An Open Letter to the Blender Foundation

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The features are there, the active tools are simple enough for kids to use, and an application template can be used to provide a simpler UI for a simpler UX for kids at school, but personally I don’t think this should be done from the core dev team, in fact you can organize a work group to make this a reality, no need to involve the core team.

No 3D app is designed in that way, to access a 747 cockpit you need a license and an education, to access a 3d app you don’t need that, you just download it and use it, in trial mode or in full mode like Blender, or in some weird free/student mode, and developers/companies know that, I think that’s already present in Blender in a coherent way with it’s current toolset, it’s also present in other tools like Max/Maya/C4D, with their toolbars and their “button/toolbar” oriented workflow for begineers

So i don’t think it’s a good comparison, compare it to other apps with similar functionality in the market, like Max/Maya or C4D, Fusion360 is an specialized tool that it’s designed for just one thing, the same goes for ZBrush or SketchUp, not suitable comparisons.

Regarding the Nurbs toolset, first you would need to get some developer that wants to dedicate time to Nurbs, I’m not against that, but it’s hard to find someone with real interest on them.

And blender full fills that promise, the promise is not to be the easiest or simplest 3D tool for everyone, but to be the most powerful 3D tool for everyone so it empowers everyone to be able to create magnificent art in any way they want.
Not to confuse the “being free for everyone” with “being easy or simple for everyone”

There are no elites here, we are talking about big studios, but we are also talking about super small studios and freelance artists, and students and children, we are talking about people that put it’s effort to improve and learn how 3D works, no matter if it’s with Blender, Maya or whatever other tool, don’t confuse any kind of “elite” with a person that puts it’s effort and illusion into something.

Open Blender, click new → sculpt and leave a 6yo kid play, you will see how they make amazing things, the basic toolset is intuitive, the advanced toolset is advanced, but still intuitive when you understand the basic toolset.

Yes, it’s for them, if they want it to be for them, if they want to learn it, I started as a young little boy with 3d Studio DOS 3 in MS-Dos, was it easy and wit great UI or UX? I later used Caligary TrueSpace, was it the best UI or UX? later I went Max with 1.2, was it the best UX possible?
I started with barely 12 years, I had no problem to enjoy 3d creation, to learn the process to play with the tools, and the UI/UX was light years away from what we have today in Blender, plus in the school there are teachers, are they not expected to learn how the software they will teach works? do they also need a super special simple UI?

Not at all, because there are different levels of usability and complexity inside Blender, in fact the most basic level, basic modelling, has become way easier with the active tools toolbar, you are confusing being powerful and having a lot of features with being easy for beginners, one thing is not related with the other.

There is nothing “over-arching”, of course if you want to do a complex fluid simulation as a beginner you may discover that you need to learn many things about fluid simulations, but if you just want to start animating in 2D, or modelling something, there is nothing “over-arching” in Blender.

Do you really think Autodesk cares as of today about new users? they were the king of the hill regarding this part, nowadays they don’t care, they removed a lot of student licenses, they made the schools to pay for the licenses and many other things.
That’s not in their plans, even when that was what made max big.

And anyways, you keep supporting all this based on the idea that Blender is hard to use/learn for new users, no is not, and your own youtube poll demonstrated it.

Anyways, in the end, the “Blender for Schools” or “Blender for kids” or “Blender for non-3D Artists” or “Blender for 3D Printing” is all inside the Blender 101 initiative that already exists, so all in all, the only thing I see here is the request to revive the Blender 101 initiative, I don’t understand why is not being mentioned.

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Good old times. :slightly_smiling_face: I also started Max with version 1.2. It was quite revolutionary at the time, with the modular plug-in structure and the modifier stack.

Sorry for going a bit off-topic.

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Hell yeah. I also immediately loved that when I saw it for the first time. This looks professional, and it’s very informative. You immediately know what’s new. :slight_smile:

Absolutely. That’s why making a structured plan for how all those things should behave consistently instead of many, many single design tasks might be a good idea now. When a feature is already being worked on it’s more than difficult to change it again. It costs time. It will, rightfully so, confuse the users.
Nobody here wants Blender to be dumbed down. Nobody wants to shift the target demographic, either. Blender, as in “the developers”, should have someone dedicated to creating guidelines that all those design tasks can use as a reference. Guidelines that make every new feature run by a structured set of ideas that make a new feautre behave the way all other features inside Blender behave. Not having to reinvent the wheel oder and over again.
A structured plan that gives addon designers the chance to create their Addons also in a way that is coherent to Blender’s UX paradigms. If they want to. I see plugins as a thing that (while its highly appreciated if the behave the same way) are more in the hands of each creator and are more expected to maybe deviate from the ‘norm’.

It’s weird to me how ‘being available’ and ‘being Open Source’ is said as being enough reson to not change in any more ways. Like “we already have a program that can do a lot and is open source - it never said to be user firendly. Why start now?”
That is such a weird thing to say and I’ve seen this kind of resoning worded in similar ways quite a few times in this thread, now. And it doesn’t make sense to me. Why would anyone not want something to become more and more accessible and intuitive wherever possible, if given the chance?

Is it because of the fear of making tools less powerful?
Is it because of the fear of making the powerful tools more difficult to use than the easy ones?

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I have not said that, what I said is way more complex, and I support Blender being accesible, and what I defend is that Blender it’s accesible and easy to learn, but I’m not against improving it, there is always room for improvement, but I also say that there is an official initiative pointing towards that direction, Blender 101.

There is no fear of anything, there is a limited amount of resources, and they have to be divided and organized, the current UI team has the UI/UX in mind, always, as has already been said they are involved in everything, there are times that something is not commited because it does not have the aproval of the UI team, so there is already an effort in UI and UX.

But for making a more specific UI and UX targeting users like kids or people foereign to 3d there is already an initiative, and can be driven by the community, and I’m sure people like @dfelinto, the UI team or Ton himself will be glad to help in supervising it and directing it, and that initiative is called Blender 101.

Blender is not made just by the core developers, or by the studios, it’s made by us, the users, and I understand, because I’m at that position too, that many times we need the developers or at least one developer, from inside the core team or not, to help us reach our goals, but in this situation, at least to reach an initial state, this can be done by the community, by you, start working in an app template for schools, for 3d printing, etc… show your willingness, motivation and real commitment to this, you don’t need to program C to do an App template for kids, and as I already said, tools are in place, simple tools like active tools for simple modelling workflows, or grease pencil, or sculpt tools, they are simple, intuitive and easy to use, start working in the app template like… right now if you really think there is an absolute need for this or you really want to fill in this gap, no need to dedicate core resources to this, it can be done from the outside by anyone :slight_smile:

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But why do you say it’s not user friendly? Is there a more user friendly 3D suite than blender? Blender is eating up the whole market and forcing giants like autodesk to change their licensing system. It is taught in universities and schools, it is the one chosen by all the indies to do anything, all the kids who are starting, too.

Does any other suite 3D have a better first experience than blender? You need basically 30 seconds from scrath in blender to edit your first cube. It is not easier in other suites.

Take the program you want and it won’t start as easy as blender. And all the programs, all of them, need to be taught that it is a 3D suite. There are many children or neophytes who know that it is a primitive? that a mesh must be converted to editable? that you can select vertices or faces?

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Just so that we are on the same page and I understand that correctly:
Isn’t the idea behin Blender 101 to have different Options of Blender sort of as ‘specific Workspaces’?
Like “Blender for Sculpting” and it’s all the UI focused on sculpting things only and the keymap is geared towards sculpting - so that you can focus only on that. Or “Blender for Kids” and it’s only the basic things in the UI so that kids don’t get overwhelmed by the more complex tools that aren’t necessary i the beginning and such …?

Isn’t that what Blender 101 is supposed to be?

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Yes, Blender For Artists. :slightly_smiling_face:

At least that is supposed to be more user-friendly. I’ve never tried it myself, so can’t tell if that’s correct.

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oh no!!! not at all!!!

I imagine it’s a subjective thing but I think B4A it’s like a disaster box where all the cliches in ui goes in, 0 innovation, a lot of “autodesk-philia”, it’s a personal opinion, but I profoundly dislike B4A XDD

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Nope, Blender 101 was an initiative to make some templates or app templates for specific tasks, workspaces is one thing that helps making those templates, but as an example, the first idea behind Blender 101, if I recall it correctly, was a “version” of Blender that was super accesible an easy to 3d-foreign users that know 3d printing (think in “The 3d printing nerd” for example), so a reduced interface with the most important modeling and sculpt tools together with the 3d printing tools (I think there is or there was an addon for 3D printing), something that will simplify that kind of people to use blender just for their tasks, that are way more reduced than what Blender can do.

So workspaces is just part of the UI of Blender, and they can be used in many ways, the usage of them in the Blender 101 initiative is one good example of simplifying the App Template for it’s target users.

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Have some good decisions, like icons with colors. But I think that is a mistake separate from blender in all aspects.

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I believe you guys. :slightly_smiling_face: Never had the impression BforA was a big success. But in theory I like the concept of developing for artists who are inexperienced with regard to 3D. It might work, but I guess not in this case. :slightly_smiling_face:

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There is a structured plan for UX. They made a Workflow workshop before Codequest.

Then, codequest.

Then, Homestretch workshop.

followed by UI workshop

Design Tasks in d.b.o are not isolated things coming from the voïd.
Most of them are subdivisions of a bigger parent task.
Some of them are second or third iterations of a task come from a must-have that may have been established 4 years ago.

But it is true that we cannot find an heuristic map of tasks in wiki.
Or guidelines in wiki about rules to follow for things that were not planned to be added, 4/5 years ago.

The whole point of creating the devtalk forum was to guide new developers through interaction on forum or chat.

Developers made guidelines. Problem is not about not having ones.
Problems are elsewhere.
For example, when those guidelines ignored something that needs to be treated differently.
In current design, brushes are treated like active tools. That does not work.
And UI workshop established that brushes should be treated as assets.

You can do that when the plan is fixed.
But because of the scale of the refactor of Blender, plan of software is dynamic.
The paradigms are not all settled, yet.
2.80 was released in end of 2018.
2.81 was mainly about polishing what was new + Sculpt new workflow.
2.82 incorporated new technical stuff (Mantaflow, UDIM) and still modified things from users feedback.
2.83 features were also a combination of completely new things (Volumes, VR) and usability improvements.
2.90 and 2.91 will not be different.
That is mainly usability improvements by proposing other iterations of existing features or introducing new pieces of puzzle that has been drawn, years ago.

That is missing the nature of most new features added in last and next releases.
Most of them are just about making things easier to do or just possible.
And some of them are just about responding to promises made years ago.

Currently, developers are not in a frenzy of new features just to compete with others software.
They are mainly following the plan.
EEVEE was introduced in 2.80. And since that, it was improved in each release, by making it supporting common things (that people expect a modern render engine would support).
And when they don’t follow the plan and add stuff that was not expected to exist 5 years ; that does not an erratic evolution.
Pablo Dobarro created a whole new workflow for sculpting that will only take sense in 2.90 with refactor of multires modifier.

That was established that new nodes system will be accompanied by presets of nodegroups.
Currently, there is a Quick Particles quick effect in master.

In official release, people don’t have to connect nodes to create materials.
They can simply use Principled shaders.

William split the whole UI in sub-panels to easily hide very technical properties only used by experts.
It is not because there is an option visible that a user understand what it does to ignore it.
Label of sub-panel is supposed to give a clue to user, tooltip another one and eventually manual should be more informative than tooltip.

IMO, hiding things will not help beginners to progress. And stopping addtition features that are lacking will let advanced users continue to experiment an uncomfortable UX because of low quality outputs or unpolished workflow in needing to set-up complicated workarounds.

Many expected features are expected because they should improve UX.

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It was, imho, the worst change in 2.80. With the T-shelf a newbie have access to all tools and features in one place. We only needed icons for that and a better layout

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Okay. Yes, that’s what I meant. Using “workspaces” as a wording was wrong on my part. :smiley:
It’s a cool idea in itself but it won’t tackle the core of Blender itself. Having secondary program setups feels much more cluttered, in fact. If a variation uses different layouts and hotkeys that might be super good for people who only want that focus but if differs from the main program then that’s yet another layer of “something to be learned” on top.
For those people who only want that one feature, though - pretty cool. :slight_smile:

This sounds like it could eat up a lot of time that could otherwise go into much needed feature development, as well, though. :hushed:

*Clint Eastwood shuddering GIF
Naaah. That is a very odd thing and it makes everything rather weirder and more complicated, than better, if you ask me.
This makes things much more complicated in the long run, if you ask me. All the things you learn with BFA are not transferrable to the Blender default layout and as such won’t even help you with tutorials. And if the forg gets discontinued or becomes stale as opposed to the main branch then you’re left with all the time invested in a layout that you again have to relearn in the main program.
2.8 isn’t as difficult to get into as Blender used to be years ago, when BfA was started. I’d rather see 2.8+ set in the nitro bost for usability features for a few more releases.

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I can point to an example of lack of UX thinking. The UI of the modifier stack has changed virtually every release since 2.79. Each new release, users have to relearn how to use it, where the controls are and how to use them. And it will undoubtedly change again with the new modifier nodes initiative.

Perhaps the UI gets better, but the UX is all over the place. That is but one example of why an overarching UX strategy is needed.

Everytime the UI changes, it obsoletes training materials and confuses all users. And it gives those like myself less confidence the developers know what they’re doing.

Will each UI have to be recreated over and over again because development keeps changing their minds on how best something should work?

Why didn’t they test and ideate at the beginning and make only one change?

This is but one example why an overarching UX strategy is needed. There are others.

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Do you propose not to implement new fields with necessary values in the blender modifiers because, according to you, that interrupts the UX? And to make users wait for years to have access to features already implemented?

I don’t think it’s serious to talk about problems in the UX because in a modifier a vertex group field is implemented. And even less that core developers are asked to work on it instead of implementing features. Much less saying that this is a problem for new users.

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I don’t understand how redoing something many times is effective, and doing a UX pass the first time and doing it correctly (given that you base this on what most people understand) means so much less time on new features?!

Since we mentioned the modifiers. If the modifier changes was user tested on me I’d say the following (based on the version I’m using now 2.90):

  • It is not IMMEDIATELY clear what order the modifiers are applied, I always have to think for a second (could add numbering, lettering, obvious is good imo)
  • Hiding apply did nothing positive because it’s many extra clicks to get to it (though I can understand it makes sense for a fully non destructive workflow to hide it, but that’s not my reality now). I’d rather have it double height when collapsed WITH apply
  • If you click one modifier to use the keyboard shortcut CTRL-A to apply, it isn’t highlighted so you don’t know which is selected

Someone else would have different opinion, but then at least the changes are based on users using it, you don’t get a full picture if your only feedback is people that have bugs or like to report bugs. I’m willing to contribute to Blender, and I’m going to look into that, but you don’t want to base it on just my opinions either. That’s what UX focus is for, removing it from only devs and UI people, and collecting broadly and testing broadly.

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Yes, this IMO is going backwards from a UX point of view. How to prioritize what features are 1-click vs 2+clicks away? This is perfect for precise UX testing.

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But what changes are we talking about? Nothing on the list of modifiers has been changed yet. Only controls for new features have been added. And since it was not yet clear how the list of modifiers would go, they have been added to the existing system.

That you can go to blender 2.57 and the few modifiers that were there are identical in their layout to the current ones.

How can you be defending that the layout of the modifiers has been changed in each version and to justify it, give an example of a version that has not been released yet?

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Also, that’s very funny to me because that UX problem is exactly what was designed to improve UX and users were quite happy, surprisingly.

And no, sometimes going from 1 to 2 clicks is not a problem, and I usually defend it. The “modifier list” addon also adds another click to apply a modifier you haven’t selected and has a much more comfortable UX than the classic blender list. It is one of the most downloaded addons to IMPROVE the UX of the users. And in theory is how it was originally going to be the list of modifiers in 2.90. But one decision, bad imho, changed that design.