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Comment by ryz | Hacker News Reader

oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long. It goes against any standard which has been established in similar software, not only 3ds max/maya/etc. but also engines like unity/unreal.

Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS.

It's one of these things which you won't be able to measure, but they will certainly have lost thousands* of people trying to switch to blender by this very simple default setting. This right here is a UX lesson - take note folks!

*probably, maybe

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> Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS.

It's like with Emacs and its defaults. It wasn't breaking any convention originally, because there were no conventions back then, and it made sense for this particular case. Right-click selection was born before Blender, in Traces for Amiga. It was 1988 and the "standards" of today weren't established yet. Traces didn't become Blender directly, but this particular behavior has been carried over to it. Years have passed, and another convention won.

Maya, another software with quite a legacy, also has a lot of things considered archaic today. None of that is right-click selection tier, though.

In Emacs, you can start the GUI version and use the menus, and it isn't modal so you can just start typing and it'll work like it does in Notepad. You won't get the advanced features Emacs has, but there's no standardization for "text editor advanced features" anyway, especially if you don't distinguish between text editors and word processors and think a ribbon bar is a UI standard.

A lot of Blender is completely customisable. It takes a few seconds to find user preferences, make the required change and even switch to a colour scheme to match Maya/Max etc.

The thing is, however, Blender is more than just a Maya/Max replacement. It can do a hell of a lot more. It has After Effects capabilities like compositing and video camera tracking, 2D animation tools, render outlines to SVG, video editing and python scripting. It’s a bit of a jack of all trades, master of some.

I wonder if I'm the only one who's extremely reluctant to change default key bindings?

I find it very off putting that suddenly all existing tutorials and manuals might become bogus.

Pretty much the only tool where I have custom bindings is Vim.

Same. Am always envisioning having to sit down at a default configuration or _somebody else’s_ custom config. Emacs was the one I (ironically) resisted the most.

I also try to keep to default key mappings where possible. When you’re the one called on to help others in a variety of situations then keeping everything as default as much as possible is useful.

If the first thing you have to do to a software is customize it, you’ve already lost on usability. How many thousands of potential users simply created a cube and tried to click it, realize that on top of the already overwhelming UI you don’t even know how to click something in this software, then just exit and take to the internet to echo that Blender is unusable.

You don’t have to do anything, I’ve taught several people how to use Blender and the right click to select thing wasn’t an issue.

I won’t deny that it’s complex software but so are all professional 3D applications. Try and use Solidworks or (shudder) Creo/ProE or Maya or Max and selecting a cube will be the least of your issues.

All of these tools require some degree of training that’s part of the landscape.

As a counter point: I've used a bunch of 3d modeling applications, starting with the Max Payne and Unreal level editors back in ~2002, and have since used SolidWorks, 3D studio max, modo, zbrush and various iterations of Blender throughout the years.

The controls in Blender are so terrible for me I've basically always given up in frustration within an hour or so.

The reason I didn't customize the controls is because I shuddered at how awful the UI for doing that probably was, and feared other lurking UI terrors were I to invest in adopting the app.

The people who are taught how to use it are not the problem. The problem is that they need to be taught.

Personal anecdote:

The first 3D software I used was Cinema 4D. I couldn't be bothered to watch a tutorial, but in a good 10 minutes of clicking around, I could already do more than half of the most common operations. I tried using Blender several times before and after that, but after the same amount of time, I couldn't do literally anything. Not even move the cube! After switching to Linux, I finally forced myself to watch a few Blender tutorials. I can now do things better and more efficiently than I ever could in C4D. But the moment I switch to another tool (Unreal/Krita/Inkscape...), I see just how non-standard Blender is. There's always the Blender way and the everything-else way.

2.8 is a huge step in the right direction. Maybe one day multi-select will make sense and then there will be no more reasons not to use Blender.

What’s the issue with multi-select in Blender 2.8?

Blender was my first modeling software, and learning on it made everything else frustrating for many reasons beyond controls by comparison. I also come from a Linux background, so modal softwares like vi were not a new concept.

So I wouldn't say that Blender's controls are inherently obtuse or more difficult than others, but that other popular software follows conventions that are more familiar to people with a subset of similar experiences.

the thing is, all 3d software ever is an UI nightmare, almost inevitably. it's all very complex software that tries to do way too much at once, and even Cinema 4d with all its initial beginner friendliness that has made 3d accessible to a lot of people that were afraid of it before wears off once you try to make something non trivial (did you have to make a deformer a child of an object or the other way round? what operations do you need to make an object editable for? what about needing to change the order of objects in the manager for certain things to work? how to reconnect missing textures for a project? - those are all fairly basic things that i need to look up again and again, because they are not as obvious as they should). Maya is such a clusterfuck of bad UI decisions and insane defaults that one wonders how it's held its place as the king of vfx 3d for so long. zbrush might be easy to start with - it's like finger painting! - that's until you try to make sense of its million sub menus. My point is, blender just happens to trip you up right away with the clicking thing, and it's happened to me that I stumble upon that and I go "oh, this free software doesn't work, it's crap", so for sure it's bad marketing, but they are all the same in the end.

Yes, but a new user will not be aware and that is quite the turnoff for many (myself included). Even with that fix blender is plenty different to what most new users will be used to.

That said I'm completely blown away by the quality of blender. It is among the most well polished applications I've ever had the fortune of using. And an open source software at that, and multi-platform at that.

Truly amazing.

I don't do any 3d modeling at all but I use Blender for its sequence editor to produce my YouTube videos. Being free open source, Python scriptable, and cross platform makes it better than any alternative video sequence editor for me.

This so much.

It is better than most commercial offerings on OSx, and yet, everyone still threats it as a poor hack by mangling the UI by default.

Give blender a "copy after fx UI" default already.

I have definitely quit blender because of being unable to bear the horrible alien ass-backwards UI, same with GIMP. I love learning new things, but when EVERYTHING in software works the opposite way from what you have expected, it's too much.

ZBrush UI is also alien and counterintuitive, but after you learn it it begins making sense and feeling convenient, not so in blender, here I have to fight it for no reason.

In that case you may enjoy Blender 2.8 more than when you previously tried it.

I’d be surprised if thousands properly encapsulates it. I’ve used blender various times for like... 15 years? I think it’s a phenomenal tool. Absolutely amazing for what it can all do and the fact that it’s free. Truly is an amazing project.

But god damn I’ve never even gotten close to being comfortable using their interface. Every tutorial online seems to be flawed in some way, so that you have to look up another tutorial to find some feature. I really can’t follow the logic they use to organize things. Is there a feature where you can type the name of a function into a search and it just pops up? If so I’d probably save 80+% of my time spent in the program.

Every change breaks somebody's workflow...

This change also has received some backlash from the existing userbase, albeit you can configure the behavior.

There's even a convenient toggle in the settings for going back to all the 2.79b keybinds. Muscle memory shouldn't be a reason to not upgrade.

It's going to bring in more users than it alienates, and those that are upset about the change can always easily switch controls to "Blender Classic" in the preferences.

New users don't know how to fix the behaviour. They just leave.

> oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long.

Because they wanted to develop Blender for Blender users.

I use emacs, so I shouldn't disregard non ~standard defaults.. but blender was just too odd. 2.8 aligns it not with standards but with human ergonomics.

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