Reading some answers … mh … the word “complain” in various answers. Sorry, but its not about “complaining”.
. Just saying it’s bad doesn’t really help anyone.
The simplest thing is to refer oneself to people who refer about their opinion that someone “complains”.
I agree, complaining does not help.
It might help if you were to say what’s wrong with the UI
What could be the reason I spoke about complexity, about comparing applications?
Speaking about complexity could result in speaking about complexity, loosing its connection to Blender … you are right if you have doupts. But, please, share your doupts in a way which does not mark everything I said as “useless complains”. You did not use those words that way, but thats the message I read in your writing.
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LMB/RMB are customizable…well until you hit something like weight painting. Then you can’t select bones if you set select to LMB.
It was a true Bug within my public X Driver. Rather not the Blender-UI, it also could not be solved tweaking the UI. ATI stopped supporting my very old card, so I had to use the public X driver.
I changed to a newer one. Now it does not freeze any more, it works.
It is possible that customisations clash. But not only in Blender. I love Ubuntu, its visual simplicity. But its defaults reserves some Alt-key and STRG-Key combinations. Thats annoying, clashes with Blender and other apps. First thing I did, I disabled some Alt/STRG-bindings in Ubuntu.
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Zalamander said …
If you ask Blender users what focus they would prefer, Polished UI vs. Increased Functionality, they would probably go with functionality.
Following Blenders Forum, I share your opinion. But its not only about functionality. It has to be “astonishing” to be noticed.
I am not sure that much people care e.g. about the normalisation tool in weight painting, which still includes every vertex group in its normalisation routine. If you have multiple armatures (avoiding dependency circles in the tail) and you use vgroups to specify modifiers, that “normalize all” could mess up everything.
Ok, I split up my mesh to keep the vgroups seperate. Normalisation does not make problems that way. But, as I finished my work, I found out, that “copy vertex groups” does not only copy a vgroup to another object, it overwrites existing vgroups! We not only need functionality, functionality itself has to be complete, it has to be coherent.
I am not sure that many people noticed the Normalisation issue, did not found anything mentioning it. Many notice “astonishing” features, there is applause everywhere. I do not have a good feeling participating this. Applause wont enhance coherency.
Now, I think, there is a developer working on this Normalisation issue. Normalisation will get better in future.
Sadly, Blenders development fund is limited. Blender grows. We need more developers.
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if you were talking about Blender from 2.49 back… but the UI changes that were made starting with 2.50 … Can it get better…absolutely, and I’m sure it will over time.
Working with Blender 2.67.1 … its the version I speak about. I agree, it enhanced. Panels could be collapsed. Some day, Blender got an outliner, I think it could be a very important tool. Sometimes I thought that its name filtering routine could be ported to Python (Python Custom Nodes). Could we use the Outliner together with the Node Editor to do some repetive stuff?
But the User Interface is still complex, its distracting. Counting 113 UI elements on blenders startup — an eye has to gasp it. Comparing Blenders Sculpting with Sculptris (UI). Their functionality are similar, they even share some bugs. But, in the UI there is a difference.
In Blender there are tools doing similar tasks: “Clay/Draw/Draw(SculptDraw)” or “Flatten/Polish”. I think, it would be good to ged rid of tools which do nearly the same in sculpting.
There are additional UI-Doodles a user has to care about, distractions.
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Simplicity is really hard to achieve, especially with a program that is meant to be powerful.
I tried out Maya learning edition. In my opinion, its User Interface is complex, and distracting, too.
Never tried 3D Studio. Sadly. The money bareer is something which keeps me from comparing 3D-Applications in depth. But, it seems, in 3D-Apps there is generally a complexity problem.
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I got used a lot with blender ,maybe cut of some more “useless” buttons and make the default look a bit cleaner ,that’s all…
I dont think it will be that easy. But I am glad you answered
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but I am not convinced about the “minimalistic simplicity -> better artistic freedom”.
There is a Quote I like … but I cannot find it in english language.
“The simplest is not always the best. But the best is always simple”
An artist has to keep focussed on his task. Artistic freedom is limited by distraction, as it threatens his focus.
As I try to draw with a medium I never used before, it was more difficult for me to get proportions right.
Our ability to focus, its the bottle neck our creativity has to flow through.
Thats the reason I keep speaking about simplicity in the UI.
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Panels are placed by coders, its not the user who decide it. They stack in Blenders UI, side by side. In my Opinion, this is a serious obstacle in achieving simplicity in the UI. Several people in this thread mention this. Thank you.
An Idea might be, to register addons together with tags and a “summary” description. Would it break existing addons? An Addon using
bl_space_type = ‘PROPERTIES’
bl_region_type = ‘WINDOW’
Could raise a deprecation warning: “Warning: registering addons to spacetypes / region types is deprecated”. Where / whether they are placed, the User decides. He could search for addons and filter them (only display addons relating to Tags “Armature” “Bone” “Constraint” in the “addon-browser”(?)). Primary, panels would be accessible within the “addon-browser”. There need to be a way, to load a panel into the Toolbar or the Property bar.
In different screens it needs to be possible to place different properties (e.g. into the toolbar of the 3d-Win.)
You can experience something similar in Ubuntu (the new Gnome, or Unity dash).
Thats an idea I like to share. Its on you to decide whether its useful, its also on you to share your ideas. Thats this thread for.
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But Blender is a 3Dsoftware able to do complex professionnal work.
You have to learn the map of the wide 3D domain to start to play.
IE had an Idea, I think its a very good one.
I hope it wont be forgotten by the community!
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26998&sid=71c4e8633a5887122c1025aaf5e98d5c