 years and thats one of the best things about it. Using labels instead of pictures for buttons makes it much easier to use a 3d package (in my opinion) because there are just so many tool in 3d packages, its impossible to make good, descriptive icons for them. Plus as someone already mentioned, lightwave's menu layout is extremely customizable. I've tried using blender and 3dsmax but I've never been able to get as comfortable with them as I am with lightwave.
Blender is an open-source application... the others are not. This is a *major* consideration and will create a distinct dichotomy in these kinds of comparisons.
The fact is that Blender is the premier open-source application for this type of work. Whether it is the premier application for this type of work is largely subjective.
Should you use text to italicize rather than em? <em> is for text you want to emphasize, rather than text you want to force a specific slant on.
As a longtime C4D user and professional CG artist/animator, I can tell you that only the newbiest of the newbies are using the core package by itself. The largest chunk of C4D users tend to be XL or Studio owners. Like I said, compare the apps at their loaded potential. The playing field, as most artists will tell you, gets a lot more even then.
How does C4D Studio actually stack up?
C4D will DOES have cloth, hair, dynamics, & advanced particles. Honestly, C4D's hair & thinking particles are some of the best tools in its category. MOCCA3's cloth tools, though still in need of an upgrade, are quite Syflex-like.
C4D DOES support 3rd party renderers. Actually, C4D currently offers support for FinalRender Stage-2, VRay, Maxwell, FryRender, & Renderman (via Maxon's plugin).
C4D DOES support advanced character animation functionality. In several real world cases, MOCCA3 smokes the hell out of Maya's character animation tools. For one thing, the C4D's advanced morph tools make Maya's look like a joke. Plus, rigging in Maya is largely based around MEL, which is a time consuming beeyatch. You can create an advanced rig that's in C4D r10's MOCCA3 that's just as powerful, flexible, and stable as anything in Maya... in 1/3 of the time. (To be fair, Maya's timeline/dopesheet is a bit more flexible and has greater XRef support.)
I don't know where the writer gets their info, but C4D DOES have loads of support in the film industry. C4D is used quite a lot for matte work, opening credits, texturing, and even modeling. Maya gets all of the credit because they get out all of the press releases. The fact is, no one app is used exclusively in a production. Multiple apps are used. I know for a fact that C4D has been used in Spider-Man 1, Spider-Man 2, Tomb Raider, Star Wars Episodes 1-3, Daredevil, King Arthur, Van Helsing, and literally tons of other big name summer flicks. I know for a fact that, although Maya claimed animation credits, C4D was the primary texturing AND modeling tool for the full length CG toon Open Season. Does the article tell you that? Nope.
I could go on and on, but I can tell that this article is poorly constructed & largely one-sided. Maya & Max will always look aces compared to the entry level versions of XSI or C4D. Of course, Maya's entry level is ~$1,000+ MORE than C4D or XSI's entry level, making the comparisons just so unfair and uneven. C4D & XSI's entry points feature different feature sets than those of Maya or Max at their lowest.
Again, FULLY LOADED, the horse races is MUCH more even. BTW, apart from being a pro CG artist/animator myself, I also moderator to several of the largest CG world communities on the net. I've also written nearly a dozen feature articles myself. THAT article is clown shoes, biased and skewed.
"If you ever wanted starting in 3D creation today, you probably need to know with which 3D applications package with you will feel better and which is the most suitable for you and business ?"
If you don't like blender (which I don't) here are another two cross-platform, GPL, alternatives:
K-3D: http://www.k-3d.org/
Art of Illusion: http://www.artofillusion.org/
I tried K-3D a couple of times, and though I *really* like it's pipelines and procedural modelling, I couldn't get rendering to work properly and experienced several crashes. Hence my current preference is for Art of Illusion.
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution. Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.
Whaaa?
X, Y, Z have been the standard for width, height and depth coordinates since long before the advent of 3D apps. Z buffering is used to determine which objects should be visible from each viewport (or camera), it's always distance from camera and not directly related to the global coordinates for the scene.
give much credibility to a writer that uses emotes in his charts.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I only reached the second paragraph of the article before the grammar made it too painful to continue reading.
The writer of the article doesn't seem to have English as a first language. Or maybe even as a second language. It's almost "All Your Base" bad.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ctrl + W is the same as Save in VI! W simply means Write. Now you know hopefully it'll be easier to remember!
The overall evaluation of the 3D packages using a Benjamin Franklin approach is a direction that I wish others would consider when evaluating software. I have tried it with openOffice, and MS's Office, this solution is mind vortex, but informative when comparing functionality. If I know how to do "X" in one package, then this table by TDT COULD show me how to do it in Blender; Bravo!
A lot of posts here are stating that the UI sucks as a matter of fact, but something that is subjective like ones opinion of a user interface is not indeed fact.
Other 3D applications can blite my shiney metal ass.
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution.
Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.
True, that - when switching between the two I often find myself wishing Gimp worked a bit more like Blender... And certainly there are a lot of people out there who wish Gimp worked more like Photoshop...
But this whole idea of "one paradigm to rule them all" doesn't work for me. I think it's premature. People are still figuring out better ways to do things in UIs and - here's the clincher for me - what's best is domain-specific. If you're writing, say, an e-mail application - there's a certain set of tasks that program has to do, and probably there's an expectation that lots of people with all kinds of different backgrounds will use the app. In that case, sure, familiar UI concepts are a strong asset. But even then, even in something as simple as e-mail, the emphasis on making the app "easy-to-learn" emphasizes things like hiding or removing lesser-used features, to simplify the interface.
But a 3-D modeler is a different beast. You don't expect everyone to learn 3-D modeling, not everybody needs or wants to - which is quite understandable due to various difficulties involved. (For instance, dealing with 3-D space but 2-D display and input, using a giant library of different modeling tools and techniques to create the desired effect, and even dealing with things like individual vertex placement, since the computer can't quite handle that on its own in "specialized" cases, like low-poly modeling or animation...) The task of 3-D mesh modeling is inherently complicated - at present, anyway. People, in general, aren't sculptors or model-makers. In any medium (clay, plastic, polygons, whatever) the process of learning to model isn't simply "how do I make this", but "how do I make this with these tools and materials?" So users of a 3-D modeling app have a considerably higher initial investment: this suggests a higher level of sophistication as well.
So, here's the thing about making the interface fast-to-use vs. easy-to-learn... How many times do you have to use a given function? How does that weigh against the one time you have to learn how to invoke it? Let's suppose, for instance, that I had a polygon model with "smoothing" turned on. (That is, smoothing via shading algorithms, like Phong or Gourad shading) - And I wanted to specify edges that would appear "sharp" - discontinuities in the "smooth" surface. Now, it may be simpler for me to find this functionality if it's laid out nicely in a button bar somewhere - and I honestly have no idea if Blender has such a button, since I use keystrokes for most functions like this... If this is a task I have to do lots and lots of times, it's worth my t
Bow-ties are cool.
I love open source software. Just thought I would get that out there but ease of use is one of the strengths of the closed source model.
Everyone talks about how you can make money on support with open source. With closed source every support call costs money.
It pays to make the UI so easy that people don't have to call or call often. With OpenSource the UI often stops at the, "It isn't pretty but it works stage".
I have heard that Blenders UI is much like vi and or emacs. Really steep learning curve but once you know it then it is very fast.
I have worked with Solid Works and Turbo Cad and I have to admit that I found Blenders UI really confusing. I managed to do a quick rendering of a model I imported for SolidWorks but it wasn't easy.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
http://www.ashlar.com/
http://www.pixels3d.com/
These programs have stunningly intuitive user interfaces.
Blender is great.
Runs on Linux.
It's free.
Been doing some stuff I thought impossible before but only with the help of a Brazilian Book.
CG is really a synthesis of sculpting, painting, film/photography, and programming.
Like sculpting, you need a firm handle of spacial conceptualization and perception. If you have a hard time visualizing the shape and curvature of something the human clavicle or the texture of a worn leather belt then you might have an equally hard time with CG. So much of what I do in CG boils down to, "Can I see it in my mind? Can I virtually 'feel' it on my fingertips?" In a lot of ways, it's like an actor asked to eat an imaginary chocolate bar. If he can't taste it then he can't fake it, at least not convincingly. If you're a good sculptor then there's a good chance that you'll be a good CG modeler. I can't draw to save my life (pencil woes), but I'm an excellent sculptor. That, for me, translates into an equal level of CG proficiency.
CG is also like painting. To texture and shade, you need a firm grasp of where your light sources are coming from, how the surface is absorbing your colors, composition, color juxtaposition, etc.. You don't necessarily have to be a good painter to do CG, but it certainly helps. Like anything else, I think that you can pick up texturing skills. The harder it is for you to grasp color/texture theory the harder it will be to grasp actual surfacing.
If you're into animation or complex stills then the similarities between film and photography should seem obvious. I'm not saying that you have to be great at either, but you should have the ability to observe. Good animation boils down to 50% observation and 50% perspiration. It's like that one friend who always knows what you're going to say before you open your mouth. Is it because he's psychic? Nah. He knows his subject and he knows how to read the subtle cues. That's all animation is. The longer you observe something the more you can understand the nuances of weight, balance, pacing, and so forth. That's why many animators keep mirrors and video cameras around. A good animator is also good at observation.
The LEAST of CG is programming. You may encounter the need to write a script now and then, but unless its your job you won't regularly encounter them.
Many people are under the misconception that CG is technical. It has technical aspects, but it is still art. There's no "Make Cool 3D" button. You don't have to be an engineer. Heck, some of the best CG artists I know are the least technically minded people. The best CG art is still made by those with an eye one the classic elements like space, composition, color, perspective, and so forth.
CG is just another tool. It's not different than a chisel, paintbrush, or pencil. Its there to help you get the ideas out. CG may shortcut some of the things that our forefathers grunted through, but its no an art form. If you struggle in CG then there's a good chance that you'll struggle with non-CG arts.
BTW, very little about that chart is factual. Having done CG for 18 years, I can tell you that that chart is very subjective. There are inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and biases all around. It is very much skewed toward the Autodesk end of the spectrum. There's a reason why the chart didn't compare all the apps at their NON-base levels. Maya & Max don't exactly rule without a fight when you've got XSI & C4D with their non-entry level (newbie friendly) models. The playing field is much more even then and far less happy for Blender users.
Autodesk really doesn't make entry level of Maya or Max. Not really. They make pro versions and studio versions. That's the real difference between Maya Complete and Maya limited. One supports the needs of a full studio. The other doesn't, at least not as much. There is no newbie version of Maya. The PLE doesn't count since you can
Saying that Blender compares favorably with other programs in a feature matrix is exactly what's wrong with its design process - they've completely screwed up the basics and focused on bells and whistles. It looks good on paper and crumbles to pieces in practice.
By "basics" I mean the things you do hundreds of times in a typical 3D session - selecting objects, moving them around, manipulating verts, moving the view. In MAX and Maya these operations are only ever one button press away. The workflow is set up so that if you have one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard, you never need to shift position for 99% of the common operations.
Blender on the other hand requires all kinds of SHIFT-CTRL contortions and strange bindings. Stuff that you want to be all in the same spot on the keyboard is scattered to the winds.
Blender *isn't* the vi or emacs of its space. Those programs are extensible enough that you can fit them to whatever paradigm you need for the task. Blender is GUI-based and locked into certain paradigms that are just fundamentally broken.
Here's a challenge to all you Blender lovers out there. I'll open MAX or Maya, you open Blender, and we'll agree to model something simple. I will do it faster than you, with the default bindings versus whatever custom thing you can whip up in Blender.
Why? Because Blender is designed by programmers who know nothing (or don't care) about UI design.
It may be a decent enough piece of software engineering but that doesn't mean squat to the thousands of people who have tried it and been turned away bewildered or disgusted (and likely chastised as inferior humans by its defenders). Ignoring the human interface component is exactly what keeps free software from taking over the world, time and time again.
Joke whizzing over 'Offtopic' mod's head duly noted.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
The one true failing of both Blender and GIMP is the UI. Someone had a real brainwave and built GIMPshop, a skin that makes GIMP look & act like Photoshop. Brilliant! Now people can get started using it immediately, and shift to its' native configuration when ready.
Why don't the Blender devs do the same thing? I would love to have a skin so I can use Blender instead of Unigraphics ($20K for a full seat!) A skin for the 3DS crowd, or the ACAD people, would have Blender in use in most offices by the end of the day!
If the UI is what is killing it, make it changeable!
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
I agree its different, but so is any other 3D application. Try comparing Truespace to 3DSmax for example.
Once you take the time needed, you can be quite productive. And yes, it takes TIME to do it, this is not something you can whip out in a weekend. This isnt MSpaint we are talking about.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's going to be pretty obvious to anyone that actually works in 3d that this article is a joke, and a tired one at that.
/. post, however, is that Blender achieved a decent standing in this comparison chart. If the credibility of this article hasn't been questioned enough to make you second guess that conclusion, I'd reiterate the case that Blender falls far behind the major 3d apps for several reasons. Most of these "wow" features are buggy, and would never hold up in a production environment. They are great in concept, and could be great in practice, but bug testing is not something that Blender's OS community seems to spend as much effort on, as opposed to implementing new bells and whistles. What good are new features if they are broken? The documentation for Blender is horrible, and this is only compounded by Blender's notorious alien interface. Again, I feel like this is a problem with it's OS development; no one seems to want to spend the time doing the "grunt" work of making some decent documentation. Overall, the features feel very tacked on and isolated, a far cry from the streamlined powerhouses that Blender competes with. Contrary to what some people are claiming, the UI is not Blender's biggest problem. People will adopt an alien UI if the payoff is large enough; take the case of Zbrush. Most production environments do not exist in a vacuum, with a single piece of software serving all production needs. They are hodgepodges of various 3d and 2d software, so it's not as though there isn't room for Blender to take a few seats in a studio. Blender just doesn't make itself easily admissible into this kind of environment, by continuing to focus on shoddy feature implementation as opposed to usability, performance, interface, documentation, and integration with other 3d/2d apps.
It gets a lot of things blatantly wrong; for instance, MentalRay is just as capable as Vray. It really depends on personal preference, speed, and skill level as to which one is prioritized in production. There is no such thing as the "killer" renderer, as their ups and down make them interchangeable, like the major 3d apps themselves. MentalRay has one advantage over Vray, Brazil, FinalRender, etc. in that it is integrated, from the ground up, into Max, Maya, and XSI. Learning this renderer will produce easily transferable knowledge into the other major apps.
Maya has fluids and cloth, and XSI has hair; they deceptively only compare base packages, without even mentioning that these options are available in their tiered pricing schemes. This is a huge omission in the case of Maya, because their Nucleus technology is absolutely jaw dropping. The "cloth" you get with XSI foundation is laughable, as Syflex Cloth (only available in XSI Essentials and up) is superior by far. How, then, Foundations got a "very good" rating in cloth, I don't know. 3dSMax does have limited compositing with Video Post, so it should have gotten the "Very Poor" or whatever, at least. XSI has some great compositing tools, but only with the more expensive versions.
Why have a rating for Nurbs (hardly ever used), but exclude a rating for poly modeling (the industry standard)? Furthermore, why isn't there a rating for "performance", or how often the software craps out? Also, how is it that Max, whose "top unique feature" is biped, only scored a "very good" in the animation tools category? Maya Paint FX/Artisan are two different features, and Artisan (3d sculpting) once was, but now is not unique. There is no way that the fluids you achieve in Blender and those you can achieve with XSI are even comparable in production environments, underlining that fact that most of these "ratings" are completely arbitrary. I could go on and on, but I think anyone reading this gets the point by now.
The point of the
I would really like to learn Blender. I own a full seat of Lightwave 7.5, but using it means booting into Windows, and Blender certainly seems like it should be able to do what I want. But actually using it is a pain (as so many others have said, the UI leaves a lot to be desired), and learning it is just as much of a pain. I bought the Blender 2.3 Guide -- yes, I really want to support the project -- but it's so poorly written, or so poorly translated, that it's effectively impossible to use.
Have they come out with a manual written in good, clear English? And who will give me a free copy in exchange for the useless manual I currently have?
I've tried Blender, Max, etc... and it's like they hired a five year old to design the interface, and then brought in a three year old as a contractor to do revisions. I for the live of me can't figure out how people are productive with this crap and given how much you pay for most of these programs, it's extra unforgivable. To date, the only 3-D program I can tolerate is AC3D. It's got a straight forward, intuitive interface and it's friggin' cheap. The only draw backs are you have to install POV for rendering, and it doesn't do animations.
Hello, :-)
:
:-)
cheers,
Ben (BSM3D)
I'm the Benoît Saint-Moulin (the badboy) who writed this article
First thanks to all for comments and email, I hope my article goal is reached : discuss about how improving softwares and what's can be offering us for our needs.
I'm CG technical artist and teacher in 3D College (HEAJ-Belgium) and try to stay independant into that's writed article. (sorry for my english...)
To writed this, take a long and painfull 12 months of works, I hope it's well understanded.
I read all comments, so here is few replies
- I'm not Pro Blender or not, I tried to stay indepedant into my article, I'm using Blender because there is powerful tools inside, not because it's free or not. As teacher / trainer I can say today industries interface use ""standard"" shortcut, F1 for help, well organised docs,... in Blender it's a bit uncentralised and new users never done 3D before must probably loosed to found the info when he need...
To Blender be an industries and Film used softwares, replacing maybe some old dinosaurs, he must adapting his interface to be more CG artists friendly and open to artist's today kind of pipeline working, artists say not technical geek like us.
- I'm not anti-Lightwave, I have it (9.2 dvd), used from LW 3.5 and the famous LightRave dongle until today for such task others can do ! I also writed this words on LW with LW-europe dev.support.
- I'm not cons to text interface, I really prefer text interface, that's more faster to work with than vivid Icons as each softwares icons are not the sames ! text stay the sames...like in xsi, lw,...
- This article don't to tried to compare Blender opposed to the world. Blender is include in because to industries can't simply ignore Blender potential and great work who can be done by Opensource software. (no licence troubles, no network installation issues, no per year subscription...)
- Blender have a now a place to be in this kind article and I really don't like work with Nurbs in Blender, so each softwares are good for one tasks, try to do all with one is mayeb not the best to do !
If blender is really good today, he must evolving (as free it's the best) he as somes lacks on somes BIG datas projects. I know just because I'm worked with, why somes highend 3d softwares is again today so highly priced and in somes case that's really justified ! in many not
I love open source for many reasons, chiefly because of the superior quality that seems to come out of such projects, and the fact that the work is offered up free of charge. Just because something is open source does not make it superior, however. Sometimes the open source solution is superior, in the case of Linux versus Windows and Firefox vs Internet Explorer, but other times it's not; as in Photoshop versus The Gimp. In the case of Blender, it is a solution that is not superior or inferior, it's just it's own program with its own set of features. In the 3D industry, when two programs have almost identical feature sets, the superiority of one over the other is quite subjective.
The concern that I have is with overselling. If I make a claim to a friend that if he downloads Firefox and uses it over IE that he will never get a virus, and he gets a virus via email or some other source, he will assume that this is the fault of his browser because of my outlandish claim. He would likely switch back to IE, and actively argue against anyone who tries to tell him that this is dangerous because obviously my claim of Firefox being all the protection he needed was ambiguous. The fact that Firefox is free makes little difference, as there is still an investment in time, productivity and learning the new software- even for one so simple as a browser. Making claims that Blender is this much better than the competition could have dire consequences for the adoption of Blender in the future, as many users may not give it a second chance. By all means, be honest about what Blender can really do- but be open about what it can't, so new users will know exactly what to expect.
So is Blender at least equal to Maya, Softimage or 3Ds Max? In some ways yes, in others no.
The article I previously read dealt with 3ds max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, and XSI. I will compare the three that I have experience with, those being Max, Maya and XSI. Also, I will skip much of the technical information that is very concrete, such as pricing and compatibility.
Interface- The Blender interface is actually brilliant, but different from any other 3D package I've used. I personally dislike the Max interface very much, but I am quite fond of both the Maya and XSI interfaces. I know that there are many artists who prefer Max over the other solutions out there, so this is completely a matter of opinion, and none is a clear winner.
But for beginners, I actually think that Blender has the best interface. The rest are messy and confusing, especially Max, whereas Blender is clean and simple- with most options available via shortcuts. With video tutorials like the series by Glen Moyes available, Blender is probably the most newbie friendly package on the market.
Rendering Quality- This topic is extremely subjective. I have managed to get very good results out of all of the packages that I have used, and with poor rendering settings, I have gotten poor results as well. I recall the first project that I rendered using Renderman, which is an industry standard, and it looked awful. Like the 3D package itself this really depends on the artist- and none of the render systems are a clear winner. If I were to pick one as the best my opinion would favor Mental Ray. Again, this is subjective, so I am not claiming that your experience will be the same.
Animation tools- Each is different, but I would put XSI as my favorite to work with. The animation system in Maya is very complex and hardly intuitive, but extremely powerful. I have not found a limitation yet with the Maya animation system. 3ds Max has good rigging tools and setup, though much of it is a pain to use. They do have Character Studio though, which is nice if you have a tough time constraint, but in larger projects it isn't very powerful. I would rank theirs as "good" because there are no major limitations.
Then there's Blender. I am quite satisfied with the rigging system. They are missing a few things, such as using non-bones as part of your rig (useful for ma
If you don't have the patience and skill to learn the UI and get results from Blender, youre simply not cut out for 3D modelling/animation.
Personally, I appreciate Blender for what it is - a powerful set of artist's tools, not for what it isn't - a 'my first 3D' toy.
Try and achieve what you can achieve with Blender in any other free or open source app and you'll come up short. It's as simple as that.
With all of these whiners complaining about the UI, you'd think there would be some who might be prepared to contribute some code,documentation and design resource into making it happen? No? Maybe you really are better off paying a few thousand for a commercial application suite then.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
If you don't have the patience and skill to learn the UI and get results from Blender, youre simply not cut out for 3D modelling/animation.
If you don't have the patience and skill to learn JCL and get results from OS/360, you're simply not cut out for using a computer.
You know, when people criticize the "Gimp" for being less user friendly than Photoshop, what happens? Well, sure, there was some grumbling about it, but there's also been a concerted effort to improve it over the years, including some outright lookalike variants.
I've used a number of 3d tools, starting with "edit these text files" in PoVRAY and working up through pretty much all the open source tools and a number of the commercial ones, and I have to say that using Blender didn't make me think "this needs polishing", it made me think "the guy who designed this program actively hates his users". Even for an open-source program, Blender is particularly obscure.
With all of these whiners complaining about the UI, you'd think there would be some who might be prepared to contribute [...]
I'm sure there are. I can only speak for myself, though, and I have to say that in general you're only going to get contributions to an open source project from people who find value in the project. If the user interface dissuades people from using it, then that is going to act as a pretty strong filter keeping out the people who might be interested in providing the kind of help it most needs.
Will it blend? http://www.willitblend.com/
-- Boycott Shell
I take it all back, Blender is not an X11 app like I suggested it was. Still it does have a funny menu and the toolbars never seem to draw correctly on my McBook. Looks like an X11 one.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I've used Blender off and on for a few years, and have even written some tutorials on its usage. For me, it's similar to using vi versus some other editor. Once you get used to the interface, you can get a whole lot of stuff done quite quickly. I'm also lucky in that Blender was one of the first serious 3D apps I had used so there were no pre-conceptions about the interface.
Nobody creates 40,000 polygon meshes my specifying all the vertices manually. All modern modelling applications in non-engineering fields rely almost exclusively on NURBS or subdivision surfaces which are the very definition of 'multi-resolution meshing' technology. They all already do have 'infinite' resolution.
These technologies do not preclude the use of CSG techniques, though CSG's requirement of a closed boundary adds complications that are just irrelevant and often visually objectionable when manufacturability or physical correctness aren't priorities.
The big issue is that artists only put in the detail that is required, and no more. Your premise assumes that if only there was a tool smart enough, that the details required to render a beautiful, physically accurate models down to the sub-millimeter scale would simply spring out of nowhere, or be synthesised on the fly by this 'tool'.
But how would you avoid having to spend the time required to model the eyelashes, the skin-pores, the fibres in clothing fabric, the cracks in the tooth enamel, the fine body hair, the slightly jagged fingernail edges, the complex mutilayered appearance of the iris etc. etc. etc. - once you've done that, you can start reducing polygon counts with your tool, but theres no tool to put it in in the first place. Thats why we have 3D artists. And usually their job is to omit or fake these details in the most realistic way possible given the other constraints they face.
In some areas, this is possible - typically, artists do not sculpt and style hair on 3D models by individually placing each one - many hairs can be generated based on algorithms that use a set of guide hairs, or parameterised hair patches, to give results.
'Texture baking' is increasingly popular, using a high-resolution render of a detailed model to apply per-pixel displacement to a lower resolution mesh - again, however, this technique is limited by how much detail the artist put into the original model.
But nobody has yet come up with a tool that lets you sketch an outline and click the 'this is a horse. expand to 'infinite resolution', and make it look the way i intended it' button.
Maybe thats what the blender UI needs?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
It's funny that the usablity of the UI doesn't get much credit in the artical, even though that is the most important factor.
The general opinion of the modelers at work is that XSI is the best and Maya is the worst. One outside consultant swears by XSI. He claims Modeling and texturing is about twice as fast compaired to 3ds max.
> "The default keyboard shortcuts are WEIRD -- Ctrl-W to save, anyone?"
"W" for write? As in write-to-disk.
No, YOU Sir, are a troll. Blender's UI is notorious and always has been, and this is widely know. I myself tried to learn it once. "Nightmare" doesn't BEGIN to describe it. The GP was just trying to describe his honest opinion and you question his "mental capacity" for his effort.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
LightWave's FPrime plugin is such awesome technology providing pixel perfect real-time previews and astounding rendering acceleration. It's extremely useful during lighting and texturing. It's continuous, progressive refinement rendering engine is also a tremendous time saver letting you strike a balance between quality and speed automatically by providing you with progressively better looking versions of the entire animation basically from the moment you press render. For me, these features alone would be enough to put LightWave over the top. Does the competition have anything like it?
+0 Meh
..but when kdawson starts posting, am I the only one who thinks:
"They left Wesley Crusher at the helm of the Enterprise, again..."
I am not some "learn 3D over the weekend" kid. I've used Blender extensively, and I hate it so much that I'm tempted to unload my own personal money for Maya.
1.) I'd have a nice advance towards my Maya fund, if I had a dollar for every damn time I've failed to save the file I was working on, because I didn't notice the little, TINY "Save over" dialog box. I can't think of any other application that feels the need to verify that I really want to save the file I've been working on and saving for the last three hours. And, if you've used Blender for any length of time, you know what rolling the mouse off of a dialog box means...
2.) WTF IS WITH THE $#&*(@&ing dialog boxes that disappear when you roll off of them? I've had to pop the same dialog or menu four times in a row, because I kept accidentally rolling off of it. This is especially annoying if you've typed something into the dialog box, because you have to do it all over again when you bring it back up.
3.) The UI may be lame, but the UI widgets available to script developers make them look like a treat. Many scripts are a nightmare to use -- not because their developers were lacking, but because they just had a godawful poor set of UI elements to work with.
4.) I'm sick of "features" that are really barely supported python scripts, that are often hellish to use (see #3).
5.) Blender actually has some pretty cool features that nobody uses because NOBODY CAN FIND THEM. Who knew that Blender had a retopo tool?
6.) I'm in edit mode, but I have the object button panel selected. Now, I'm in object mode, but I have the mesh button panel selected. Confused yet? It's even more confusing when you're looking for an option that you know is USUALLY on the button panel you currently have selected, but oops -- you're in the wrong mode.
7.) Why does my button that allows me to make only front faces selectable just... disappear sometimes?
8.) And why do my tool tips just stop working sometimes?
9.) Try to talk someone through the texturing workflow, just once. See how efficient they think that is.
10.) Why can't I lasso UVs in the UV editing window? It seems like a pretty obvious feature that's missing.
11.) Why does the left click do something I almost never do, and right click does something I want to do constantly? If I had a dollar for every time I've accidentally moved the center cursor, that would be the rest of my Maya fund.
12.) Why can't I remap the keys?
13.) I can't add programmable shaders without writing them in C/C++? This is 2007, isn't it?
Oh, geeze, I could go on and on and on. 1 and 2 alone have been enough to make me want to tear apart the source code -- but I don't know to what degree the Blender team would be interested in my mods. Sometimes, I think some of the long-time Blender users have a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome.
I think you'd be insane to just learn one tool. If a graduate goes to an interview and says he only knows Maya, he doesn't have as good a chance as the guy that knows Maya, Blender, Silo, and Zbrush.
are the best modelers for the mac for those in the low price range. In fact, Cheetah3D has the best UI and can be scripted.
Modo is real nice too. Though, the price tag is high.
I've tried Blender and I have to agree with other posters that Blenders UI is a nightmare. I guess you get what you pay for. ( except some tax payers who foot the bill for its development somewhere )
Sheesh. All this whining about Blender's bad UI is making me sick.
My 10 year old picked up Blender a month or two ago and has cried, fussed, whined and sometimes driven me absolutely nuts with 'I can't figure this out!'.
Guess what, the stubborn little guy didn't quit.
First particle animation movie (it's 13MB - still need to work on compression).
Oh, and he's not the only kid struggling with the useless UI. Check out these guys at
Peerless Productions.
It's their tutorials that really got my son over a lot his hurdles. (Thanks Colin if you're reading this).
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
My prediction for all discussion concerning UI and Blender :
cat troll.txt | sed 's/gimp/blender/;s/photoshop/3ds/'
A lot of trolls "Blender UI is teh suxx0rs", while silently there is a big community outside who's happy with blender, even if its interface is radically different from other softwares - that the community hasn't learnt anyway.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Happy with Blender...
Let's see. If people liked shoving a cheese grater up their rear end to get the graphical effects they wanted but didn't like the bleeding after each production, but it got the job done... a significant percentage would live with the butt bleeding rather than learn yet another crappy tool.
I hear there is medical salve you can get to help the bleeding.
Without attributes, you'd be right. But I can see one use of presentational elements, in a document that uses a microformat within HTML or otherwise uses features of HTML and CSS that not all user agents support. You might want a particular kind of inline element to gracefully degrade to italics in the legacy visual user agents used by a sizable population. For example, <i lang="x-tokipona">nimi mute</i> would mark the words nimi mute as being in toki pona (semantically) and in italics that signify a foreign language (presentationally). Though the same effect could be achieved with a span element and CSS attribute selectors, the still-widely-deployed Internet Explorer 6 doesn't recognize CSS attribute selectors at all, and IE7 still doesn't apply multiple attribute selectors. We are still in the Transition.
But will it blend? And how did we get from Blender to this?
How long did you spend trying to figure it out?
I'm not a 3D artist by any stretch of the imagination (I'm an engineer), but I do need a decent-quality render once in a while.
The first software I tried was Maya, and that was a horrible experience. It's not that I couldn't find the controls to do stuff, but that it took SO long to get any work done. I'm told that experienced users can throw stuff together quickly in Maya, and I believe it, but for me it felt like I was digging a tunnel with a toothpick...
With Blender, it took about a day to get past the weird UI, but now I can get a model made at what seems like a reasonable speed. The heavy use of the keyboard gives a UI with more "bandwidth", which is exactly what a 3D program needs.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll have to check it out.
I started using Blender as my first major 3d modeler so I was learning from scratch. While the UI can be daunting even for a person who's never done much modeling, once you learn it, it really is fast and just plan nice. Same with vi. The first time I used vi I had to reboot my computer because I didn't know how to exit it and I was in a basic CLI. However, I put some effort into it and learned the basics like saving and inserting text. Now it is my editor of choice. When I'm coding I have a difficult time using basic editors because I can't more around as fast and generally have to take my hands off the keyboard just to do a simple word replace. It's extremely painful to use Notepad++ or gedit.
I am extremely happy with the way Blender works. I am not a pro at modeling but I can do a decent job. Making Blender easier to operate would be helpful but not necessary.
Problem is that for a UI like 3DS, the mouse has modifier keys such as Alt to change the mouse movement (2-d) to something required in 3-d (like, rotate around the z axis, for example).
Now you have a modal Alt key: if your hand is on the mouse it means "rotate around the Z axis" if you've pressed "D" you may have mapped this to "Select for stretching (Drag Vertex)".
And so now you need to work out what you can afford to make modal.
The 2D interface, input and output methods are insufficient for the task and this makes any UI design inherently sucky. Your choices are where to make it sucky.
Did nobody read the article? There are at least twenty amazing internet memes waiting to be started here!
- Very good all around application suitable for freelance/designer best quality tools for the price ! Not enough popular yet !
- By far the most well know and used 3D dcc applications in the industries all around the world, so the prices for freelance is too much expenssive and old core.
- As you view each softwares have their strong and weaks parts !
- I don't wont here to push an application more than others
- I also hope my goal is reach with this table and a long hard work, I hope you get more ideas on what's solutions is the most suitable for you !
Think of this for a while: There is no such thing as a "model artist". Everyone are bound to have different goals,
and Blender tries to apply to everyone. This is what I believe is its biggest flaw.
You have people doing still renders and animation renders, as well as artists modelling meshes for other applications, who are not even interested in the Blender renderer at all. Or at least not interested in the settings outside OpenGL, like the raytracer settings.
With all these features, and with the goal to please everyone, of course the GUI gets bloated. If they somehow got their features split up, I think more people would find Blender easier to use. Also, a way to bind your own shortcuts would help.
What I miss, is an editor specifically made for modelling meshes for games, with proper bone and shader support. As I mentioned earlier, people modelling game meshes do not care about advanced renderers inside the editor itself. They want the renderer to be able to mimic their game engine.
By the way, what's up with how Blender does bone animation?
I haven't used envelopes or vertex painting that much, but from my experience they are either useless or a total pain to get right.
Armatures only work with a radius, so often you get too many or too few vertices inside the armature influence.
Vertex painting seems very counter-intuitive to me when I don't want weighting. I just want to bind a vertex to a particular bone.