I agree totally. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a labeling convention the software uses. One can argue the Y,Z thing all day and find good examples of why it should be one way or another and they are all correct, but in reality it doesn’t really matter. There is no “industry standard” and only a matter of flipping an object 90 degrees if need be.
I’ve yet to see a 3D printer or CNC mill that uses Y as up. Guess Blender’s coordinate system is more helpful if you’re into those.
Yup…
Z is depth. As it always were.
How deep is the sea, how high is the sky?
AE… In analog days & techniques cameras are facing down on film, again depth (Z) is up & down… from human POV. Animators used to do the same. Nowadays monitors are positioned vertically, that’s why the axis got shifted. Same on teachers board.
There is no god, funny, it’s just human intelligence or stupidity.
Someone could make a nice movie about it?
See you in the next axyz thread.
Mods: add Y/Z axis up to the list of forum holy war topics? 
Would it be impossible to have a “Y up” settings under User Preferences? to visually skin the Z axis everywhere to Y?
For me personally I don’t care. It would just save me time to explain why Z is up in blender to friends that uses blender as secondary tool for 3d cc for their games done in game engines where Y is up.
I think it’s one of these things like “But why is there masculine/feminine grammatical gender in French?” - there just is and if you want to learn French you have to wear it.
Export-wise, FBX, OBJ and 3DS export all have “Y up” export options. You can set -X up if you really want to. 
Being able to configure the up-axis would be nice but it seems like it would require some deep down changes to Blender so it will not happen soon.
Cartesian coordinate system in Three dimensions
I’m more a Solidworks user than I am a Blender user. Solidworks uses better named planes as front, right, and top which is very descriptive, rather than xz, xy, and yz. No matter what plane you sketch on, you then have constraints like horizontal and vertical. Solidworks has y=up and z=towards me, so still having right hand rule (same as Blender).
It’s only a problem when having to deal with two or more different approaches at the same time, but even then, it’s not that much of a big deal. If I could swap behavior in Blender, I would, so that real time transformations sits in motor skills rather than having to actually check the icon or doing it by motor skills and getting it wrong the first time.
Yep. And then there are other funny things like this (for perceptive eyes):
Makes one question the “convention” even more 
It´s set to use the local coordinate system so there is nothing strange about the gizmo on the object being different from the little gizmo in the lower left corner indicating the world axis. 
I know, I set it that way on purpose. See, if the ground “plane” is XZ, then why the face’s local “plane” is XY? Bottom line, repeated in this thread multiple times: it doesn’t matter.
God is a worldbuilder in his day job. On Sundays he paints for relaxation.
Ah, so the face is selected? I thought the object was selected. Strange indeed. But as you say, pretty irrelevant.
:evilgrin: You don’t have to be a god to have a sense that everything always ends up on the ground because of gravity. I read a book looking down on a paper or a kindle. I write on a piece of paper on a table looking down. So my sense of XY is the ground, table, horizontal surface, etc.
It’s awkward to refer to the ground plane as XZ. Too awkward. For me, at least.
The zero origin will always be between the object and the ground or table it sits on. The Z will always be pointing up, up, through infinity. But that’s just me. :evilgrin:
It really doesn’t matter which one you prefer, at the end of the day.
Another example of Z being up-down like in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXKqeUtJM&t=0m52s - also an explanation for why the solar system is flat.
No reason to chime in on this other than I’m a little bored.
To the OP, 3DS Max is as much an industry standard as Maya, and it uses a Z up axis. How can there be two contradictory universal standards?
an architect, a designer and an animator… come into a circus… :spin:
In case anyone is wondering from a more story driven sense as to why this confusion has taken place I hear it’s to do with architects looking down at their birds eye view plans and getting a sense of 3d space that the z axis would be straight up into the sky and x and y stretching across the tabletop basically.
Once people started using upright computer screens to look at their old tabletop plans you’ve now got an orientation where the old z axis that was shooting into the sky is now shooting out of the screen at you, so the new axes that would be stretching across that old tabletop would be x and z leaving Y to be the new up. Or at least another option for up I guess.
I’m sure I heard this somewhere legitimate but it all could be just a nice story I tell myself. 
Aidy.
The discussion belongs in Blenders lack of “easy” customization. If it was easy and doable it would of been made years ago. And it is the same as talking about UI design you will only get beaten down for discussing why the tools are not user friendly. In short accept the stiffness and roll with it. Hell you could even open this thread in 10 years from now and see that nothing has changed because Z-up is the Blender way.
Now lock this thread because anyone who starts a thread and doesn’t know C programming and comes with a suggestion or question about why anything works the way it does in Blender should be ridiculed and told that this has been discussed before and thus should not be discussed again.