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Blender 2.57 Released — and It's Easy To Use!
An anonymous reader writes "Past Blender releases, as capable as they were, had learning curves somewhere between straight up and down and 90 degrees. The release of Blender 2.57 changes all that. No longer are simple features 'non discoverable.' It has more or less a completely redesigned user interface that is clean, sensible and newbie friendly (hey, I'm using it!). It has a handy tab interface for Actions/Properties such as Render, Scene, World and Object etc. Plus, it's fast and CPU friendly. I'm running the official Blender standalone binary on Fedora 14, with 2GB RAM , Radeon X1300 (free drivers) and a cheap CPU Intel duel e2200. No more more slow GUI, no more 100% unexplained CPU, just great stuff. Kudos to all who made this possible."
Well... it may be easy to use, but does it blend? ...oh, wait...nevermind
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"Easy to use"? Last time I used Blender, it was so unfriendly and hard that I thought it should have the "L" taken out of the name...
Perhaps it really is now "easy to use". I doubt it. Many moons ago I downloaded Blender to give it a shot. I installed it, messed about for a while and was totally lost. Nothing made sense in it; I could barely figure out what I was supposed to be looking at or how to draw the simplest object. I gave up cursing the UI as completely impossible and arcane.
Some time later I decided to try it again. This time I didn't even try to figure it out, I just read the Complete Newbie tutorial and did exactly what it told me to do. All of a sudden Blender made sense and seemed quick and easy to use.
So, my recommendation is not to treat Blender like other packages, where you can figure it out by clicking around for a few minutes. You're a newbie. Do the tutorial. It will definitely save you a lot of annoyance.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
a cheap CPU Intel duel e2200"
What that really is: two cores at 20 paces.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was not only a re-design of the gui, that's just a sub product. They have redone all the underlying api to improve animation capabilities and facilitate extensions and adding of new features. Check the release log http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-257/
I think the original poster over states things, while certainly a lot easier to use and learn. There is still definitely a learning curve and a few counter intuitive hotkey and mouse button choices.
Actually, I heard that the new Gimp is actually going to make the whole thing one window. Maybe I'll be able to use it without losing the stupid toolbox, or having to close the layers window just to see the darn image.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Gimp is an excellent example of old school window use -- where you do not blow up windows full screen, but work with overlapping windows. It allows you to work on multiple pictures at once, copying between them, without the toolbox, layer window or similar ever taking up more space. Even to/from other applications.
But to use it efficiently, you have to forget everything that Windows and Ubuntu has tried to teach you for the last decade; that you should only view a single window at a time, and that smaller windows raise on focus.
Return to the X way, and it makes perfect sense, unlike Photoshop, which takes over the screen, and then presents its windows within the master window.
The problem is that it's utterly unusable on Windows. Heck, when I load it I have to minimize all my other windows just to bring it to the front. Cross compatibility is much more important than appealing to people who use uncommon window focus settings.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That's pretty much the case with any real 3D/CG application - even the allegedly easy Kai Krause built apps of yore (Bryce, Poser, RayDream/Cararra) required more than just a little bit of time and effort to grok the controls (let alone the concepts behind them).
Turn a complete newbie loose on Modo, Maya (*shiver*), Lightwave, or 3DS Max... or even a totally NURBs-happy app like Rhino. I guarantee you that 60% of those newbies will give it up in disgust in less than a few cumulative hours, and at least 20% more will give up on it after creating (and perhaps animating) a few crude meshes. It simply takes some work to know what's going on in a CG app. The closest I can remember any CG app being newbie-friendly? It was MakeHuman, but in that app's case it was (and still is IMHO) pretty limited in what it could do offhand.
Hell, I've been dinking around with CG apps for 10 years now, and I'm still learning things when it comes to maximizing what even my most favorite and oft-used tools can do.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I disagree. Breaking usability for nix users is backwards.
What's with the recent phenomenon of anonymous supposed newbies posting release announcements for software, claiming it's easy to use and posting all sorts of information about how well it runs on their systems? Why doesn't someone with some real knowledge post the release announcement? Should I personally be announcing the 2012 General Motors line-up?
Has anyone made a PPA of this for Ubuntu 10.10? Or should I wait for 11.04 before looking for a PPA?
1st of all: Blenders UI has been OpenGL accelerated from day one. It has allways been one of the fastest GUIs in existance. Way faster and more responsive than any other 3D Tool UI anyway. The GP is talking bullshit on this one.
2nd: Blender has never been particularly difficult to use for any 3D Kit with a simular set of features. In fact, it's UI design (non-overlapping, customizable, document/task based configuration, etc.) has served as a benchmark for quite a few recent creative tool UIs in the industry (Modo 3D, latest CS releases by Adobe, etc.)
3rd: The UI has been updated, yes. But it's more an evolution than a complete redo, from a user standpoint anyway imho. Simply because Blenders UI has allready been pretty good for quite some time now. ... Allthough the arcitecture actually is a complete redo. Python driven, new Icons and new panels. However "OMG I'M USING IT! IT FINALLY WORKS!" is way overboard, exaggerated nonsense. Blender has been a kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool for approx. 7 years now. And yes, that also goes for its usability. Anybody not familiar with other professional 3D Toolkits and the learning whoes associated with this field, please stay out of this on this issue. Thanks.
4th: There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies, Smoke and Volumetrics rendering, NLA with an extra new NLA UI, etc. This has Blender closing in on competing programms even further and will shake up the industry once again. ... Can't wait till they finally get full Renderman compatibility. That will kick some serious shit. ... Anyway, Kudos to the Blender team for this great release.
As for the GP: Mostly Rubbish or stuff that no one wants to hear. "OMG I'm running Blender on XYZ with 2 Gigs of RAM. UNBELIEVALBE!" ... Idiot.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I tried the beta, the UI is(or rather 'can be') very Maya-ish. They actually have a 'Maya' mode. All in all, the ability to jump in has greatly improved.
Just a disclaimer, I royally HATED the old UI and was sick of people jumping down people's throats for saying how utterly inaccessible it was. Yet now I have to say they did a really good job. Windows can be broken off or split, everything and the kitchen sink isn't all crammed into the lower half of the screen and the shortcuts actually can be set up to make sense..
Isn't the Mac Photoshop multi window just like the GIMP? Or am I remembering that wrong?
As a "novice" Blender user (by "Novice" I mean I have only been working with it for a couple of years) - I will say Blender is the most complicated program I have every used in my life. I have always attributed it complexity, and counterintuitiveness to its unfathomable complexity and clusterf*ckery of features and options. As I'm glad to see a bit of an overhaul to make things easier - I am completely dreading having to re-learn it all. I guess on the flipside, I don't really know it all - hopefully it will be easier to learn this time around!
Good news, it's an option.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
is it that confusing to use a piece of software if it doesn't have a full screen title bar and gray background behind the WIP?
On classic Mac apps with floating tool palettes, the tool palettes would hide when the user clicks to focus away from the application and reappear when the user focuses back. It's confusing to use an SDI app with floating tool palettes if the palettes don't automatically hide and unhide in this way and even more confusing if the palettes don't raise themselves above inactive apps' windows.
When I hear "steep learning curve" as it is used colloquially, I think of effort on Y and mastery on X, just like economics graphs put price on Y and quantity on X.
I would be happy if the new version is going to fix the mindbogglingly confusing GUI that Blender has. The version migration from 2.56?? to 2.57 is not exactly very suggestive for fundamental user interface improvements. If it actually would be then somebody really missed out on a great opportunity to create a, say, 3.0 release? People use Blender in spite, not because, of its user interface. Amazing!
Shit, I wrote a chapter for an edition of Inside 3ds Max, and I hit the helpfile at least a couple times a week and IRC/discussion forums for help daily.
Yes. Focus follow mouse. The whole "one window" thing stems from people who refuse to use focus follows mouse as far as I can tell.
What's ridiculous about the situation is the blind religious insistence that my *application* should implement a window manager. And a *tiling* window manager at that!
One of the things that this whole issue has pointed out to me is that window managers are broken. I like focus follows mouse, but obviously it isn't for everyone. So we need a window manager that allows you to group your windows by application and tile them how you like inside a single window. We could even add hints to X that allows the application to specify how it thinks the windows in the app should be tiled. But putting it in the application is the *wrong* place to do it. If we do that then every app will have a different way to implement the tiling.
But I like focus follows mouse so I've never gotten around to implementing a better window manager. I probably should do it just to stop people from sticking things all in one big bloody window...
I started playing with Blender a couple of weeks ago. Being a software developer, I actually wanted to spend some time improving my skills working with 3D graphics. But what fun is that without some cool models to play with?
I started by downloading Blender 2.4 but couldn't figure out where to start. I was about to give up but the shiny 2.5 beta was calling my name. I thought I'd give it a try.
I went from virtually no 3D design experience to creating my first model over the course of a couple of days of periodic tinkering. It is far from perfect and I have learned a lot more since I created it, but for my first try I am very proud of it and I think it speaks to the ease of the new interface for beginners.
I've put serious learning time in on at least 5 different general-purpose 3D graphics packages, including Blender. Blender is, hands-down, the hardest to learn and use of any I've tried. It even beat out a hoary old beast from the late 90's I had to use for a course, which was chosen purely because it was ancient and therefore cheap.
There are those that use the excuse, "It's professional grade, and pros don't cry about difficult to use tools." Well, sorry, but that only flies when there are no alternatives. If there's only one tool that does Thing X and the tool sucks, well, a pro will grit his teeth and use it anyway. That's not the case in 3D modeling / animation / rendering software. We have an embarrassment of choices, and they span a wide range of cost, power, and ease of use. Unless "freeeeee" is your only important criterion, there are usually better options than Blender, at least as of 2.4x.
I will certainly be playing with this new 2.5 version. Maybe they're right. Maybe they've completely fixed it all, and I can get off the Cinema4D, modo and SketchUp upgrade treadmills.
ITs optional. You can go back to multi window mode if you like it that way!
From the page
"You won’t be forced to use it, if you don’t like single window! "
There : you have the best of both worlds
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