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Comment by BoysenberryPi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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