Some thoughts about Blender

I foud this on one site and I want to know your opinion.


Wouldn’t it be awesome if Blender were so capable that no one needed any other 3D app, putting most companies, like Autodesk, out of the CGI business?

I think so. But they need to so something about that clunky interface first.

Hahahahahahaha! Good one!

That’s nearly impossible. Blender developers will NEVER stop hindering it, because they DON’T respect the professional’s needs, nor even care to do so.

• Blender does everything its own way–and not necessarily in a smart way. MODO and ZBrush are unconventional, too, but MODO’s smart about their uniqueness and ZBrush’s just so freakin’ useful, you learn to live with its unconventional design.

But Blender? They just do things to be different. It’s not even a well-unified kind of different–it’s an amateurish different. A “lack of professional designers” different. And then wonder why the industry doesn’t adopt it more.

• They rely on ad-hoc development too much–no focused development with a singular direction at a time. There’s no oneness of mind with development–it’s just every man for himself, and fit it in wherever you can within Blender’s overcrowded UI. Scattered development, scattered product.

• Every thing anyone tries to help Blender by giving a leg up, the dumbass community tends to react poorly. When Chaos Group merely announced their official V-Ray support for Blender, a lot of people throw stones at the news, worried that a commercial third-party plugin would ruin their precious FOSS philosophy, and kept making shitty comparisons between V-Ray (an industry standard) and Cycles (a decent but pretty ordinary ray-tracing renderer).

Even their own Blender Market got criticism for selling premium addons–some of such addons wouldn’t even be possible, if weren’t for the market providing developers incentive for fuller-time developments. Most give a part of their funds to Blender development, and a few have proposed that they will eventually release the addons for free, once its developed enough–but yet, the self-entitled whiny Blender community still complains about anything asking for money–well, except those shitty Blender Foundation short films that people keep supporting.

• When most of your community are embarrassingly just novices and hobbyists, and you’re all about appeasing that community, you’re not being what it takes to excel as a professional-grade product.

Blender devs have made it clear that they’re about their community first–not the needs of the (few) professionals who use Blender at a higher caliber. They crucified this one guy (Andrew Price) for merely even SUGGESTING some changes for Blender’s UI.

The Blender users are smug fanboys who commonly attack Autodesk needlessly, when Autodesk hasn’t really taken swipes at Blender–nobody takes Blender seriously enough to worry. And fans always criticize when Autodesk seems to borrow an idea from Blender–never mind if Blender borrows them right back (like the Pie Menu that’s so “revolutionary” to Blender).

• Blender devs don’t need to merely “do something about” its interface–they need to give a complete redesign, from the ground up. Blender’s so stuff incoherently, that nothing is efficient. Nothing is truly integrated well together. They just keep compiling stuff together haphazardly without any thought or plan or structure to their effort. It has decent-enough features individually, but is a very inefficient multi-purpose application overall.

• As somebody once stated well on BlenderNation: “Blender’s problem is that it tries to master so many things, that it never masters anything at all.” Blender tries to wear so many hats, that it never finishes or specializes or refines any one of its aspects.

They have a texture-painting mode which can’t support 4K textures very well. They have a sculpting mode with no layers and no decent retopo tools. They have a compositor with no ready presets and no instant readiness with editing your freshly-animated frames. They have a game engine, but no one really uses it because it’s half-baked and the GPL license sucks. They have some decent addons, but no real unification or standard about development, so they vary in quality and clarity.

• People complain that Autodesk takes years to add a new improvement, but I guess they forget that it took Blender A DECADE just to add n-gon support–something so basic, that most 3D packages had this back in the 90s. It was only last year when they finally made Texture Paint a simpler set-up process–we had to live with a convoluted process just to set up a damn paint layer!.

They just only recently addressed improving their crappy FBX support, and we’re still waiting on Alembic support under way. They proposed an initiative for new remeshing system a couple years back, and have not said word of it since. They did the same thing with NURBANA. They abandoned the promising Array Sketch system built for Blender 2.5x.

They don’t complete a damn thing in a reasonable time frame. Even the “fast” progress they do is still all generally late. They’re just now catching up to volumetric lighting for Cycles in 2015 and wasting time on stereographic 3D nonsense. They felt the need to add an ocean simulator and 3D printing tool and camera-tracking tools, but not first work on a simple layers system for Edit/Texture Paint/Sculpt Modes?

Meanwhile, Maya’s moving ahead of the curve with geodesic voxel binding (which is handy as hell with animating mesh characters with attached separate parts such as clothing) and REAL advance simulations with Bifrost, and were one of the first to start supporting PBR workflows. Autodesk’s complacent, but they still lead the industry with cutting-edge. Unlike Blender, they actually WANT professionals using Maya.

I’m sorry, but you’re completely kidding yourself here. Blender is a fucking mess. It’s a noble effort that’s capable for small freelance jobs and mid-sized small-studios projects, but it’s not nearly competent enough for wide industry-level reliance. They can barely support the needs of their fledgling community heavy with mere novices.

I’ve been familiar with Blender since early 2.4x–they never learn. They never change. They tend to be stubborn against necessary changss. They will never reach greatness, because they’re too busy pandering to a mediocre community. Move on to MODO, if you want an alternative. I sure have.

My opinion is your post is too vague to provide much of a response to unless you’re trying to stir up contention and/or fanboy outrage.

What exactly do you want the opinion on? Is it the points raised in the post (& if so, which ones), the tone used, the overall recommendation at the end, or simply an opportunity to garner a “circle the wagons” response from BA?

No outrage intended! :smiley: I just wanted to hear from you on those specific points he/she wrote…

You think you very smart to veil your hatred on “bad software” by masking your thoughts like its someone’s else quote?

Yeah quotes without source… Link please. Trying to search google for pieces of the quote only results in this thread. Private discussion, googlebot has not found it yet, or… you decide.

I think it was on cgpeers.

When I see OP’s like this, I begin to play a game, I make 3 guesses about what their other posts look like, And then I check their profile and see,

I saw this on Twitter a couple weeks ago. As far as I can tell CGPeers seems to be a piracy community.

people write those angry comments, most of the time are the most unprofessional and unexperienced people about blender.

His post history would surprise you… I mean, it looks quite like a flame start, but his history (your game intrigued me ;)) shows a different kind of user.

I always think that those controversial criticism where is compared a single software (Blender 3D) with a dozen of other very good commercial softwares that do different things, it is indeed good propaganda for Blender. Even if they say that in each category where some of these software are specialized, Blender is not “the best”.

In fact he is not totally wrong I think, not on everything, but on some parts he said what lot of users don’t want to admit.

As usual here when things come to be embarrassing for BF, people reroute the topic over OP’s intentions, his background, skill and family, and so on, rather then face the naked truth, that is that, sadly, every single statement of the quote is absolutely true, whatever the reason.

paolo

Well, even with hate or not, most of those opinions are true. I love Blender, and it is my primary 3D software (I rarely use anything else, unless is a Maya or Max file from a client), but we can’t deny that most of what it says there is painfully real and spot on.

Just take a look on other CG forums outside BA and you will find pretty much the same opinions and answers by all sort of users, both hobbyists and professionals. Blender is and will always be the ugly duckling of CGI, but for those of us who use it, it is a “beautiful disaster” :wink:

too much expectation from a free software being developed by a handful of people.

This criteria, although somewhat hostile, does have some valid points. Dismissing it fully will not help with professional adaptation.

Blender has some of the strongest paradigms, amazing customizability, insane development speed and perhaps greatest potential in both short and long term. This software has weathered countless criteria and is evolving from its core while other major players have cooled off (focusing on acquisitions on top of stagnant, often broken core). Much good must be said about the developers as well!

UX however is not to be underestimated for new users/adaptation and things like I/O are important for professionals working with multiple softwares (instead of trying to excel at every single task). Also for every problem you face with max/maya you have a choice of several plugins. Here your have no plugin api (python goes pretty far though), no docs(for source), limited import/export and in general no means of working around these issues - it’s a major problem.

No one says blender is flawless, but! Every single package has its own pros and cons (read my thread about houdini below), despite the cost (being it free like blender or $3-10k for maya\houdini\cinema4d). When someone is writing “maya is crap”, nobody’s heart breaks,no one gives a *t about some anonymous, because its a big company with alot of money, with a lot people in charge who just work for salary (not a small one) and dont care much of what you think.
But with blender situation is completely different! Small team trying to survive, but still with a passion to bring something good to people for free! And you know what? It actually insults those dreamers, insults Ton himself, insult those ~5 developers working for a small salary just because blender is their bias.
I believe if such haters posts were more in count Ton will be just like: “Screw it! From now i’m just disbanding all my employees and all the money from donations i’ll just send to my new business (bakery or smth :slight_smile: )”
Who prevents you from taking blender’s sources and creating you own company which will do all the right things and in 5 years will beat Maya’s ass?

I personally think that those strong paradigms are also the cause of blender flaws,

amazing customizability: it’s often the excuse for the lacking of a well designed UI, and it’s itself bad unfinished (e.g. Tabs, missed custom presets for the file browser, …)
insane development speed: too much ambitious and mindless
greatest potential in both short and long term: I don’t think so, without a deep redoing of its core, blender fate is sealed (Undo System, the managing of Assets, Materials, Textures, the integration of Simulations, etc. etc.)

For me blender is the full complete package. And has come on leaps and bounds since the early stages. Can anyone remember the old interface. I honestly get confused when I look at maya of 3dmax tuts. The interface looks so cluttered, there’s so many buttons and settings, don’t get me wrong, there’s heaps in blender.

I know blender tries to do everything, but that’s why it rocks. with maya you need to break open different software packages, like fluid sim, smoke sim, zbrush, each on is great by itself, but blender does the lot.

To me, it is one toolchain, you learn once and anything is possible. The strides taken with cycles and GPU is just mind blowing, isn’t it even further ahead than octane now? And it allows much faster rendering than vray, where you need a farm. All we need in a decent GPU and we’ve got some good production environment.

And the game engine is just ridiculously good. Which other software package ships with a game engine?

Honestly I do not give a f about what anyone think about Blender. I work with, earn money with, donate, can use it my render farm without paying huge amount $ for license, my work is in pair with competition. Can use other render engines if want, Octane, Vray. I get used to UI so all that UX crap I hear everyday is … as usual just crap.

Yes there are few things that I miss, I hope it will be addressed in future releases, same as commercial apps …

And comment form that person from piracy website … ask him to pay for all pirated software he is using and he will be super happy with Blender.