Linux Graphics Users
March 28, 2024, 03:19:45 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Thank You
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

How do you rate Blender

Poll
Question: How do you rate Blender
Awesome!! "I Love It" - 1 (25%)
Good - 2 (50%)
Fair - 1 (25%)
Awful - 0 (0%)
I use Blender to make good Black Russians - 0 (0%)
Total Voters: 4

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: How do you rate Blender  (Read 7423 times)
Digitante
Newbie
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 11



View Profile
« on: March 19, 2008, 05:19:53 pm »

Blender grows on you.

I know my first reaction to the GUI was to scream and hide from my monitor. It's like trying to pilot a 747.

There are some big problems with the documentation in that it appears to assume more familiarity with the discipline of 3D modelling (e.g. that you've been doing 3D graphics with some other program and now want to learn Blender, instead of trying to learn 3D graphics with Blender, which is my actual situation). Thus, a lot of basic overview information is just missing from the documentation, leaving you to try to piece the missing parts together from what's there. That's not good.

To make matters worse, the published "Official Blender Guide" book starts with a tutorial (the Gingerbread man) that was broken by interface changes between 2.3x and 2.4x versions of Blender. Which means you have to actually go to the online documentation to find updates to figure out what's wrong. What's more, when I searched Blender Artists for information on this problem, I found snarky RTFM comments suggesting it was inappropriate to ask about this problem on the forums. That's not friendly when the problem arises in the Quick Start tutorial!

Also, I have serious pedagogical issues with the "hot keys only" approach to teaching certain concepts. While it is no doubt extremely useful to learn the hot keys in order to be productive with Blender, it's a lot of extra memorization for a newbie. Moreover, there is no way to learn where an item is in the menu from the hot key, while every menu entry tells you what its hot key is (this is also meaningful because the menus group similar tasks together making it easier to find a related task). Thus, it would be more useful to teach the menu approach first, and allow people to pick up the hotkeys from the self-documenting menus (of course mentioning both is fine, too).

Another problem with the hot keys approach, especially for newbies, is that it can be easy to miskey -- especially when the meaning of a key combination may depend on context ('X' for example), and when there are Alt, Ctrl, and Shift variants which may or may not be related. Combine this with the lack of a global "Undo" option, and it's a very unforgiving interface. One little mis-key, and your work can be trashed -- you have to go back to your last saved version. That is also not very friendly.

However, once you do piece the missing bits together, the rest of it starts to make sense.

In fact, I now find myself missing Blender GUI features in other programs. It would be really cool if Blender could somehow release a generic BlenderGUI toolkit for writing other programs using the same GUI design (I understand from queries to developers that this would require some refactoring, so it's not likely to happen soon). I can definitely think of applications for which the Blender GUI would be more appropriate (CAD for example).

So, while I would say Blender has a lot that can be improved, it's still an excellent program. It's also far and away the best free software 3D modelling program.
Report Spam   Logged


Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMFFree.com - Create your own Forum

Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy