Blender is moving in the wrong direction

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313

So, 2.81.

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Even more beautiful buttons, pink themes, gizmos, and all sorts of decorations.

"Wrong direction" started at 2.5.
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The “beautiful” interface and accelerated rendering overshadowed the eyes, and the community clapping their hands merrily moved along the crooked path. Functionally, the blender is getting better from version to version. And that’s normal, it should be so. But few people notice that some changes fundamentally break UX, because most of the community is users, and (as it turned out) a very small part are professionals.

Are there any people who used a blender as the main tool for working up to version 2.5?

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Are there any industry standard advocates (keymap and UX) who used the blender daily to work up to version 2.5? Use a blender for modeling, texturing, rendering, for more than 10 years? Do not skip from program to program (Maya, 3D Max, Madbox, Zbrash, etc.), sometimes including a blender, but uses it as a main tool?

There are a lot of complaints in this forum thread. And these complaints come from the fact that people are deprived of the opportunity to work normally. New users, proponents of industry standards, are becoming the majority. And the blender goes to meet them, neglecting and infringing on the old, experienced pros.
Arguments like: “you can just select 2.79 keymap in the settings”, “most users prefer gizmos and it works well for everyone”, “the industry standard takes the blender to a new level” - complete nonsense. This is written only by those who have not learned how to work in an old blender.
People do not complain that now it is possible to switch to the “left mouse button”, or turn on the pink theme, or use gizmos for all the manipulations (which are completely useless and only interfere with seasoned pros). The problem is that, old approaches to work are being cut off. But old ones don’t mean bad ones.

Surely there are those who quietly moved to new standards. But it is impossible, wrong, stupid and unreasonable to assume that the old UX blender is outdated and not competitively capable.

UPD:
I do not mean a return of 2.4. But I defend some positions of the author of this topic, which relate to the deterioration of UX in 2.8.

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314

@AUDITORIUM Pink themes? You are a major shitposter. :man_facepalming:

Go get some rest dude. :smile:

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315

It’s very funny. But it is better to stick to the topic.

316

Hey yo, “seasoned pro”, do you have a portfolio somewhere?
Asking for a friend.

318

So what you really want is to go back to version 2.4 of “a blender” before it went on this “broken” and “crooked path”? Why didn’t you say so? Here you go:

https://download.blender.org/release/

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319

@AUDITORIUM when this change is made then you will be seriously pissed off :grin:

@Harleya a patch to have this (every time I don’t know what name to give him) optional, is it really that complex?

320

If blender adds it, it will be like night and day. Awesome feature. :ok_hand:

321

you know how fanatical I am with blender workflow …
but when it comes to being honest about increasing efficiency to get results faster, I have no qualms … :grin:

322

Its not that it is complex. But it is more of a fundamental change than it looks.

I agree that the second gif shows a much simpler process for quickly changing that value. But I’d also need to see how the value can be changed directly. The fundamental tradeoff is really in deciding what to do when you click with your mouse and then release without moving.

In the second gif they are treating press and release (without move) as an intention to directly set the value that is represented by the mouse position.

In Blender we are allowing you to drag the value, but a simple click and release will put you into manual edit mode so you can directly type a value. That is to be consistent with the other inputs where a click in the area will allow you to enter a value.

I personally don’t care about that and can imagine making click and release set the value immediately. But then you also have to plan on how to enter an exact value with your keyboard. It could be double-click or something else, but those something else’s are part of any planning of it. And because it won’t be as simple as clicking it represents that tradeoff between the two actions.

In Gimp I struggle with their Opacity sliders. You can click to set an immediate value most of the time, but not past about 94%, where the text is. If you want to enter an exact value and click on the text numbers the insertion point is set in the middle and you must fill in all including decimals. Double-clicking on the bar will sometimes highlight the entire number.

But normally I go into this much detail, essentially saying “a change like this means planning for all the usages of the item” and the response is usually silence or an unhelpful “well it can’t be that hard”. LOL

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324

but since it would be optional … who cares about the rest? hehehe

“click” pham, I set the parameter I want, more or less …
click drag, I move the parameter I want …
I want a precise parameter: double click and I set the number, I press enter.

I don’t need anything else
:heart_eyes:

325

Click = set value
Click and drag = Drags the slider
Double click = Type value

Best of all = Optional in the preferences.

I would use this option everyday without looking back. :slight_smile:

326

The devil is always in the details and the details are “the rest” LOL

It is very easy to just tell everyone that “from now on you can just click and release anywhere in the slider and it will instantly set the value”

But it is much harder to tell everyone that “from now on you can no longer just click in any of those sliders to set an exact amount using your keyboard. From now on those inputs, and for only that type of input, you have to somehow guess that double-clicking will allow direct editing”.

Harder still is announcing that “from now on all inputs of all kinds require you to double-click before you can enter a value. This is to make all inputs consistent with sliders”

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327

lol for the first time we are on the same wavelength

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328

Still not sure how we’d communicate to users that those inputs requires a double-click while the rest use a single-click.

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329

Hahaha. Don’t get used to it. :smile:

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330

I don’t see the issue. Number fields and value sliders are two different things, they can behave differently.

331

if it is optional from preferences, this is not a problem …
although I believe that as soon as this patch arrives, 80% of those who will learn about this option will switch to it

332

How about a long-press to set the value?

I mean right now when you click down and don’t move, it doesn’t actually go into “direct edit mode” until you release your mouse. So we could use that behavior to allow long-press to set the value to mouse position.

Might be a bit of a usability issue though as it is ignoring people who might have difficulty clicking and releasing quickly? Probably not. Have to give it a thought. lol

333

This could work too. But I still prefer double click, cuz it’s more used in general. Even in blender you double click objects in the outliner to rename. It wouldn’t be something new.

EDIT: Hmm, I guess I misunderstood that suggestion. It long press instead of click? That would be too slow

334

And you guys could just be right of course. It would be so easy to set the value by clicking that you might hardly ever need to enter a value directly. But I still worry about communicating that difference. Maybe let them have long-press to enter keyboard edit as well as double-click.