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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 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.
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.
CSG is just a means, you could just as well use NURBS or subdivision to represent a highpoly model. The problem is that you have to downres it to a point where it's not just fewer sides on a cylinder or something but where the entire surface has to change. Details must be removed from the geometry and put onto the texture instead. Some things will be faked with alpha. The software would have to automatically recognize which details are important and need to be kept. Even worse, for organic objects it has to understand where and how the object will deform and how to make that look good. And finally, it's just unnecessary work to model every little detail on a model when 90% of them will be lost in the downressing anyway, that just wastes time and time is money.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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 dont see why that is such a big issue ?
Apple's implementation of X is fast, stable, easy to install and blends very well into OS X. It's freely available and you can download it from apple.com.
Sure a native application would have been even better, but this is really very far away from "unusability".
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
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.
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.
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.
That may be true, it may have a bad UI, it may turn new users off, but theres nothing that can be done to fix it without people who have the skill, and the will to change it.
So, in the short term, if you don't like blender's UI, go buy a package with a good UI. There is no free alternative. In the medium term, your best bet is to help to fix it, and in the long term, eventually, this issue will be addressed by somebody else.
Its a matter of how much time have you got to contribute vs how much time youre prepared to wait for Blender to get a new UI.
I mean, if i never bothered trying to edit text files in POV-Ray (oh yes, i've been there too), i would never have gained the knowledge i use daily with Blender and other 3D apps. I never once threw up my hands and said 'too hard' - i was too busy learning and creating stuff.
So while it may be 'the slogan of bad user interfaces everywhere', its also the cry of the project that is trying to be too many things to too many people, with not enough hands on deck.
Its a simple matter of resourcing and a lack of consensus - so if Blender is losing users because of the UI, well, thats regrettable, but unfortunately not addressable without compromising other goals in the short term.
Blender can, and will be, so much better than it is now - and its not like anyone is stopping anyone else from reorganising the Blender UI in a newbie-friendly way like GIMPShop does with GIMP.
Inkscape is wildly popular because a bunch of developers took the oddball sodipodi interface and changed it to their liking, not because the sodipodi developers were influenced by the UI complaints on slashdot.
And really, when you look at the size of the Blender community, does it really seem like there is a problem with the number of users?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long