How to Make Blender Industry Standard

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After many years of looking at Blender, I’ve decided it’s time to jump into it now that 2.80 is released. Up to this point, Blender has just been a bit too weird for me, but the changes to 2.8 makes the transition so much easier! Just the fact that left click is possible is a game changer. While there are 1000 new amazing features in 2.8, the biggest one for me is honestly that it’s significantly improved from a UX point of view.

What I like:
– The software is clearly extremely powerful.
– The modeling tools are quite solid
– Eevee and Cycles are awesome!
– The new UI is so much better than previous versions
– The Blender community is so friendly and is extremely eager to help! This makes learning it a lot more motivating and easier.

General Dislikes:
– It definitely needs another UX pass, as there are a lot of quirks still.
– Retopo and UV mapping isnt great
– It really doesnt play well with other 3D software.
– Blender still often feels like an old software with a new skin on top. It looks beautiful, but once you dig a bit deeper, some of the workflows clearly havent been updated in a long time.
– It’s extremely hotkey based. There are features I simply cant find in the UI, only by hotkey.

Specific Wishes:
– Quad draw style tool from Maya for Retopo
– Seriously pimp up the UV tools. They feel like they are from 2010.
– The Simple Deform shouldnt need an Empty to work
– C key stops the 3d navigation. This is super annoying. A modeling tool should never freeze the navigation.
– Searching in the modifier stack
– Isolate selected which does not move the camera, and is mapped to something more sensible by default. Alt Q or Alt X are great keys for that.
– Frame mesh without comma key on num pad. You really shouldnt have to move your hand to frame the mesh. This is one of the top 5 hotkeys I use the most.
– When deleting a mesh, it shouldnt ask to confirm. I literally just confirmed by hitting delete. I have ctrl Z if I want to undo.
– Move origin point with single click. Moving the origin is really annoying
– Add 3d view to render tab. When rendering, you always want a 3D view.

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There are lots of menus in Blender.
If something is not shown as an icon button, it should be present in UI under an item of a menu or inside a popover.

Blender is a software that have its own history and terms. If you don’t find something, maybe it is because you expect to find something that is named differently into the software you are used to.
It also happens that Blender have same ability of a tool, you know from another software, but presented differently. It may be a tool, that you already discovered, but that is doing more than you expect ; when it is combined with an option, that stays unknown to you.

Don’t hesitate to ask on a support forum how Blender users are dealing with same task. When you will be enlightened, you will be able to make a constructive critic.
Just don’t assume that Blender is not able to do what you did not find. Because it may be simply wrong. And there is also a chance that, eventually, you could prefer Blender way more than what you know.

It is already planed to improve them.
A task is opened about retopology : https://developer.blender.org/T67997
UV mapping should support UDIM in future release. There is a dedicated branch of development.
https://code.blender.org/2018/06/cycles-mini-code-quest/

Modifiers are using empties because it was simplest way to do it without creating widgets.
In 2.8, concepts of gizmos was added. They are currently limited to transform and edit mode tools.
But modifiers stack should become a nodetree. It is planned to transform each edit mode tool into a node in order to build modifiers more powerful than existing ones.
At that moment, those nodes will have to exploit correctly gizmos.

This tool has a modal keymap that uses same key as the one used for navigation. That is the reason.
But, in 2.80, you can use this tool as an Active Tool by selecting it in toolbar. Then, it will not bother you anymore while rotating view.

You can use Shift H to hide everything that is not selected. Alt H to reveal what was hidden. H to hide selection.
Under Object mode, you can use numbers 1,2,3 … of keyboard to keep only visible collection with same index number.
If you prefer to use Alt Q or Alt X, you have ability to remap shortcuts.

Same as above, you can change this shortcut and save it. Or you can add what you like the most to Quick Favorites Menu by overlaying corresponding item under corresponding menu and pressing Right Click.

Confirmation is optional. If you press Delete key instead of X, there is no pop-up.
That is just an option to uncheck into setting of shortcut.

There was a discussion about it. And developer in charge of UI accepted to modify that.

You can create as many workspaces as you want and give to each of them, desired layout.
If you want to add a 3DView to Rendering tab, you can slimply by splitting an editor that already exists.
Then, you just have to save your user preferences to make change permanent as for hotkeys.

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It seems like the threadstarter forgot to mention that this was not written by himself. This is copied directly from a thread on the “flippednormals” webiste, written by “Henning Sanden” one of the founders at flippednormals. He is currently testing blender for the first time and wanted to write down a few thoughts on why Blender will have a hard time becoming “industry standard”.

One thing that noone has replied to is blender interacts with other softwares already adopted by the industry. This appears to be a very critical part because blender doesnt support aloft of software formats being widely used by the industry
So i am wondering if anything will be done to the import/export features in future versions of blender?

Here is the link to the thread at Flippednormals.com.
https://flippednormals.com/forums/topic/why-isnt-blender-industry-standard-yet/

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blender dont support actively private formats, so if somebody wants to make the addon is free to make but devs don’t support that. at least until now that blender now will have support devs

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after read the list… i think that som problems are not real and solved time ago… for example, circle select is an active tool. he is using the old method. UVs are really powerful and retopo also. but blender is really dependent of the free addons

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I would like to change the C keymap as it is in the left click keymap which is a switcher among the various types of selection … how can I do this?

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Edit -> Preferences -> Keymap. Search for “C” and switch search option from “Name” to “Key-binding” to find the shortcut, or click 3D View -> Mesh -> Mesh (Global) to start searching and changing keybinds in Edit Mode. You will find the other modes in 3D View as well. 3D View (Global) has all the universal keybinds that are shared across modes.

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here we go … it works quite well, but it also activates the switch to the 3d cursor and breaks my boxes a little …
Screenshot%20(226)

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It seems Blender is already pretty close to having a Quad-Draw tool for retopology, it just needs to be fine-tuned.
I switched the input mapping of bpy.ops.mesh.dupli_extrude_cursor(rotate_source=True)
from Ctrl+RightClick to be just a single keyboard key and then I held the key down while moving the cursor around and quads are drawn out.
It’s not a good tool right now because it’s using the operating system keypress sample rate to lay down quads but if it was using a vector calculated from changing mouse positions then it should work beautifully.
Even if it just had a samples/second slider it would still work well enough to be useful.

Here’s a 9 second clip for inspiration in case someone wants to make an addon or adjust the C/C++ code to upgrade dupli_extrude.

https://vimeo.com/manage/353026645

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I think the link to the vimeo video is wrong

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Interesting.

Try to make it work in the Polybuild tool. :wink:

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What you said gives no useful information. What issue are you having? The video loads and plays for me when I click the link so do you take issue with the video’s content?

Great idea, I didn’t think to mention it to Pablo. I was just hoping someone would direct the idea to the right person in my absence but I’ll do it now since you pointed him out. Thanks.

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Screenshot%20(228)
Screenshot (228).jpg1343×681 162 KB

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this is more of his personal preferences than anything else especially for someone coming from maya and trying blender first time, it happened to many of us but there are solid points like improvements in retopo/uving, better interoperability…etc
if you spend more time with blender u get over the small differences between softwares.

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@MarcClintDion you just posted a wrong link (for managing)

https://vimeo.com/manage/353026645/general

as @ThinkingPolygons points out above, the link should be

https://vimeo.com/353026645/

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ohhh… thanks… how embarrassing.

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I think when referring to quad draw people mean maya’s quad draw in the modeling toolbox. Drawing strips of polys is not as useful in production as having the ability to tweak, relax topo ,add cuts, loop cuts and extrude edges/edgeloops using single tool.

I agree, some of the points are just thing’s he (if we still talking about Henning from flippednormals) missed or can be solved by using addons. However, he has some production experience and brings up some good points (admittedly, most of which have been brought up before).

Really glad to see them doing some Blender content though.

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