An Opinion --- User Interface, Blenders Future?

Blenders strength and its limitations.
I believe, it is important to see both sides.

One of Blenders weakest points (in my opinion), is its User Interface. The reaction against those who spoke about it were often similar. Someone who has doubts will be drown out by those who praise its User Interface as something very good. With fast key binding workflows. Or, those are told the User Interface would be a matter of taste. And, its told that Blender is “free”. That way those who are honest (see both sides) are pushed into silence.

HOWTO.txt ~~~> How to praise away any progress?
( allow me a little joke :–} )

There are threads dealing with Blenders strength. Its my aim to start a thread dealing with its User Interface. Its not my aim to push blender down. I like to put a counterweight to the balance.

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Comparing some software (its User Interface) helps me to develop my opinion.

E.g.
… compare Synfig Studio with (sadly unstable/incomplete) Tupi.
… compare GIMP with MyPaint.

Please, dont say, they cannot be compared because of differences in complexity. They can, the differences in their complexity is even the reason I do!

I think understood something doing this.
The aim to make functionality accessible for users miss something.

A User Interface needs to hide complexity from a user, make its possibilities understandable, and protect the user from being distracted from his task.
It keeps out of sight what is not needed.

Thats what I learn comparing different UIs.

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Of course, Blender could attract by its strength, its features. But, there is no doubt, everyone who likes to use Blenders strength, is confronted with its distracting User Interface.

There are postings in the internet of people who give up using Blender on this point, overwhelmed by its User Interface. Some even “hate” blender because of it. Sorry. But I think, they have reason doing so.

For me, those tell us a message. Blenders features attract. At the end, the User Interface dominate, it paralyses and disappoints the user. He gives up.

We Blenderers are “brave”, the chosen ones! We keep struggling, we grew and now we are able to use it — more or less.

The UI changed. It enhanced. Good workflows are possible, but Complexity and Distraction is still a problem in my opinion.

I look forward for PIE-Menus. Maybe, the Outliner absorbs Blenders Layering? What about the Properties-Window? There are some interesting things going on. But, primarly, I am interested in the development of the UI.

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You might think different, but I believe, “awesomeness” and useful features wont bring blender further as it is.

An UI which keeps in Background, with users who arent even aware using it.
How could Blenders complexity be tamed by an User Interface?

I believe … my naive thought … that this question could change Blenders future.

This is just my opinion, but I would totally agree with you if you were talking about Blender from 2.49 back… but the UI changes that were made starting with 2.50, were most welcome, and a huge improvement over the old design. Can it get better…absolutely, and I’m sure it will over time.

What it still lacks, in my opinion, to get new users really attracted to it quickly, is a good number of presets all across the board that they can use as a starting point… This will instantly make any new user to blender get much more comfortable figuring out the program, particularly the overly complicated, but very effective node system.

For me the blender Interface is so clean and i undestand it i just know where all stuff is and where to expect it. It is just so simple. I was working with 3dsmax. and i many times was like they say easy interface!? kidding me. Blender interface is really good and simple once you understand it it is okey. i don’t know why it is so much complaint about that it is not good etc.

I really like interface of programss such as:
Modo
blender
Photoshop.
Corel
Finall Cut Pro

The interface of programs with i hate the most are:
3dsmax, great program but that inteface i can’t get it.
Gimp. No doubt hear.

I wouldnt go as far as to say Blender’s interface is clean. It has a nice aesthetic sure, but it does suffer from “being all over the place”. It’s pro’s are easily how windows work within the application, yet in many ways it can be streamlined. The more thats added to Blender, the more space it needs in the UI, and for many the more hotkeys you need to press. The UI has to start stream lining and organizing itself in a better fashion at that point or else it just becomes hard to manage and or work with.

I agree with this. The people who complain about Blender being weird haven’t tried it lately. It is more customizable than Modo, for instance, or Lightwave, or Houdini. The thing I want from a UI is to just get out of my way… but that is because I work with a mouse and keyboard. If you work with a tablet, you want something that has easy to access palettes, or even pie menus. That isn’t a big deal with me. I prefer hotkeys I can customize.

To each his own. But presets are good.

That’s true houndini is really great App but you haveto be coder to use it.

I can work with the UI as it is now, and just wait for the improvements to arrive where the viewport works better and we have better control over the output and use - then the ui can get planty of love if there are diehards that want to tackle it. Harley was working on a few different things awhile back, and some others were drawing up some interesting changes to the tool panels and menus. Pie menus might be interesting for those on tablet, but I see it as arguing over a paint job scheme on a car when you aren’t done rebuilding the engine :smiley:

It might help if you were to say what’s wrong with the UI. Just saying it’s bad doesn’t really help anyone.

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…

One of Blenders weakest points (in my opinion), is its User Interface. The reaction against those who spoke about it were often similar. Someone who has doubts will be drown out by those who praise its User Interface as something very good.

I have yet to see anybody praise Blenders UI as “very good”. On the other hand, I have seen people who “speak out” make completely unspecific complaints that aren’t really useful.
A lot of people also like to complain about things that are essentially customizable, like LMB/RMB or hotkeys. Sometimes people just have a different opinion on what constitutes good UI.
Also, a lot of the time people are simply newcomers who have yet to understand why certain complexities are not hidden from them. Simplicity is really hard to achieve, especially with a program that is meant to be powerful.
Lastly, even if we did figure out what’s wrong with the UI and how to fix it, somebody would still have to implement it. A lot of Blender UI flaws are known issues that people just haven’t gotten around dealing with. If you ask Blender users what focus they would prefer, Polished UI vs. Increased Functionality, they would probably go with functionality.

LMB/RMB are customizable…well until you hit something like weight painting. Then you can’t select bones if you set select to LMB.
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=35031&group_id=9

Okay, I’ll bite.

Blender’s UI is very good. Ton compared it to skateboarding and I find that very apt. Once you have mastered it, work becomes extremely efficient. You’re also likely to fall flat on your face many times before you master it.

Dude, they’re all useless since you can do pretty much everything from the python console… you might wanna be a little more specific maybe?

Why debate it now? First of all the 2.50 GUI changes was started like, what? 3-4 years ago. And just got completed.

I’ll bite also.

Blender UI

For me it’s the best, honestly. People complain whom I show blender to. And they’re amazed that I know almost all the short cuts in my head. Blender has a very straight forward approach compared to XSI for an example. for Rotate,Translate, Scale. Blender has consistent use of Alt, Shift, Ctrl keys.

If you know like Box Select, is B. Circle select is C. CTRL+B makes a Render Border etc.

Wacom has always worked great for me with blender, and other HCI devices seems to get integrated quickly. Like that 3dspace thingy.

Blender GUI

I think it’s way more responsive than many other Apps since it’s custom written in C. That’s the good thing, although I just blurped out that before doing that frameworks like QT could have been considered. but then your dependent on that framework. and what if it starts to die out with devs (very very unlikely for Qt).

But it’s easier to customize visually, and you should have gotten a super robust base to work upon. And atleast 1 year of dev time could have been spared.

In the end it was for the best I think they rewrote the whole thing, quite hug amount of work but it got done.

I don’t know ,but actually I meant , blender should have : BlendModel > Shows only model related buttons, BlendAnim:shows only animation related buttons.

And ,I personally haven’t pressed many buttons using the click button lol,just by using shortcuts.
Scale/Rotate/Move …

But in that sense, we already have purpose driven UI - the extended options don’t appear for texturing until you enter Texture Paint mode, for example. Edit functions do not appear in Object mode, and sculpt settings only appear in that mode. In certain instances, I think you can see things and manipulate them and that is a good thing, especially for animation on the fly. That would be a feature, not a fault.

edit: +1 to ejnaren’s comments below

I too agree that Blenders UI “is all over the place”. Especially eith addons that are both in the toolbar, the properties bar the oprions bar or in menus etc. Its har d to keep track.
But is has come a long way since 2.4x and is still moving (pie menus, custom toolbar, image paint gismo etc.).

I think the problem is that when you have so many functions you try to cover you need a lot of knobs and buttons. Maybe it can be optimized to not show all of them all the time, but I am not convinced about the “minimalistic simplicity -> better artistic freedom”.
A plane has a lot of functions. If a plane only had a few buttons it would be quite hard flying the thing.
Its how they are organized that solves the problem of finding the right tools in my workflow…

@MadMinstrel + Ton - Wuahhahahaa! Nice! I have a skateboard and it is true :smiley:

I disagree with the concept of default interface hiding complexity to help newbies to concentrate on basics.
The user have to take its responsability and knows what he needs to see and what he needs to hide.
It is not to devs to choose for him.
And blender interface is quite customizable.
You can create your screens and hide what you want by python scripting.
The problem is that UI python scripts are used as a general preferences.
And there is no easy way to hide panels only for a specific project.
I am missing 2.49 free alignement of panels and overlaying of panels (that was a fast way to hide unneeded panels).

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.

I wish there is an education 3D FOSS that looks like anim8or to help people to become more familiar with 3D.
But it does not mean that the most famous 3D FOSS should become this app.

Is there same kind of thread on K-3D forums ?

In regards to B,C and almost all blender ops, my problem with them is they are almost all modal, I like the way Softimage has both ops and tools (you can use delete both as action and as a tool-replacing selection). Also sticky keys from Softimage or Photoshop would be most welcome, although they could be possible in the shortcut editor but I’m not sure. Other than that I like Blender UI and the options of customization very much.

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 :slight_smile:

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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. :slight_smile:

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. :wink:

— Edit —

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