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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

Blender's UI is like Vim's powerful but with a steep learning curve.

I happen to like Vim which perhaps explains why I like Blender. Blender isn't really designed for the dabbler. It's designed for the serious user. For that type of user it's worth the learning curve since you can get really fast in it. So fast that a common activity is speed modelling. If you only dabble then something like SketchUp is probably more your speed. If you plan to create stuff like this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=... though then blender is well worth the learning curve.

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Yes, once you get past the obscure UI and rely on shortcuts instead, and only using things when you actually need them -- unlike Maya, that throws EVERYTHING on screen all at once, and gobbling up keys for animation and other actions you may not need.. uggh.

S is scale default in BLender.. S is "Set Key" in Maya that will only use up that key for ONE aspect of model creation right out of the box.

Blender's shortcuts know what to do in context.

I'd say a better comparison is that Blender is like to Nokia interface of Nxx phones 10 years ago before the iPhone. All the functionality's technically there, but it's often very convoluted to use it, and that doesn't necessarily make it powerful.

Some of the defaults are just downright stupid: why does rotate by default rotate in screen-space (so against the 2D camera plane, instead of world or object space). The reliance on the MMB so much (Maya does this a bit as well, but there's keyboard alternatives) means it's almost impossible to use on a laptop. There's so many things like this that while minor in isolation are just so frustraiting as a whole when attempting to use it, and make me go "nope, I'll go back to Maya or Houdini thanks".

Rotation can be constraint on a world space axis with `r x`, `r y`, or `r z`.

Blender is fine for me on a laptop but a trackpad is nearly unthinkable for 3d work so I hope that's not what you meant.

First thing I do when using Blender on a new machine is go into the settings and turn on "Emulate 3 Button Mouse". That makes it so you can Alt+Click to rotate the camera instead of using the middle mouse button. No idea why it's not on by default, since the Alt modifier isn't really used anywhere else (especially in the context of a mouse click)

I have been interested in checking out Vim and Emacs, but the shortcuts required are hardly ergonomic and very hard to use continuosly (Emacs being the worst for that of the two). The pinkie!

You can make that model in pretty much any 3D modeling software so I don't see how Blender is special.

Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI to the point where if I'm just fiddling around with it I can generally figure out how to use it. Blender is pretty much the exact opposite. It comes down to cost vs time. Do I want to spend time to configure Blender or do I want to spend money and buy something that has a much more intuitive UI and use something that I can just get started with right away? For my sanity I would choose the latter.

Just curious, are you a vi/emacs user by any chance?

Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI...

Let's not confuse the power of a software package with a powerful UI. Blender is the emacs/vi of 3D software - its UI is very unintuitive for beginners but extremely fast (and intuitive) to power users. Personally, I found that with Blender it's hard to master the basics but easy to learn the advanced stuff, once you have your basics down. With other packages I've used (3d max, Maya, Softimage) it may be easy to do a simple scene, but advanced stuff is very unintuitive to the point that you need a tutorial to do anything you haven't done before in that particular package.

I use vim.

When did you use it last?

Did you watch any video tutorials?

What 3d apps do you like?

When I started about 15 years ago, Blender was much less intuitive and there was little tutorials and help. It helped that I used 3ds r4, 3ds Max, Auto Cad, and VIM... It still took many hours over a couple years to become comfortable with Blender.

They've since made everything MUCH more discoverable and organized. I've seen and helped young kids get started with it. I've also used/still have to use 3ds Max, Lightwave, Maya and others ...but Blender is my creative swiss army knife.

It's not perfect, but for ~95% of what I need it is... and it's still improving. Ton Roosendaal and others involved with this are awesome. I donated some to see it open sourced, and some since. My best investment ever.

Like 4 months ago. Yes. Modo and Houdini are cool

In what way is Blender's UI powerful?

Blender itself is powerful, yes. But that is in spite of its terrible UI. Most of the controls don't even have useful tooltips.

To be fair, they are improving it slowly but surely.

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