Blender - what is wrong?

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Hi there

My name is Marek Holly. I am gaming & animation department executive at NOISE artillery studio. I have 18 years of professional industry experience. Worked on numerous big game titles, animations and movies VFX. Through my career I was using TrueSpace, Max, (beloved) Softimage and lastly Maya. Each of them at least 2 years in a row on daily basis.

Blender is getting my attention for more than two years. But I had time to dive little bit deeper just in last 10 months. I decided to share my thoughts with you all, in a hope, that some of developers will actually read this, and possibly take my notes into consideration.

Why? I see Blender as a fighter. Maybe not strongest, but definitely sturdy, and gaining some serious weight step by step. Open source - of course! Unbelievable artillery of tools at no cost! This is just awesome. Community - I am sure Blender’s community is largest comparing to any 3D app. After seeing Autodesk killing Softimage, and doing almost nothing with Maya and Max for years, it is extremely refreshing to see some life in 3D waters. That’s why I started to learn Blender. And because I see great potential in it, I am going give constructive criticism. Not because it is very easy to criticize, but because I love to see Blender to become my weapon of choice. I really, really do.

I’ve jumped into blender train just at the moment, when 2.8 was announced. Seeing all the demos, features, and basically complete upgrade over 2.79 - it was just mindblowing. So much effort, so much work in so short time span!

But, on one side, seeing all those features, upgrades and polishing, together with outdated remnants of Blender’s puberty era on the other side, raised the first question:

Who will be the main Blender 2.8 user?

Eevee, new wireframes, collections
 All the bells and whistles from 2.8 made me think who is primary audience of this release? I have mixed feelings. Fancy new icons, and tons of cosmetic improvements could aim to the beginners as a target. Emphasis on visuals is evident. But then there are collections, new dependency graph, asset manager - things aimed to more pro users. So I assume, target audience is in fact everybody.

Is it OK? Don’t think so.

Blender does not need to fight for Beginners. Amount of Blender downloads is growing every year. There is already army of beginners on board

Blender matured to the age, when Pros are starting to show their interest in it. Taking look at Autodesk’s actions of last years, there was never better time for Blender to hit them with full force, grab them, and never let them go.

Blender is doing it, isn’t? No. Why?

Blender is crazy mix of great potential on one side, and strange weirdness on the other. I am talking about first impression. Beginners and Pros as well are doing same thing at the beginning. They are looking for outputs. What was done in Blender? How does it looks? And they can find some really good works, out there, which will encourage them to download Blender and give it a test ride. This is the moment, when Pro’s and Beginner’s ways splits. Beginner will seek for some tutorials, and start to learn it. Pros will try straight, and then (mostly) miserably fail.

Because:

Pros are people who have their habits. Especially in terms of strict common logic, which is equal across wide variety of tools they are using. Forcing them to something different could be possible only if they gain some serious advantage of it. And advantage mostly means getting job done shortest possible way. Blender has lots of strange principles, which are uncommon in Pro’s world. Moreover, those principles seems to be mannerism without any good reason. And this quite a showstopper.

I am going to present some of the most alarming issues (imho), and I will try to lay out some possible solutions. Again - I am playing with Blender just about 10 months (not in a row
). So, it is possible, my issues could be easily tweaked out, or directly solved by some more advanced user, but hey - this also means that there was not enough intuitive in Blender to lead me to winningly fight the issue.

Selecting and Deselecting:
With any object selected, clicking on blank space does not deselect it. I do not understand why. Why you can not deselect object this way? Being able to do this, several problems will be solved:
1 - now, when you click in blank space with object selected, you can unintentionally move it. This will not happen when you will be able to deselect it

2 - this logic - if applied Blender wide, will give you one great advantage. Box selection for free. Without pressing B key. Just click into blank area, and drag box select. Neat, isn’t it?

Selection modes:
Rectangle/ box/marquee selecting objects in viewport - shortcut B. The name of this tool is Select Border, which is nothing more than misleading. This tool is not for selecting borders Name of this tool should be Rectangle or Box selection. Aside naming – box selecting blank space is supposed to deselect actual selection. This is common sense. Hey dev guys, you are not making it easy.

Circular selection – named Select circle – shortcut C. One could think, you can select circles with this tool. Another one could think, there will be circular selection – you simply draw circle with your mouse, and everything inside circle will be selected. None of them is right. By clicking this tool you will end up with circular area around cursor. Draging it, everything the area touches will be selected. This is useful tool, but naming is misleading, and weird.

Lasso select – shortcut Space+2. This works as it is supposed to work. Naming accurately represents how tool is working. So, Great! Or no? Of course not! Weirdness is a trademark of Blender.

Let me explain:
As I want to remain mentally OK, I prefer left click for selection.
When you press shortcut B, for “Select border”, you just click LEFT button and drag rectangle.
When you press C for “Select circle”, after you just click LEFT button and drag your circular are selection.
When you press Space + 2 for “Lasso select”, you have to click RIGHT (!) button to preform lasso select.
Ok, let’s try it without shortcuts. On the left side, you have tool icons. So, naturally, I thought left click on icon would activate the tool, and it will act like when shortcut pressed. Nope. If you click Select Border icon, and you start to drag your rectangle selection with left mouse button, you will end up moving your already selected object. (And since you can deselect all only by explicitly pressing Alt+A, there is more than real chance you had something selected. So, you will move it.) Here comes the thing: If you are going to perform “Select border” by running the tool by shortcut, you are selecting with LEFT mouse button. But, If you press the icon, you are selecting with RIGHT button.

So, let me sum this up:
There are three selection modes available. Their inconsistent shortcuts are B, C, and Space+2. First two you use with Left button, and the last one with Right button. But, when using icons instead of shortcuts, you have to perform all three selection types with RIGHT button. This is crazy.

Solution: when clicking on icons, always use button which is predefined in settings – in my case Left. Moreover, Ctrl+ dragging the selection should add/remove objects from selection. Shift + dragging should always add to selection. Again, this is common sense.

Create cube. Duplicate it several times. Deselect all (Alt+A), Now select one of the cubes by clicking on it. Press shift and click on another one. You think you are going to add another cube to selection? Nope. You have to fire up one of the selection modes, and then start to selecting. Let’s say you want to select rest of the cubes by using Select Circle shortcut “C”. So, you press C and select all the rest of the cubes. But, then you decide, you do not want to have one of them in the selection. Naturally, you press Ctrl or Shift, and click on specific cube. Nothing. Cube is not deselected. You have to finish previous selecting session by pressing ESC, the fire up Select circle once again ©, and the finally you can deselect one of the cubes with Shift shortcut. But beware! If you fire up Select circle for second time, and by mistake you will not press shift while clicking to deselect, you will not be able to deselect anything during this session. You have to end it by ESC, and run Select Circle once again, and be precise to press Shift while clicking.

Selecting objects in Outliner is the same story. Let’s say we have 40 cubes. We want to select them all in outliner. Naturally, you click on first, scroll down, press Shift, and click Last cube. You will end up with two cubes selected. First, and Last. Selecting multiple objects by Shift-click first and last item in list, is one of several common rudiments valid across all areas in complete digital industry. Not in Blender
 To select multiple objects you have to use „Select Border“ tool, and draw rectangle over items you want to be selected. This will highlight the objects, but still objects are not selected. You have to Right click in outliner, and choose „Select“ in context menu. Now the objects are selected. If you want to deselect some of them, guess what? Shift+ click on selected item will deselect it! (So, Shift can sometimes work
)

Let me ask politely. What the actual fck? Blender devs, did you ever evaluated user experience with your tool? This is one non-systematic dirty mess.

Manipulation schizophrenia part1:
When you have object selected, click on it (or outside it. doesn’t matter) drag a bit when clicked, release and move mouse. It is glued to cursor until you click again, to release it.
Now, enable translation manipulator. Do not click on manipulator. Do exactly the same as above (clicking on, or outside the object, drag little bit, release). Now, the object is not glued. At the moment you release button, translations tops. Why? I don’t know


But manipulator itself is acting weird as well. When you click on manipulator’s axis, you can translate object in axis direction. Moreover, finally you have possibility to translate in specific planes. Which is great. But, if you want to translate object in view space, you have two ways how to do that. To click on the object or outside object (not on manipulator), and drag/move. Or to click precisely the white circle in the center of manipulator. If you click directly in the center of this circle (yellow dot), you will end up moving object not in view space, but in some of the axis – depending which axis is closer to the point you’ve clicked (on 1-2 pixel level!).

This is the concept I would suggest, if you want your users to get mad the quickest possible way.

Two different methods of translating. Not schizophrenic? My suggestion in “Selecting & Deselecting” paragraph solves this issue partially.

Manipulation schizophrenia part2:
Two ways of manipulating SRT (using gizmo, and using direct shortcuts) is strange, but OK. I understand. But, why Blender punishes those who wants to use gizmos instead of direct shortcuts, by forcing them to use crazy shortcuts? Space+G, Space+R, Space+S.
Solution: Put " Direct manipulation or Gizmo?" switch into settings. If Direct manipulation will be ON, everything will be like it is now. If Gizmo will be ON, you will be able to change S R T gizmos by pressing S R G shortcuts. Sounds simple? It is


Layout:
I respect non overlapping windows layout principle. But, I am unable to find any real logic behind it. It is 2018. Is there anybody who has single monitor setup? Blender layout logic is designed to work on single monitor. I know, you can duplicate window and move it to second or third monitor (and this windows does not minimizes itself when you minimize primary Blender window). But, this is in fact overlapping window, but done in ugly, non elegant way. Why is user not allowed to tear off some of the windows, and create layout of his own?

Example – if I want to work on object with has modifiers, constraints and some vertex colors on it, I am forced to switch from modifier stack constraints stack, and Data stack windows. There is no elegant way to tear it off, and lay it out according your preference. Only if you duplicate window, and switch it to show properties.
This simple example perfectly illustrates Blender’s weirdness. So, non overlapping logic, but we allow overlapping. Sticking to some outdated dogma, without re-thinking if this dogma is still welcomed nowadays.

So, the solution: allow to tear off any window easily. Non overlapping will be there still, and who likes it, can use it.

Left mouse button selection and 3D cursor:
I’ve been reading a lot of about those two things. Sure, you can switch buttons for selecting with left. And I’ve heard a lot of explanations why selecting with right button is so much better. Beginner will use it. But no Pro will switch. Because - habit. And because, Blender will never be the only tool they are using. Switch jumping between Blender, and (for instance) Realflow - switching between two different rudiments of control - will harm the effectivity and speed of work.
3D cursor is bigger issue. Not because it is there, and anybody who wants to understand why it is there, needs to go through several tutorials (and dig very deeply to find good use of it), but because of more serious thing. Let me quote my youtube comment post under “New 3D Cursor - Blender 2.8 Code Quest” video:

"3D cursor is and will be pain in the ass. (Now in 3D! ) In fact 3D cursor is nothing more than complication when you want to relocate origin of the object. Take look at good old Softimage. Moving origin in one click (holding ALT, eventually ALT+CTRL to snap it to everywhere you want). I’ve been reading quite a lot about 3D cursor, and I was trying to figure out why it is so important. Everybody speaks on first place “you can create new object in position of 3D cursor”. Holy socks! This is it? Precise modeling requires ultra easy and quick origin relocation. Everybody who comes from any other software is just laughing. If Blender guys could copy temporal origins/ center functionality from XSI or Maya, their prehistoric 3D cursor will nobody use.
_But more serious thing is the fact, that for 3D cursor there is exclusively one mouse button reserved. Sh*t. _
One of three buttons on your mouse! On your right(or left) hand - the hand you control your mouse, you have just three buttons. Three important buttons. And one is for 3D cursor. No way I can understand this. 
You know why Blender do not have context menus? Yes. Thanks to 3D cursor.

So, quickly coming to the main blender showstoppers:

1 - no way to efficiently, and quickly relocate origin (moving the origin to 3D cursor position is not quick, nor efficient)
2 - universal snapping - why the hell I can snap only to vertices, only to edges, only to faces. OMG. (and with crazy Shift+TAB shortcut). Universal snapping means, you can snap on anything what you define - edges, midpoints, centers, faces - all at once.

Blender guys, do this two things, and you will see how many new users will migrate
”

I knew, after my comments, haters will start screaming. And so happened. Blaming me for not using Blender properly, and writing nonsense. This led me to write new comment with practical example:

“OK, not lowering the discussion to nonsense level. I may be mistaken, but it seems that you was never working in other software than Blender. And by “working” I mean at least 1+ years of daily use.
Let’s take specific example. Create cube, and rotate it’s top polygon around one of the top vertices. (with default shortcuts in all the programs)

_Blender: Ctrl+A - Mesh - Cube, Tab (edit mode), Ctrl+Tab - choose vertex, A (to deselect all, because everything is selected), click to select desired vertex, Shift+S - cursor to selected, Ctrl+Tab - choose face, click to select desired face, _
In the menu “Pivot center for rotating and scaling” choose “3D cursor” (to use 3D cursor location as pivot point (by the way, now it is pivot, not origin
) ), click to activate rotate manipulator, finally rotate polygon.(or, if you do not want to use manipulator, just press R, and desired axis shortcut)

Maya: Click polygon cube button, F11 (polygon selection),selecting desired polygon, E (rotation manipulator), D+click on desired vertex (for temporally moving pivot to selected vertex location), finally rotate polygon

Softimage: Primitive - Polygon mesh - Cube, Y (polygon selection), selecting desired polygon, C (rotation manipulator), Alt+click on desired vertex (for temporally moving pivot to selected vertex location), finally rotate polygon

Now we did one of the simplest operation in three different programs, How much clicks and key presses it took?

Softimage: 6 clicks and key presses
Maya: 6 clicks and key presses
Blender: 16 clicks and key presses

Do I have to say something more? Do you still think I am writing nonsense? Next time, review your words, think, and do your own research before blaming someone of writing nonsense. In examples above, you can totally clearly see how obsolete, and archaic 3D cursor thing is. Moreover, 3D cursor is the one and only reason why this simple operation was done in 16 steps in Blender


Your blind 3D cursor worshiping has simple explanation - you have no other choice. You have no other choice to quickly move pivot point without this damn thing. Open your eyes. Look from different perspective, and you will see, that 3D cursor is unnecessary connection between object and it’s pivot. As soon as there will be possibility to efficiently move, and snap pivot in Blender, 3D cursor will loose it’s sense
 Ok, most of it’s sense. I am not against 3D cursor as a tool for position newly created objects. But I am against using 3D cursor as a tool for relocating pivots.

_Do not get me wrong - I am big fan of Blender. I would love to work with it. But from the nature of my work, I must look at things rationally. More clicks means more time spent. And, of course, more space for errors, and misclicks
 _

Blender developers are doing one fatal mistake right now - they are aiming more to newbies, than professionals. Newbie doesn’t care. Pros do. And when they open Blender, and at first they find selecting with right click, and will see that Shift is not behaving like it use to behave everywhere, duplicating is not Ctrl+D, but Shift+D, snapping is crappy, and when they find out, that for moving the pivot they need firstly position the 3D cursor, and then snap pivot to it
 oh my god.

There is a recipe to make blender awesome. Just developers need to listen to pros, and follow some old rules, and standards approved by time. As soon as the argument for different approach is “Because Blender”, things are getting wrong.

Sorry for long post, but I believe there will be more people reading this, and I am always open to communicate on rational basis.”

There were some more comments from enthusiast, but several Pro’s agreed. You can check the discussion further on your own


So what to say in the end? No other program provided me so much love and hate in one package. Blender is like big bag full of great ideas made by really talented people. But inside, there is almost no order. Blender 2.8 makes this bag looking great, but inside, the mess is still there. I could write several more pages, about issues I have. ( We can speak about dopesheet and timeline controls inconsistent logic, new features like hair shader (missing root and tip color slot), possibility to drag and drop parameters as driven animation property, direct scripting keyframes through keyframe icon
).

For now, I will let it all here, in a hope that someone hears me. In case of interest, I would gladly participate on any action that will lead to making Blender my weapon of choice.

Marek

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wouldn’t this do the same thing?

1- shift-a → mesh cube
2- tab (to edit mode)
3- a (to deselect all)
4- click vertex select mode
5- set the median point to active element
6- shift-click the top 4 verticies ending in the one you want to rotate around
7- r to rotate

that would be either 7 or 10 clicks or keys, (depending if you want to count the 4 clicks in step 6 as either 1 or 4)

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Hi Marek, I’m not a developer, I’m a professional blender user, but I’ll give you my opinion on what you say.

Start by saying that I agree on the bottom of the question of what you say, although some examples seem wrong (Blender and its 3D cursor improves performance as a modeler a lot, maybe not in that particular rotation, but the average is to give an incredible speed). And probably attract haters, although there are not many here.

But going back to the main thing you said
 Yes, Blender Insitute completely ignores all professional users. It doesn’t matter what we think and say, it’s my vision after wearing blender for 8 years. We are completely ignored, not by the programmers themselves (with whom I had a very good relationship), but if blender as an entity. It doesn’t matter what we tried to be heard
 We don’t matter at all. And there’s not a single attempt to want to change that. My only way to explain it is that blender is the toy of a few people in their search for ego/success. Because I just can’t find any way to explain that a program like this hasn’t changed in the last decade the left click when it’s a value in the configuration that would have attracted tens of thousands of users. The only explanation is that someone has been embarrassed to admit their mistake during all that time. It is a childish behavior that guides many of Blender’s decisions.

Another perfect example would be the idea of eliminating the wireframe mode, which I don’t know how there was no one there saying it was crazy from minute one. It is clear that there are no real users helping in the design. This means that while users can make enough noise for the wireframe to return, they can’t make the same noise for a hundred other things.

During the last 4-5 years many professionals and users have asked for a series of changes in the usability of blender. To the point that some changes that you comment seem to me minor, there are much more serious problems. In blender 2.8 has been taken and ignored practically all those requests for changes that were minimal changes for what ultimately has been changed. On the other hand, the interface and abstractions of the program have been profoundly changed, without any weighty reason, in what seems to be a personal project of a couple of people who don’t seem to know how to use blender and who often seem never to have used it. And practically nothing has been heard of the changes that were requested from the professional public that in the end we are the ones who earn the salary using blender.

You can imagine this has generated a lot of anger, to the point that an hour ago a good friend of mine, after two years using blender decided to “send to hell” Blender and go back to Maya. Because he is tired of them laughing in his face. A professional looks for the same professionalism in the program he uses, and not to change things because someone has woken up one day with a magical idea. And that’s what blender seems to do, which doesn’t care about users (especially professionals).

I do not believe that anything that is said here is going to change anything. Not the points you comment, but in general. Blender can never be a tool to which one can entrust their salary because that is what is sought from the blender institute. That “freedom” that in the end means to ■■■■ professional users who have no voice or vote because as there is no connection sales / users there is not much we can do. I myself lost a job opportunity last week by saying that I was using Blender to model even though I made it clear that I could use the program they used (3DsMax). How do you transfer those problems to the Blender Institute? the amateurism image of blender doesn’t seem to matter to BI.

Maybe in 6, 8 or 10 years blender is a very established program but it is clear that it will not be thanks to the decisions that are being made today at the level of usability, which seem to be aimed at allowing disabled people to use blender, instead of professionals. It does not seem that we want to understand even the 3D industry, how expensive are the productions, the importance of the pipeline, third party tools, confidence in the tool 
 At the end blender seems more like an intermediate point in the way, a novice learns blender and one day he knows that he has to jump to another program to be taken seriously. Which is not the case with any other program.

Would it be okay if this changed? Well, it would be great, but I’m going to go back to Maya as the main software so I don’t worry about my future. Would I say this if I used other software? I don’t think so. And I would like it to change, but I don’t think any of this will change.

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Thanks for heads up on this thing. This is what I was seeking for - if somebody can show me the way how to use blender to compete Maya. This is easier than my approach. definitely. Still, origin relocation is much wiser, and much more versatile solution.

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I think the added orientation in 2.8 really improves the 3d cursor by a long shot. It’s now more like a working pivot thing. I have yet to do some more serious modeling in 2.8 - but having custom transform orientations on a click is very convenient. the default is sadly set to view orientation which isn’t all that helpful. And more often then not I do place it via move to activate, than clicking.

Totally agree on the selection behaviour, it’s such a low hanging fruit to improve
 To be fair, it can be customized to work almost the same like in Maya/max etc.

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Alberto. I am so sorry for your bad Blender experience. I can not believe hat you said. It simply does not have any sense. Why would BI ignore Pro users requests? Is there in Blender team any guy (or small group) who is a kind of integrator and user experience executive? Somebody who will tell that “Nope, we are not going to implement this way, because it will harm user workflow. We need to follow some strict rules, and we are going to implement it differently.”

This is the place, where I am calling some Blender development decision makers:

Guys, lets discuss. Is there any chance, Pro’s requests will be heard? Is there any plan to rationalize Blender user experience? If not, why? If yes, how, and when? Me, personally - I have the power to spread Blender over my company, and start to use it as primary tool. But at current state of thing, I can not do it. I need to see your vision. I need to know, if the time, which Alberto (and thousands others) spent with Blender will pay off some day? Most of the things I mentioned above, are tragic concept mistakes, and any Pro knows it. Will you be like a child, and ignore it, or you will carefully go through it , and start to think about it? All the time, we have spent by writing, testing, and learning Blender, is time which YOU should use to make Blender great. We are not highlighting problems, because we want to harm you. We are highlighting it because we want to have better Blender.

Ok, is there anybody who can seriously answer my questions, and start some productive discussion?

Marek

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And this is what I am talking about in reply to Alberto (about user experience). Is there anyobody out there, who changed rapidly your Photoshop shortcuts? I don’t think so
 Why? Because, by default, this thing is working. Default Blender is supposed to be so good, nobody will customize it massively. I am former Softimage user - I know only one person who changed his keymap. There was really great logic behind it - no need to jump from “A” to “F11” (like in Maya) in most cases. They followed strict logic. This is not Blender’s case. Everybody I know is adapting and changing shortcuts and customizing it, because default is bad.

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Hi there,

I’m on the Blender UI team. Overall, I tend to agree with your sentiment.

I can answer some of your questions.

Do we care about ‘pros’?
Of course. But institutionally, Blender has had the mindset of being its own thing. Some users even think that making Blender behave more ‘standard’ is dumbing it down or making it worse. There is resistance to change also from veteran Blender users.

However, to address the problems you point out, we are working in a few things that should help:

We are working on improved support for left click select, as well as an easier way to switch to it, right on the startup screen.
Here is the design task: https://developer.blender.org/T56702
This will make left click selection better supported, and will make it work better with the tools.

We are also developing what we call the ‘Industry Standard Keymap’ - a way to make Blender behave like a normal DCC app in the way it handles tools and interaction:
https://developer.blender.org/T54963
So, left click select (obviously), QWER for activating the basic tools, and so on. These keys will activate the gizmos, and so will make Blender behave much more like what you are used to.

Naming:
Blender was originally developed by people who weren’t native English speakers, and it shows. As you say, ‘Border Select’, ‘Circle Select’ are examples of poor use of the English language. Some of these we have and will change in Blender 2.8.
Design task: https://developer.blender.org/T56648

Layout:
Blender 2.8 now includes ‘Workspaces’. These make it so there is less of a need to use the old area-splitting dance. We expect that, with improvements, many users will simply use these Workspaces. As for multiple monitors, Blender has supported that for many many years, and artists in the Blender Institute studio use multi-monitor setups too.

I hope this answers some of your concerns. With some additional changes we are working on, Blender 2.8 should address at least some of your complaints.

William

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Alberto: This seems like a very incoherent and unproductive rant.

MarekHolly made a specific list of questions and comments, and those I largely agree should be addressed - at least I clearly understand the problems he is having with certain parts of Blender. I responded with a list of things we are working on to help address these issues.

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Look, there are many (most?) areas of Blender that are not perfectly done. I’m not here to say that everything in Blender is great or perfect. If you have a specific point or specific proposal, or specific patch, you are welcome to make it. A general unspecific rant is not really very helpful if you want to make a specific point.

There are also areas that all the developers know are lacking. Things like the NLA and animation layering, or dealing with Child Of constraints for dynamic parenting, just to name two examples. These things should be improved. But the problem is that we don’t have an active developer with free time working on this.

Developers do listen to users. But 1, there are many types of users and 2, in any coherent design there are some trade-offs. There are also limits in terms of development time and effort. We cannot make everyone happy all of the time.

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I made a lot of specific proposals, here you have some of them

And various videos with proposals that I thinkt hat some people have made patchs, like the new layout of columns

Or the fixed new areas

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OK, I can respond to a few of those:

1, Industry standard input: See the Industry Standard Keymap - it adresses this.

2: Top Bar: The top bar is for tool settings. Active tools use this area for settings relating to that tool

3: Hiding/Showing: This area is not complete. The plan is to bring back local mode, which had to be recoded due to the new Collections system. Hiding/Showing is now independant from viewport visibility to solve the problem that unhiding will then show all your items and collections.

4: Reference Images: One of the goals of Blender 2.8 was/is to make things more direct, more visual. Rather than having to support two different ways of implementing background images, it was decided a while back to make improvements to one of them, and remove the other. These types of background images have the potential to become more flexible because you can freely move them around, and when working with many viewports you don’t have to manually add them to each.

When developing complex software, it’s sometimes advantageous to remove some features to make things more maintainable over time with very few developers. This is sometimes wrongly interpreted, as with the game engine, as being some arbitrary crusade against certain functionality, when it’s really to keep Blender internally consistent, maintainable and ready for bigger and better upgrades over time.

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I understand that obviously you can’t read all those proposals in a couple of minutes, I don’t even ask that now, all of a sudden, you are going to read them all. But you stay in the title of the proposal and not in what those proposals actually say.

For example

In the standard keymap I don’t ask for such a standard. I was actually against that idea. Things should be simple, changed in the default keymap and that all users are mostly unified in that keymap. That is the keymap that all users use at the end and mostly ignore templates from other applications.

Background images. Currently the background images system is still implemented in Blender and there is no intention to remove it. It has only been left to work only on cameras. If the system is still implemented I see no reason not to leave it improved in blender and not to break the workflow of hundreds of artists who prefer it for obvious reasons. Well, the new empty images have many regressions that there will be no way to solve due to the nature of that system.

The topbar, although I personally don’t like it in general (although for sculpt it’s very good), it’s not about that my video, it’s about being a customizable area like any other area. And not a fixed area at the top of the screen that makes life very difficult for people like me who use several large monitors. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a customizable area.

And so are mostly my proposals and those of many other people, who beyond focusing on big ideas are fixed in the small details that can not be seen unless you are a very advanced user of Blender. Because those details are what make Blender great software, and they are the ones that are being lost.

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In the case of the keymap proposal, after reading many many paragraphs, I don’t even understand what your point is, or what you even want. You write that we should use industry standards, yet you are also annoyed that we use standards. In the end you write ‘And above all, nothing matters.’ What is it that you propose? I cannot even figure it out.

The industry standard keymap is not the default, so again, what’s your point precisely?

It seems like you are arguing for and against standards at the same time - and also both for and against changing things. The result is a proposal I don’t know how to respond to, because I don’t understand what you are trying to say.

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Hi William

Many thanks for reply. Your post gave me some hope, that there are people in Blender team, who knows what’s wrong. On the other hand, I’ve also lost some hope. Because there are old Blender daddies who will be always against anything. So, this is quite a bad situation. Old vs new Pros will never came to any rational agreement. Never. That’s for sure.
So, I see only one possible output to successfully achieve win-win situation. Two official Blender branches:

First should be as it is right now. This would be for those Blender users who are not willing to change paradigms.

Second should be aimed to Pros who are switching from other DCC, and have their habits, and want to work with Blender similar way they use to work with their previous apps.

Me, as an owner of company which is working in animation/games/VFX area, I would gladly put some money to support this branch. And I am pretty sure, there will be much more guys, (even individuals) like me.

I can imagine this quite well - New things to implement and/or to change would be sorted by votes from registered supporters.

This could really lead to win-win situation. Old Blender pals will have their good old Blender, and Pro newcomers will have much easier situation. In the end,Blender will have some more money, and will much more easily penetrate do bigger studios.

Is it in your powers to propose something like this to wider audience of Blender executives?

Thanks

Marek

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Tbh I’m strongly against this proposal. Segmentation of User Bases doesn’t seem like a good Idea. But who am I to decide.

Also with Application Templates - you kinda have most Tools you need for that already.

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Well, the good news is that Blender is very flexible. It can be customised in different ways for different people, so we don’t need to do an actual fork.

With the ‘Industry Standard Input’ keymap, Blender will, more or less, behave as you suggest it should. When opening Blender for the first time, users will be presented with this option.

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Hello Bill! Thanks for dedicating time to answering concerns here :slight_smile:
I recently bought a second monitor (I’m an animator, so I wanted dedicated space for the dopesheet/curves), and seeing that you mentioned that many artists at BI also use multiple monitors I wanted to ask you something.
Do you guys have some trick for having two windows/instances of blender active at the same time?
I use windows, I think you guys use Linux, right? Does it have an option in Linux for it?
On windows I have basically three options:
-have to click on the second non-active window every time I want to make it active (worst option)
-set a windows configuration to make a window active on mouse hover after x miliseconds (a little better option), but disrupts the rest of the OS usage.
-use a single Blender window and stretch it to fill both monitors. (what I’m using now, its the best option because it’s instant interaction each monitor, without disrupting the OS usage
 but requires dragging/expanding the window every time you open the file).

Thanks!

Edit, also, I cannot express how happy I am on reading this: :heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

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Well, we already support what is called click-though, so you can select objects even on a window that is not active.

Some people use what is called ‘sloppy focus’. It’s an OS-setting that makes it so it always activates the window that is below the cursor. AFAIK many of the Blender artists in the studio use this.

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I still don’t understand. Your proposal is what exactly?

I have read many many posts on various forums. The point of a feedback topic is not necessarily that Blender developers precisely as each post dictates. Many of the posts conflict and want different things, so that’s not even possible, even if we had the will, the time and the manpower.

If you could clearly explain what your proposal is, then at least it could be considered. But these rants are not very clear or helpful if you have a specific proposal. I don’t know what ‘paranoia’ you are referring to.

As the OP in this thread writes, he would love to use Blender 2.8, but has found that Blender is still too deviant from common industry standards in terms of basic controls and input. We have a plan to address this by improving left click select and by implementing an industry standard keymap.

Is there anything constructive you want to add?

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