Headline is misleading, TFA says it's the last maintenance release in the 4.x series so if anything, big changes are expected in the 5.0 beta whose planned release date was two days ago as mentioned at the end. So are there any news for 5.0 yet? I loved Sketchup and sure looked forward to Blender releases over the years but it's anything but a tool for casual 3D scene modelling or level design, requiring a huge time investment for learning and keep memorizing its awkward UI.
> requiring a huge time investment for learning and keep memorizing its awkward UI.
Have you actually given Blender a serious try? You don’t actually need a huge time investment to get efficient with its basics, maybe 1-3 days with a tutorial.
When it clicks and you memorized just a handful of shortcuts, the UI is mindblowingly intuitive and consistent, pure bliss. To the point where everything else feels wrong.
And let’s be clear, the payoff here is using a fully capable professional tool of nearly infinite complexity. It’s not a toy, niche, or compromise, but widely used across the industry, up there with commercial giants.
Replace language, language is Pleistocene technology.
Replace binary, binary is dated technology, trapping us in counting, not measurement.
Pretty silly, using these dead and dying tools, Blender, as ieal seamless animation/rendering/editing software, point the way to visual software.
>it's anything but a tool for casual 3D scene modelling or level design, requiring a huge time investment for learning and keep memorizing its awkward UI.
It’s a lot better than it used to be, however, your argument that’s it’s merely a casual tool is incorrect. Features films have been made with it. AAA games have used it. Your frustration is your own. Knowing 3D, I find blender extremely welcoming. Sure, it could use some more work on texture painting but it’s got grease pencil which is a god damn game changer.
I presume they meant "anything, but" as in it's not perceived as a casual tool. Basically, Blender appears to them as too complex and intimidating.
I think, we can agree that Blender does look intimidating, when you open it first time. I would also say, you absolutely need a tutorial to get started, if you know nothing about 3D stuff. You can actually, get into Blender very quickly, if someone explains basic concepts, but probably not at all just by yourself.
For starters, randomly clicking around will sooner or later freeze/crash your PC, because you did an expensive calculation on a billion accidentally duplicated vertices. In contrast to other creative apps, with 3D modeling/rendering exploration is a lot less forgiving and you can easily choke the best hardware available. (I wish Blender was a bit more patronizing when it comes to resource exhaustion. Subdivision modifier set to 10 iterations, probably should give a warning by default :D) Some easy mistakes, are really hard to unfuck. Extra frustrating, when it's been pushed out of the undo buffer, before you notice. Just a tiny bit of theory can go a long way there. Geometry nodes is downright hostile/arcane to beginners, probably worse, if you already know some programming and think you can apply that knowledge :D It's super fun and powerful, but oh boy is the evaluation logic confusing/frustrating at times...
> I presume they meant "anything, but" as in it's not perceived as a casual tool.
Yeah sorry that's exactly what I meant. Could've probably made myself more clear.
Blender is a tool for working day-in day-out with its workflow (aka the "vi of 3D modelling") but is absolutely unsuited for casual one-off use. Its predominance shouldn't discourage devs to create or port alternatives IMO, though it's of course a massive task.
I agree with you there. It’s a program that open for at least 8 hours a day if you’re using it.
I’ve been trying to work on a simplified UI for blender for level editing (blender is completely extendable) but you still have the blenderisms present. Rendering to anything is buried to the right. Along with most of the things you care about. Its lack of UX is still apparent. Almost all of those things should be menu items with windows in a normal workflow. Blender isn’t that though and everything happens “on canvas”. I’m happy it exists. I’m happy to work with it. It’s not Maya or 3ds Max, but it combines a lot of tools into one open source package. Which is fantastic.
No but I like what they are doing. Most of my stuff is just custom blender python scripts and a different workspace view. Mainly focused on CSG/Booleans, entity placement, texturing, lighting, and triggers.
