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One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
I really hope Godot will become as good for games like blender is for 3D modeling
Oh god. Please aim higher than that. Not saying that Blender ain’t powerful, because it clearly is, but it’s UI is just plain shit. (Unless there have been some massive improvements over the last few years.)
They massively changed the UI in 2019, in version 2.8. Hasn’t changed much since then though.
If you remember Blender having a bad-looking light grey UI and no support for multiple workspaces, that’s the old version.
I mean I’m coming from maya and Max, I taught myself blender last year, UI seemed pretty nice.
I remember messing with it 10 years ago, and really hating it. Nothing like that now.
It WAS shit. Now it’s the best UI (and UX) of all 3D software.
I know right! I keep wishing all software would adopt some of it’s amazing features, like hover copy-pasting, being able to right-click any button/option to set a custom keyboard shortcut for it, being able to type maths into any numerical field, etc.
I keep going into Google slides and being annoyed I can’t just use G R and S to manipulate objects
Edit: And I love how in Blender, ctrl-z will undo/redo selection. I hate spending so much time selecting things just to misclick in other programs.
Selection beeing part of the undo/redo is sooo good. One of the best things in Blender.
I tried learning it some time ago (months, not years) and I never cussed so much in my life… maybe I’ll just get the hang of it eventually, but let’s just say, first impression on the UI is not good.
Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there’s probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender’s features.
Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set – because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob’s your uncle.
Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can’t be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it’s also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn’t exactly awkward). There’s also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.
All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can’t possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can’t pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it’s professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn’t “intuitive” (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender’s defaults aren’t bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that’s not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you’ll get fifteen answers.
Thanks for the pointers!
There have in fact been massive improvements over the last few years
Most certainly have been. Worth another look.
I might have to one of these days, but man do I doubt it’s UI is usable after being such hot garbage over so many years. Such a shame too because fuck everything about Autodesk and I know Blender has some incredibly powerful tools.
I don’t think anyone would be able to comprehend how much the UI has improved without seeing it themselves. Please take a look sooner than later.
Blender used to be basically unusable for me, the UI made no sense and attempting to use it after learning 3d through maya and 3ds it just didn’t work. Then they made it good, I spent a few weeks learning it a few years ago and it’s great now. What you’re describing is exactly what they went and did
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Go and troll somewhere else, it’s clear you won’t change your opinion even though you’re wrong.
They updated it to really good stuff with 2.8 like 3 or so years ago.
I wish GIMP had a full UI redesign like Blender, it could work as a Photoshop replacement for many use cases but… Jesus it’s non intuitive, flawed and it mixes opposing design principles all the time.
There was a project that renamed it to a less controversial name and updated the UI to more closely resemble modern photo manipulation tools, but they’ve stopped working on it before a major release.
EDIT: There’s PhotoGIMP by Diolinux, a Brazilian Linux YouTube channel with a really nice host. This is a set of plugins and configuration files that try to ease the transition from Photoshop to GIMP for newcomers. It’s certainly good, but as an add-on, it can’t actually fix all issues with GIMP.
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You’re thinking of Glimpse o believe. And yes gimp really needs a change. Krita isn’t bad but not good for more graphic design oriented tasks. It’s type tools are awful.
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Are there other open source projects near feature parity with GIMP, though?
There are certainly other commercial software, like Affinity, and certainly some shady Photoshop clones like Photopea (and it does work really well) but nothing like GIMP, as far as I’m aware.
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Stuart Semple’s company has something cooking. I have Affinity pirated, and I’m going to see which one I prefer before spending the money on either.
It’s been my understanding that the general populace has been asking the developers of GIMP for years now to overhaul the UI and make it much friendlier to use, and the answer came back, “No, stop asking.”
The biggest problem with a GIMP UI overhaul is that the core team is only 2 people.
The… UI in blender is really good. Have you used any other equivalent software or know how complicated it is?
It’s not “good but it’s a hard problem to solve”. It is more “great and it’s a hard problem to solve”
Blender 2.79 and earlier was super-unintuitive. 2.8 gave it a fresh coat of paint it’s easier and more featureful with each version (Now 3.6, 2.8 was years ago!)
The intuitive UI is the best part of Blender for me so that’s weird
it is, I think he’s talking about the old ui
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That was Blender 2.9, and we’re on 3.6! It has gotten fairly good, I love it.