Blender is moving in the wrong direction

Archive User Feedback
21

Hey, a lot of this is preference, and if you prefer a tool over another you should use it. personally I expect to keep a version of 2.79 around… I doubt all the addons for it will be updated. Tools are tools, if maya is better for you, maya is better.

Couple things though, just to dialog. For the pie menus, you don’t actually have click! Just hold down z, and twitch your mouse. Whether you like that more or less than pressing z, is preference again haha, though I’m excited that it might replace the alt-z/shift-z/whatever… can’t ever remember which one is which. Just wanted to point out you don’t have to click twice tho.

Not sure about pressing 2 in 2.79 to merge vertices… that sounds like it might have been a custom shortcut to begin with haha… it definitely doesn’t work in default 2.79. alt-m still works for merging regardless, which is the shortcut I always used… though, it being 2 is probably worth a remap, haha, 'cuz that’s always been an awkward shortcut.

As for tools, the shortcuts for tools still work the same… pressing i to inset faces (for example) activates the tool and closes it away the second you use it, the same it’s always been. There’s also the new tool on the sidebar for it, but I don’t see myself using that very much. That I’m 100% with you… it adds extra clicks and is slower… All of that functionality is also behind shortcuts. I’m sad to be loosing the normal shade smooth/flat on the sidebar though, I used that a bit.

as far as eevee goes, it’s 100% not for you haha. Marmoset is a better engine in every way, and eevee is reasonably shitty still. For arch-vis peeps though, and for animation/product/rendering, it’s super exciting to have a faux-realtime engine in-tool, which I feel like is super disruptive… afaik, only C4D has something comparable. that could be a game-changer, and we’re already seeing dudes like Jama Jurabaev take advantage of that.

also just wanted to say I saw the comments on your post over on facebook and they’re pretty brutal haha. it’s fair if you’re a bit frustrated, because they are not kind haha.

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22

“Try pressing w to access the merge options”
Ok. You have a point here… It was ages since i’ve used “w” for merge options, because i was using alt+m…
“Options are just missing or not working properly.”
It’s a beta, therefore you can report missing features/bugs here https://developer.blender.org/

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23

I was tapping z so I didn’t realize that you can switch like that. If you have to hold down z anyway then I think that makes my case for having z be a toggle unless it’s held down even stronger.

My bad I meant to say W, not 2. I hit the wrong key trying to rush a reply to everyone and didn’t catch it. Since menus remember your selection with W I would only have to navigate the menu once and then just press W and double click to merge quickly. Alt M was always awkward for me to hit without moving my hand off my mouse so I never used it.

I didn’t even realize flat/smooth shading was gone. Thats the only thing I ever used the toolbar for. I wouldn’t even mind it being gone if I can just hide that whole bar. I usually work in fullscreen with Ctrl + up arrow anyway, or Ctrl + space now I guess.

Yeah, facebook is pretty brutal but most of those people don’t have accounts here because they don’t really monitor development or care about how blender turns out which is why its so much more civil in here lol. I don’t mind people disagreeing or even attacking me for my views. My frustration comes from the tools I use becoming slower to use.

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24

I see where you’re coming from. I still use right-click select, and it’s a bit weird to me that they made left-click the default for the beta. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to be going so hard on trying to support left-click. There are some weird inconsistencies and redundancies at the moment. Such as the “Select” tool. If you’re in right-click select mode, the Select tool just places the 3D cursor. We already place the cursor by left-clicking, and there’s a 3D cursor tool besides, so what’s the point?
The new tool stuff in general concerns me a little bit.
Some of the tool widgets I find really helpful, like for the spin tool, the shear tool, the scale cage is a neat addition… Others I find to be nothing more than slower versions of the hotkeys. The bevel tool, for example. If the tools don’t provide more control with their widgets, then they only benefit beginners who don’t know the hotkeys. And why ever use the 3D cursor tool unless you’re using left-click select? At the moment there seems to be a bit of a design divide at the point where left-click, right-click, and the tools meet. But we’ll see how things go.

The pie menu stuff I got used to pretty quick, especially since you can just tap the key once and simultaneously flick your mouse in the direction. I basically consider it 1 action, it’s almost as effortless as just pressing Z. Maybe I would still prefer the old way to change viewport modes, maybe not.
As for the merging thing, personally I’ve never used W for merging verts, I’ve always just pressed Alt+M, so I never noticed this. But that seems like an issue and not a reasonable design choice, so that would probably be fixed if you filed a bug report about it.

I was also a bit sad about flat/smooth shading being gone from the toolbar. But at least it’s there in the W context menu when you have a mesh selected. Some say that smooth shading with auto smooth should be enabled by default for new meshes, and I’m not against that idea.

Also, I think Eevee is fantastic. I think it’s too dismissive to just say it impresses new users. It’s so useful to have a nice realtime PBR renderer in the same application you’re actually doing your modeling in. Having that image quality and control of lighting and material in realtime while modeling and designing is a huge artistic advantage IMO. Opens up a huge area for experimentation and iteration.

For the most part I’m happy with 2.8 but there is still a way to go…
But yeah, it’s in development, it’s open source, we just gotta keep discussing it, arguing the points we care about, perhaps developing some things ourselves if we have to.

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25

There is a lot of weird stuff happening. If I press W it brings up the selection tool and switches modes with each click. Right clicking to cancel out of it like you would before just brings up a menu. Pressing escape does nothing. You are just stuck with a tool you no longer want to use always being active. If you press C it also seems to bring up circle select which you can right-click to cancel. Its just needlessly confusing. Also, shortcuts don’t actually bring up the tools that are in the tool panel. You can have the select tool active but still inset a face, which I’m thankful for, but its strange that clicking on it from the toolbar would cause it to stick but accessing the same tool through a shortcut doesn’t carry the same functionality. There is nothing consistent about the behavior.

I love what they were trying to do with the spin tool but I think they missed the mark. Once you spin and use the widget to change position or rotation you can no longer edit the spin you made, only start a new one. Plus on top of that the spin tool will stick even if you use a shortcut and as a result, you end up spinning stuff you didn’t want to when you try to move on. Its easy to forget what tool you have active.

I don’t mind pie menus as long as they make selection easier and faster which they don’t right now. Most of the time you will use z for wireframe. You have to keep the key held to use the release to confirm method so why not just have the menus come up by holding the key down and keep a single press for toggling the most used mode, in this case, wireframe. The same would also work for tab.

I don’t mind flat/smooth being moved. It was the only thing I used the toolbar for and now with it gone I could just get rid of it all together and get more screen space back. Blenders smooth shading has always looked awful and been hard to control. I heard somewhere they were going to added weighted normals and better controls but I’m not sure if thats in yet. I know there is a weighted normal modifier but haven’t played with it yet since I’m not even sure I’m going to keep using blender.

You are right about eevee. It is awesome and makes modeling more fun but if it comes at the cost of efficiency and having to put up with this backwards tool design then I don’t think its worth it when unreal is free and marmoset is cheap.

Us game art guys have gotten no love from blender in the past. I still have to use 3 different version to export working FBX files from blender to unreal and Smooth shading sucks so its almost impossible to get good looking low poly models out of blender without recalculating normals in unreal. You bet your ass I was excited about PBR materials and real-time rendering within blender. I thought they were finally going to do some stuff to help us out. I was showing off all the 2.8 videos to all my game artist friends and even got 2 of them to switch because they didn’t want to buy the new marmoset 3 update. I just didn’t realize it would come at such a high cost.

26

Yes, it was changed. W acts more as a “drop tool”, going back to selection. For right click select this is not needed as much because you can select regardless of the tool.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/UI#Left_Click_Select

You can change both the center and rotation afterwards, just click on the gizmos that appear after you do the first spin.

Shift+Z now toggles wireframe. Having both the pie menu and tap on the same shortcut was tried but ended up not working. A lot of users move their mouse while tapping keys, which would accidentally trigger the pie menu. Having to keep your mouse still slows down too much.

It is:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/Modeling#Custom_Normal_Tools_and_Modifier

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27

I also think blender is moving in the wrong direction.
an example of that is the tool system that doesnt add anything to the workflow other than making blender look more familiar to modo users.
seriously, if new users stick with the toolsystem they will never learn the keymap therefore never develop an efficient workflow.

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28

Also with the minimal keymap, there a lot of important operators that users will never know about, therefore making a impression that blender is a incomplete tool

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30

if you are a pro user then you should be able to adapt not complain about few changes here and there, other softwares do changes all the time and they don’t tell end users , even if it’s a complete overhaul,they make a release note and that’s it…2.80 was many years project not just few months so where were you back then? to me 2.80 seems much better than 2.7x and even other packages, there is no loss of speed if you know how to adjust it to you working…i think you people are just freaking out because of all the new stuff that u not used to see all at once…give it time and you’ll see.

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31

I use blender for freelancing about 5 years.
I use Blender in parallel with 3ds max, but for the last few years my main tool is Blender.

I started with 3d max. This is not the best program in the world, but comparing it with Blender, I see how powerful is 3ds max. When I began to use Blender with the experience of 3ds max, I saw a lot of Blender flaws, what needs to be improved, and what tools are not there at all. Now I learned how to get along with Blender’s flaws. But that does not mean that now the blender is fine for me. No, it needs to be improved and developed.
Blender 2.8 is more cosmetic changes, very few new tools.
For left click. I think that left click in 3ds max is better than right click in a blender for modeling.

I’m sorry my English is very bad and I need to use a translator. I can’t freely communicate and assist in the discussion of new blender tools.
If you are fluent in English and have a lot of professional experience in 3D programs, then you can help with advice. But you must remember that one person is not all users.

I think that you should give the blender a chance, and wait, because it is still in development and this is not the end result.

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32

For the millionth time. No one is complaining able blender changing. Some of us have been using blender since it was first made available to the public. We have been adapting to blender this whole time as it changed over the years. The difference is that now a lot of the changes they have decided to make aren’t good. Thats why I’m here pointing it out so they might fix it. What do you think the point of open development is if you think people shouldn’t critique the current state of the software and the direction its heading in and just “give it time”. If you are happy to sit on the sidelines saying nothing while waiting to see how things turn out then please be my guest. I think I’ll continue to make my opinions heard.

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33

Look again closely at the name you have chosen for this thread.

Length of your usage of Blender doesn’t make your point any more valid.

Majority of people seem to disagree with you. Especially the high profile users who have done tons of amazing work with it.

Almost all the things you’ve mentioned in your original post are matters of the changes to keymap. Unless you have no idea what you are doing (which shouldn’t be the case after, as you say, using blender for nearly 10 years) then I am quite confident doing a few changes to keymap to get it behaving same as 2.7 did would take you less time than writing that post.

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34

no my point, is those so called “pro” users who are now suddenly coming out and complaining about these changes, the rest of us actually were directly contributing into the design,
we made certain suggestions that devs took into consdieration, of course they pick the best and what works for all not what one person thinks it’s good…to u maybe it’s not good
but for us it is,and you can keep critiquing all you want there is no problem in that…the problem is that the devs follow an already planned design that they have agreed on before hand, and they got feedback from the community to go forward with it.
so coming after beta release and saying “blender is moving in the wrong direction” is stupid,
because reverting eveything back to what is used to be will not only waste developers time, but also breaks all the things they added…it’s simple logic.

36

Pulling sentences out of context does not turn them into an argument.
Here it is not at all about using the keys, but about the fact that the changes that will be included in the new version will completely change the whole working process. It will be necessary to learn anew how to use new functions and learn the interaction between them. And why someone should do this if there are many other programs that do not change the main core in themselves but add only new functions? I think that the question. I agree with @Ouro who described in detail that he uses the blender as one of the programs in his workflow, which means that the entire pipeline will have to be changed.
And this has nothing to do with people who make cool art in Blender. If you don’t use Blender in a professional development (and I don’t underestimate your abilities at all), then you just don’t understand what it’s all about.
By the way, I like how new Blender looks — it began to look much more organic and maybe it will be easier to learn by beginners, what will dispel (I hope) the old myth that blender has a very complex interface, and in general, a blender looks like a pro software now.

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37

I understand what the OP says, because many of us defended it during the code quest. There are many good things that have been lost for no reason, in the end we have recovered some things, but by constantly complaining.

The usability changes in Blender2.8 didn’t often force changes to be made. Adding Active Tools did not force changes in the interface that have been seen. Putting the left click should not force to use the context-menu. Having the TopBar did not force to put the tool settings in the properties editor…

And I don’t understand that this should be a “either you’re with the new ones or you’re with the old users” as some people try to do, as if they were the only ones that count and they were right… Especially when solutions have been proposed that meet the requirements for both groups of users. Many times it seems that instead of trying to improve the old simply bet to break with what has been blender the 10 years of greatest growth of the program. That is what often gives me the impression that happens. It breaks with old workflows simply by breaking them, when they can be maintained without problems.

I’m still trying to understand what the improvement has been by eliminating the T-shelf, which has clearly been a step back in blender interface design. And also contrary to everything that was promised when we asked for money for the code quest, where we were promised a configurable T-shelf, and never said to eliminate it. Which was lying to the users.

Never should have raised the codequest and blender2.8 as it has been done, breaking with 2.7x. People were always very clear about what they wanted, changes at the interface level and usability without affecting their workflow. And as I say, all this was perfectly possible.

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38

these changes happened because of years of user complain, 2.80 was always planned to adresse them and break old habits, like Left click select, weird UI, no usibilty for other devices(tablets,cintiq), bloated panels,menus and buttons…etc, even the keyboard has no longer place for shortcuts, it’s getting ridiculous to press 3-4 buttons to access a function, and to be honest blender was never well integerated in a production pipeline…at least now you can have both a junior and a lead using it without banging their heads on the table…

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39

That is not true.

  • People asked for left click by default and few changes. Not a complete remap when you use the left click by default. In reality blender works really well with left click in 2.79.
  • The UI have the same problems that before, because the main problems like strange controls (lists) still without changes.
  • I have used blender with tablet 8 years, No other program works better with a tablet. Blender 2.8 have made more hard to use tablets, because without T-shelf is really hard to use blender with the mensu and tablet.

We can talk about all the changes in blender2.8, but it is not easy to tell that the change are better without any doubt.

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40

one the tools system is not yet finished and 2.80 too, so you can’t compare it yet with 2.79 who had much longer time to develop, also the keymap changes are for only left click since they had 3DS max and maya ones which was never maintained or worked well, and now merged to just one that has a more standard version of what other common packages have, and 2.8 works better with a tablet at least for me and you don’t eve have to click the menu just hover over it.

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Blender is beta, you won’t see many changes anymore. We’ve read that argument many times in the last five months, but there hasn’t been any change.

I’ve always been a left click user, and I only see problems in the new keymap, where I see myself treated as a “second category” user who does not have the same rights as those who use right click, to which everything has been respected.

Blender 2.8 only works better with tablet if you are a novice who only uses active tools. Any advanced user will see how can not access almost any of its functions because they are hidden in new menus that are very difficult to use with a stylus, and with all the tools scattered around the interface, instead of being all in the same place. All for eliminating the T-shelf.

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42

like i said they follow a plan, they don’t go around playing this and that ,and i bet some of them use left click so your argument is false…also what exactly was in T-shelf that’s missing right now…addons can now add themselves anywhere and even make their own custom editors, it’s only matter ot time before someone makes everything compacted in one place…also i believe there is a proposal to make workspaces have their own keymaps or something in those lines, which only makes blender more powerful than any other software.