Blender - what is wrong?

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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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Hi.
I’m not sure what you mean by “active at the same time”. In Linux dual monitor configuration depends on the desktop (KDE, GNOME, etc) and the graphics card and drivers that you have. I use KDE and I have an nvidia card. Dual display is relatively easy to configure. Anyway, I’m sure that in Windows it is too.
Maybe you better ask this by opening a thread in Blender Artists forum.

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Edit3: Migrated to dedicated topic:

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For sure, I think we could make the reference images feature more powerful. It’s something we should do.

Some of those things seem like generally good, esp flip X/Y, and the ability to display always below or always on top.

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@billrey Thanks, and sure, that’s because those things are are things that we already have on BG Images on 2.79 and prior versions. Same with the options to hide all BG Images at once, or to set specific Axis to be displayed, as well as options to Stretch/Fit/Crop Images when set to Camera visibility only (which I didn’t include in the mockup). Those are things that were already there and we were accostumed to use :wink:

Because that’s when frustration arise… when we users are told that something we are accostumed to use is going to be replaced by something else, but when we look the new workflow we see that a lot of the flexibility and options we had are gone with no way to replace it (even though it’s known that it’s a work in progress).

The purpose of my post is to show that I, and a lot of users I’d say, are not against the change to Empty-Images… your devs work is amazing!! It just need to take the old workflow more into consideration when thinking what people expect to be there and therefore what should be added… I’ve shown that it’s maybe possible to add all the things that the old BG-Image had to the new system, so that old users feel comfortable, but also made even better for everyone.

Check with Pablo to see my post and I’m pretty sure he will agree, since he already mentioned in a livestream that both worlds could be combined :smiley:

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Hi,
I’m also a game developer who uses Maya at work, BUT LOVE Blender. At my work, we want to use Blender and replace Maya. I must to say, not many people (PROS) want this change, mainly for mayor deference between software’s logic of Maya vs Blender.

In the Industry We have Pro Maya user (20 years of experience), who showed me how quick Maya is in his hands (and everybody says, he is one of the fastest). After i saw his speed, I can confidently say, AFTER 1 YEAR OF EXPERIENCE I CAN USE BLENDER AS FAST AS HE USES MAYA after 20.

Blender is unique, all other softwares work on the same principle and I dont like it. I like freedom and Blender has it.

-My solution for DEVELOPERS-
Listen to both sides. Based on given information from users like @MarekHolly, Create Beginners tutorial right after splash screen for Pros from other softwares who wants to transfer to Blender.
If they knew from the beginning, Blender snapping is not based on pivot position but element position, they won’t be surprised, when it wont work.

Thank you for making Blender better for all.

P.S.: If I should name one thing, Maya has and Blender lacks, It would be working with UVs. Especially Perserve Uvs (or Correcion UVs) described here Modern UV workflow/ Perserve UVs Right-Click Select — Blender.Community
Please give it upvote :wink:

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