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.