Blender is moving in the wrong direction

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Seems strange to that have to explain elementary, obvious things.
The number of blender developers is limited. The total number of development hours per year is limited. And this time is not so much. For such crazy, always dissatisfied morons like me, for some reason it seems that working hours should be used extremely productively.
The developers took the time to implement gizmos for everything they could come up with, and all sorts of auxiliary buttons and tools for beginners. But since version 2.4, they still havenā€™t found time, for example, for this:

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What about a system for renaming objects? Someone asked to add the ability to rename data along with the object to which they are attached. This is obviously a useful trick for those who use a blender for serious work, as you have to keep the scene orderly. So that each object has a clear name. So that the outliner does not look like this:
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This may not be the best example, you think, but. Here is what was added in 2.8 for more convenient renaming of objects:
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And when someone complained that this thing does not help. Because itā€™s not enough to rename just the object. This is not very convenient. After all, those who follow the occupation of objects in the scene, as a rule, also follow the data names (for example, meshes) of these objects. And here is what the developers suggested then:
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It was really very funny. at first I thought it was such a joke. ))) Seriously.
What about this ?: Blender UI paper cuts
Do you remember that in 2.4 it was possible to get the length of the curve? And remember that since then it is no longer possible. More precisely, it is possible, but only through add-ons and someone elseā€™s crooked scripts.
What about the collections? Great idea. Incredibly failed implementation.
But we have a super detailed theme editor.

I canā€™t list all these little things, itā€™s too long, too many of them, besides, Iā€™m not sure that you will even read what I wrote here)))). From the little things is the picture. And the picture is this: Development time is spent on the development of some schizophrenic instruments. Instead of improving the really important things. To please new users, the blender goes to a dead end. As well as other commercial software. Instead of imposing its unique user experience (about which the author of this topic writes!), The blender sold itself to the crowd. It follows the crowd. For the sake of coming from another user, the blender is trying to be more convenient for them. There is such a tale about an ugly duckling. Here is something similar. The blender is trying to look like any ugly software. It seems that epic and EA bought a blender.

Stupid people usually see in such messages ā€œimpatience to the new and the nostalgia for the old.ā€ Therefore, I will explain directly:
Blender 2.8 has an excellent interface. Much has become incomparably better. Improved cycles are simply superb. A blender would be ideal if version 2.8 completely abandoned gizmos and all that. Since work without gizmos impresses with the most original, convenient and extremely fast user interface. And the time that was spent on creating an editor for those thems, these gizmos and all that could be spent on bringing to mind what has long been worth fixing.

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Donā€™t assume what is obvious to you is obvious for others, and you may think those things are elementary, but your opinion over those things is not the only one, so even when they may be elementary, maybe they are not seen as something bad as you see them.

What you posted is a big mixture of things without any specific order, itā€™s hard to read an understand, but Iā€™ll try to answer to some things.

In general what I see is your subjective opinion, I donā€™t see a proper reasoning behind each of the features you criticise.

1.- The renaming tool. I find it perfectly fin, in line with other tools Iā€™ve used in other places, there may be paper cuts, but thatā€™s a gigantic thread, IMHO if someone wants something better it has to be in touch with the proper developer and give them as much information as possible, the Batch Rename tool could be improved, but itā€™s not bad at all IMHO.

2.- The papercuts: as I said, gigantic thread, with lots of ideas, some good some bad, a good point of reference, but it reached a point where itā€™s hard to find anything useful further the latest posts, so many things are getting lost there, I talk for my self, I donā€™t know how the developers consult that thread, but I think many of the things there should be proposed in design tasks, and others seems to be small bugs that should be reported, not published there.
This thread for the Code Quest was great, after 2.8x release I think it has lost itā€™s nature and itā€™s hard to use from a dev perspective IMHO.

3.- Length of the curve, ā€œthey still havenā€™t found timeā€ā€¦ is there a patch to bring this back to the UI? because for what you say it seems itā€™s something already in the Python API, itā€™s just itā€™s not exposed.
Have you contacted some developer (not a Blender main developer, ANY developer that can make that kind of modificaciont) and proposed him/her the creation of a small patch to recover that function in the UI?

4.- The transform values, you are showing the values for a object transform in the right part of the picture, and the values for the cursor in the left part, those are unrelated, but I will suppose you wanted to show the transform of the object.
I donā€™t think those ā€œlock transformā€ should be in the N panel, itā€™s good how itā€™s planned right now, the lock transform is something specific, not something generic that you need to access all the time, it should not be in the N panel IMHO, specially for beginners I think itā€™s a bad idea to have them in the N panel.

5.- Rename Data along with the object, thatā€™s a feature request, I donā€™t like that idea, because data can be resused in many objects, and we have different types of data, and as of today you can already hide the ā€œobject contentsā€ which include the data, so you can have an organized overview of your scene without changing the name.

6.- You donā€™t like the collections, I love them, I think itā€™s a brilliant idea, and I think it very well executed, it lacks some features that will come with time, but I donā€™t understand why you think itā€™s a failed implementation.

7.- The theme editor, itā€™s as detailed as it can ā€œautomaticallyā€ be, but itā€™s not much different from the 2.7x version.

8.- Development time is spent on the development of some schizophrenic instruments, Instead of improving the really important things - Thatā€™s your opinion, I disagree, I think there is a very important development going on under the shadows that is hard to appreciate, and other development that is going very well, making Blender more productive and making it easier for old and new users.

I donā€™t see the ā€œdead endsā€ you see, and in your points in this thread I cannot see those dead ends, nothing is written in stone, but of course, if you want something done, put your effort in getting it done, contact a developer, try to help and work with them, and things will slowly come along, but saying what things are subjectively wrong wonā€™t get anywhere IMHO.

9.- And the time that was spent on creating an editor for those thems - What time? what developer? Because Jacques Lucke is not going to spend his time in the editor, but William maybe, since he is the one in charge of the UI, but he is not in charge of the gizmos development, you insist in the idea that time has been wasted, I disagree, each developer has a target, and those targets are not mixed, I donā€™t think time is wasted, some things could be better, and others could have been worse, Blender is not perfect, but I think the development pace is very good, and if you want some small things done, again, contact a developer and try to get things resolved and improved. no need to contact a super expert developer, a new developer can do many many small things like the ones you say, itā€™s not that hard, and itā€™s the beauty of Open Source. :slight_smile:

The final fact is that the good thing of all this, is that many of the problem you mentioned can be solved by a small and newbie developer, and itā€™s not that hard to contact someone wanting to contribute to Blender and work with him in creating some patches, some will get in, some wonā€™t get in, but itā€™s not that hard to do it, and from here I want to cheer out anyone with the will of change to try to do this, you will be amazed on how many people wants to help, but as developers canā€™t do anything because the are not sure what to do in a big software like Blender :slight_smile:

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Yes, what I published is a mixture of incoherent little things. I donā€™t have time to delve into the details, and deal with classifications of blender problems. You are obviously thinking too narrowly. In that sense, you donā€™t see a big problem behind a lot of tiny ones. Each individual trifle seems insignificant. Especially if a person like you is obviously condescending to the developers and supports the current direction.
Is it really so hard to understand: There are no functions in the API for determining the length of a curve. And the problem is not that it does not exist! And that is a blender 2.8! and itā€™s almost 2020! And that such a function WAS back in 2010, and earlier. And now you are offering me to write addons myself, addons, on a Python! Can I still consider it a pencil on paper?
Itā€™s nothing. Yes. Insignificant. I think this problem occurs in one user per hundred thousand. But from such trifles the overall picture is formed. Emphasis. We have a theme editor, and we can decorate the blender in the colors of the rainbow, but there is no way to calculate the length of the curve.
You think that renaming data together with objects is inconvenient or not very necessary, and that the data is often surjectively related to other objects. But this is your personal experience. Data is closely related to the object. But these entities must be named separately. In different places. STILL. There is no place in the blender where it would be convenient to edit the names (data and everything connected with the active object). And do not mention the outliner now, you will seem smarter.
At the expense of collections. You did not see the phrase: ā€œgreat ideaā€? Collections are the best thing that happened to the blender. But how it is implemented is terrible.
You will not catch all this because, obviously, you are not dealing with complex projects. Where a clearly formalized scene is important.
Personally, I was involved in the visualization of scientific data from NASA satellites. And everything I write about was important. Someone uses a blender for CAD, where this is also important. Someone applies it in science. And someone watches YouTube and pokes at colored gizmos to tell classmates tomorrow how cool he is in 3D (Iā€™ll explain for those who are dull: here Iā€™m deliberately exaggerating). And preference is given to this last one. Because there are many more. And it is for them all these gizmos, pink themes, and industry standards.
And yes, you are right about the fact that some things are obvious to some, and absolutely non-possessive to others. The sad problem. You have to try on the clown costume and endure insults from the local fauna in trying to convey important ideas to the community. Obviously the author of this topic was smarter, and abandoned the case.

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Have you tried to talk devs about some of that problems in a custom thread or in blender chat?

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I reported some little things. I cannot draw up a full report on all the problems identified over many years, because it takes time, which I, unfortunately, do not have. But Iā€™m not alone here ā€œcomplaining and whining.ā€ But this topic is not about minor issues. This raises the question of the adequacy of the chosen development strategy. And the matter does not boil down to 2.8. There is a group such as the author of the topic, and there is a group of modernists who want to turn the blender into C4D. And development must follow some basic path of these two perpendicular paths. Some need black, others need white. Developers seem to assure that they are doing gray. But in reality it turns out rainbow and pink.

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I think itā€™s a mistake to say that blender is going in the wrong direction, or to treat it in a thread called like that, when itā€™s mostly bugs, papercuts and proposals that end up being diluted in the title of the thread.

I agree that I donā€™t like all the development of blender, but even I who am critical of it, find it hard to see this as a solution to the problems you may be seeing.

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Why do you assume others have the time then?
Devs have also their schedules filled with far more important and general things IMHO.

Thatā€™s you r opinion :slight_smile:

So you donā€™t want to spend your personal time improving Blender, but you want others to do what you think itā€™s a priority.

I never said that you should have to write any kind of addon, I said ā€œtalk to a developerā€ to create a patch, an actual C++ patch that makes what you need and exposes to the Python API that function you think is so importnat.

BTW Iā€™m not offering you anything, Iā€™m giving you a solution that you can do, and I dont say that with a small mouth, I say that because is what I did in many situations, I reached different persons to help me out to solve problems I was unable to solve by my self because I donā€™t know C++ as I should, so Iā€™m giving you an advice that I my self have used in several situations.

Obivously, because you know exactly what kind of scene I do deal with on a daily basis.

Of course. as I said, you know what kind of scenes I deal with on a daily basis, and you know that I donā€™t do any of what you mentioned, not at all.

According to you industry standards are not for already performant artists with a long experience in their specific task but for students and hobby ā€œplayersā€ of Blender.

As I said, all what you state seems opinions to me, your opinions, and I respect your opinions, but I donā€™t share your opinions, I donā€™t think ā€œYou are obviously thinking too narrowly.ā€ I just think that we have different views on how to use Blender and what are our needs, when I see a problem like the ā€œcurve lengthā€ I find a solution and after that I try to do what I recommended you to do.

I see a pattern here, and it does not matter if you can solve the problems or not, being involved in such projects related with NASA and Scientific visualization I imagine it would not be so hard to reach a developer or even to deviate some of your funds to generate the improvements you need for Blender, in the same way Tangent Animation or Theory Studios does. But the thing is that I see a pattern, I see an angry person that does not like what he sees regarding Blender development but at the same time is not willing to spend true time to improve anything, I see a person that wants his problems solved, and solved in the way he wants and as soon as possible.

Iā€™m sorry, but thatā€™s not how you are going to get anything fixed or changed in Blender, and @Alberto knows it very well, he is a critic, he criticise a lot of things, and we both disagree too in some things, but he puts a lot of effort in communication, mockups and other things that are at his hand, so in @Alberto I see a high temperament person willing to improve blender, is not the same I see in you.

Fact is that if you want Blender to improve you have to put your effort into it, not just money (that you could hiring a developer to fix some things) but also your time an effort in explaining one by one the things you think are wrong and what is the solution you propose, and even with all that, some of them may get lost or turned down, in the end we collaborate but we donā€™t maintain Blender.

You can always maintain your own branch with your modifications too :slight_smile:

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To work in a blender, I use my add-ons. And personally in my work there are no insurmountable problems. I can measure the length of the curve, and rename the objects along with the data using my addons. But I WILL PLEASE PAY IT ATTENTION, Iā€™m not a blender developer. And all I can do is write here. What I do.
The narrowness of your thinking is obvious. Because You are responding to my comments do not take into account the MAIN TOPIC of this topic. Maybe you have not read the very first post in this thread?
Thinking narrowly is not bad. Iā€™m not trying to insult someone. But you cannot assume that what you do not see does not exist.
Iā€™m not the only one such a ā€œwhiner.ā€ There are others. But there are so few of them that their opinion is completely disregarded.iā€™
Dead end branch. There are too few such as the author of this topic. Alone in the field is not a warrior.

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I never said you have to code yourself anything, you can if you want, but I have never said that you should.

Again, thatā€™s your opinion,

Oh no, I take the main topic into consideration, I disagree with it (with the main topic, not specific posts), but my current conversation is with you, so I take mainly your words into consideration, I can have conversations with others, and I will take into consideration otherā€™s words, but I asked you directly, and Iā€™m speaking with you, not with the whole thread.

Of course not :slight_smile:

If you talk about others with the kind of posts that donā€™t go to the point, without anything specific, vague and generic, yes, those opinions will be completely disgregarded, and I understand that, there is no actual proposal, no deep thiking into the problem, no solution, just complaining, and complaining does not solve anything.

If you talk about people that really work in their proposals, that think about them and try to give solutions to actual problems, then I think those opinions are taken into consideration, sometimes more, sometimes less, but they are at the very least, carefully read and analyzed.

It seems a dead branch without any doubt, but it seems it is because you are installed in this idea:

The fact is that you can do much more, if you read my previous post I gave you some ideas, hire a developer, or contact a developer that likes your ideas and want to try to implement them, if the things you want to implement are small enough it will be easier for the developer to implement them, and the team the both of your form will be able to grow up and try to implement more complex things, and Iā€™m not talking about an addon, Iā€™m talking about C++ patch to be included in master.

Clarifitcation: When I say you to contact a developer Iā€™m not talking a Blender Institute developer, Iā€™m talking about any developer with C++ knowledge that wants to do something in blender, it has not to be part of the main or core developers.

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heyyyā€¦ itā€™s that dead horse, back for yet another beating. we ready to close this thread yet?

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Whats my orientation again?

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Whether 2.8 is targeted towards pros or beginners. Iā€™m not sure they are hitting either target.

UI for a tablet / laptop ?
Who is doing any serious modeling (professional or hobby) on a laptop without a mouse, or a tablet? I see a use case in sculpting, compositing, but not modeling.

Direction
A mechanics garage is not always pretty, and it doesnā€™t need to be. Blender as a tool does not need to be pretty either. It needs to be efficient. I appreciate the effort, but this did not work.

I know Blender is a powerful tool. But the new UI has turned it into a hot mess. Theyā€™re too many redundancies, things are not organized well, efficiency has been compromised for a ā€œpretty,-on-the-surfaceā€ appeal. Start digging through menus and it is just a spooky as the old Blender. (or worse).

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I am, with no problems whatsoeverā€¦ I have tablet, used for artwork only, otherwise I use my fingers!

Cheers, Clock.

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I think you would normally either use the toolbar on the N-panel or the one on the top. Idk if youā€™re trying to prove a point or are really confused, but I think dimming the global setting when overriden should be a nice option, I also noticed the redo panel setting doesnā€™t change the gizmo, but should also dim the tool setting, wonder if the redo panel would be that easy to code.

The reason for having one setting in the tool and another global one is if you want to display a gizmo with certain orientation while using the GRS keys, so not really a duplicate.

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After two years of observations I think Iā€™ve got the point of current development.
It seems that the character/asset modeling workflow is being forced without taking into account any other workflows presented in Blender, perhaps because devs just do not perform them.

The problem is, that there are many programs in the industry that already specialize in character/asset modeling, and CG is not limited to that kind of modeling work - it is actually much wider.
That was the point of Blender - blending the widest possible range of workflows, making them equally accessible and convenient, providing wider area of use than any other software can possibly have.

Thatā€™s why the current course feels like shrinking the area of use of Blender, turning it into some a kind of Autodesk McDonalds.

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Blenders development is driven by the institute/animation studios needs and they pretty much only work on animated films, only game project was Yo Frankie!Ā¹ in ~'08/'09 and for a little more vfx focus there was tears of steel, but thereā€™s no other DCC projects being validated there. So with that in mind it isnā€™t too surprising.

Ā¹ To be fair game content needs arenā€™t too dissimilar to animated films.
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Orientation in adjust last operation panel is there like any setting of last action done.
If you are able to change your mind about proportional editing, there is no reason to not being able to change your mind about orientation.
That was the same in 2.79, 2.6x and 2.5x.
What I donā€™t understand is why constraints are excluded of this panel.
(I hope they will come back in 2.9. We could imagine Adjust Last panel to handle subpanels).
Those settings were just hidden by default size of a region that could be extended unlike new Adjust Last Operation panel that look like a floating panel but is not a floating panel.

I am a lot more annoyed by that than redundancy of active tool settings.

Active tool is something new in 2.8. And exposition of its settings is repeated, simply because nobody agreed on where to put them.
Active tool definition now, includes Brushes. Your brushes are now active tools.
So, some people donā€™t want to expose new Tool Settings bar. So, they prefer active tool panel in Sidebar.
Some donā€™t want to open Sidebar because they are not working with a maximized area and prefer to see active tools settings in an Active Tool tab in Properties Editor.

The goal of redundancy is not to confuse people with forcing them to use a workspace to display 3 times active tool settings.
It is to provide to 3 ways to display active tools settings in order to allow them to pick the most pertinent one in regards to workspace they want to make.
That is a part of customization of UI that can not be a user preference. Because preference of user for that may different from a workspace to another.

To sum-up, there are only 2 orientations available before executing action.

  • The good old one on center of header that is used when calling action through a shortcut.
  • The active tool one, only displayed for relevant tools, corresponding to orientation of its gizmo.

There is only 1 orientation available after execution of action.

So, in terms of usability, that is completely valid. What was added is just a gizmo orientation.
Issue is that is absolutely not well exposed.
I think that problem could be cleared simply by replacing Orientation label by Gizmo in UI.
Middle popover has no label directly visible in the bar but it is entitled Transform Orientations.
Active Tool Orientation has a label that is too short to be understood.
Just shortening ā€œGizmo Orientationā€ to ā€œOrientationā€ in Tool Settings bar is bad. It is damaging discoverability. I think that choosing to keep the word ā€œGizmoā€ instead would be immediately understood.

The same way that we have checkboxes in View menu to manage display preferences of 3D View (Toolbar, Sidebar, Tool Settings Adjust Last Operation panel).
We should have a dedicated Tool Settings submenu that would offer 2 checkboxes ( Horizontal bar, Sidebar).
That way, Tool Settings would be only shown in one region in defaults.

With those 2 adjustments, I think that specific complains about redundancy of orientations would be gone.

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I think that the main problem actually with blender is that devs are working in features, not in workflows, at least in some blender areas. So a lot of times we have

  • tools that are really cool but hard to implement in any pipeline because lack some stupid detail
  • little features that nobody care because they think that is not important and could be a giant step for a user
  • making changes for noobs breaking the simplicity, speed,ā€¦

One example is the problem with move/scale and rotate in sculpt, that we donā€™t have the gizmos, making the tools near to useless. Other the curvatura that I talked yesterday, that is a little stone that make impossible use blender for texture creation.

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Someone from the ancients said: ā€œThe source from which the crowd drinks is poisoned.ā€ And also: ā€œDo not create entities beyond what is necessary.ā€ You need to be either an idiot or an outright villain in order not to understand the obviousness of these ideas (or be someone who uses pink and rainbow themes for a blender). Blender sat on the needle of the mass consumer. Like any capitalist software.

ā€¦ hey Ton, are you wearing a medical mask?! )))

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I really donā€™t understand all of that ā€œBlender is targetet towards beginners nowā€ talk. Blender has real issues, which are being tackled one at a time. ā€œItā€™s for beginnersā€ is not a real issue. Itā€™s not even a real definition of what constitutes as ā€œbeginnerā€. Even among the people here in this thread the definiton seems to vary on personal opinion.

For me when Iā€™m using Blender 2.8+ it feels mostly the same as Blender did before but with an improved UI and more and more long needed fixes. Otherwise the keyboard shortcuts I painstakingly memorized in earlier version (that didnā€™t have an IC keymap anywhere in sight) still work. I still rarely use the gizmos but instead G, R and S keys and I still use most of the shortcuts for modeling. The improvements of the new UI are actually very logical and much more natural to me. And yes - Iā€™ve been working as a 3D artists professionally. For well over 12 years now.

Blender, like most general 3D software, does suffer from uneven feature distribution. And yes in some cases (like that the outliner took so damn long to recieve 80% of the functionality or that true multi value property editing is still in development) the updates should have been there 10 years ago already. But I can see they are coming and I can see that the devs are also finally taking these things sriously as issues that need to be addressed. The response from both the industry and also hobbyists alike proves that this is very much the right track.I mean - Flipped Normals are producing one Blender workshop after the other right now. And they surely know what they are talking about from a professional standpoint.

Can it be the right track for everybody? No. Hell, I love where Blender is heading but I still get frustrated over some of the things in it. To be honest, though: I got mad about weird things in every software I worked with so far. And most of these cost 3500,-ā‚¬ per license or even per year (Modo and ZBrush being noble exceptions, here).

Over the years Iā€™ve seen people complain about their craft not being supported in each of these as well. Iā€™ve even complained about these things myself. Modo, for example, neglected some necessary game features for waaaay too long. Brad Peebler even made fun of this in one of the development Podcasts when they were still Luxology. Then they got someone on board to help with the game workflows (shout out to the brilliant Farfarer) and headed on the right track in this regard.

With Pablo Dobarro Blender currently has someone very strong on the sculpting development side. So itā€™s natural that development is going to head there, right now. If Blender either hired or found someone from the community with a strong affinity towards CADfor example, then this area would get a boost (and many of the non-CAD folk would probably complain in this thread. :stuck_out_tongue: ).

If you want to change things do it the right way: Help with input on existing design issues. Make mockups - discuss features. Propose on RightClickSelect. Help with programming if you can.

But overall and most important: give actual proposals for things you want to see changed.
Shooting down ideas is easy. Proposing one yourself that everybody like is not. Not at all, as this thread proves.
Get on the other side. Make organized proposals for everything you dislike.
And if someone shoots your proposal down because they simply dislike or misunderstand it without offering insight of their own - maybe try to think how the devs feel about threads like this one. :wink:

(edit) fixed some of the many typos, and ironed out some too wonky wordings. :smiley:

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We make organized offers in other forum threads. This topic discussed ideology.
When you say (for example) ā€œwhy are there no latches for the 3D cursor?ā€ (which have been absent for many many years), people say: ā€œhmm, really, that would be useful.ā€ But when you try to explain that the reason for such trifles lies in the ideology of development, and how attention is distributed, then they laugh at you, saying: ā€œOh, these are morons who always whine about what used to be better.ā€

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