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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

I used to do a lot of 3d in the 90s so I'm extremely familiar with 3d modeling concepts. One day I decided to give blender a go after many years of hiatus and oh boy was it difficult to use even after looking up documentation. Nothing like maxon cinema 4d. Is blender built on preexisting 3d app UI convention? Or is it its own animal?

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Blender dates back to the 1990s but it is its own animal, more or less. For documentation I would recommend going through the tutorials first, rather than trying to figure things out and searching for what you need. It reminds me a little bit of Vim in the sense that you switch between different modes a lot, and that's not exactly friendly if you're not used to it.

That said, I've never been proficient at 3D, other than a couple of level editors, so all 3D tools are hard for me to use. With my mediocre background and armed with tutorials, I didn't find it time-consuming to do some basic things like creating a mesh (lots of techniques to pick up here), creating a UV map, and baking a light map.

I've struggled with Blender so much that I do all my modelling with Unity's Probuilder[0] which I can get away with because I've got a low poly game. Super convenient.

[0]https://unity3d.com/unity/features/worldbuilding/probuilder

Probuilder is actually at the top of my list of tools to try out other than Blender, since it seems to be specialized to create models with the level of complexity that I feel confident delivering. Thanks for the recommendation.

That said, I'm often working with an engine other than Unity, so I'm not sure how much Probuilder is an option.

Wow that reminds me of oldschool google sketchup. Too bad that's not a great tool anymore

Yep. That's exactly what it feels like to use.

When I tried Blender a few years back there were lots of tutorials, but they were all in video format. For some people that's great; for some people that's useless. Has there been any improvement here?

Even aside from personal learning preferences, I suspect trying to learn a complex UI from a video is going to be a struggle if you're working on a single screen.

This release is a pretty significant UI overhaul, as was 2.6 from memory but that was a good few years back. Probably worth giving it another shot with 2.8!

Awesome. I tried it about 18 months ago do I will definitely give it another go!

One major change in 2.8 is that it defaults to left-click for selection. At least from my experience, right-click selection was the big thing that made Blender feel very alien to pick up.

You could change it before, but defaults matter a lot for new users.

EDIT: I just tested it and I might be misinformed on this. Either it's still RMB selection or I have an old config that it loaded.

EDIT2: Load factory settings put me on LBM select. Yay!

I'm liking the new UI a lot better. The old one reminded me of Lightwave 3d, which I struggled with.

You were close, pretty sure it was 2.5

That in particular was my issue when I gave up learning to use Blender. There are tons and tons of tutorials, but Blender hits a big "randomize" button for its UI every time it updates. Nothing is ever where the tutorials tell you to find it. It likely isn't even grouped under the same menu heading anymore.

Stick to tutorials from the same 2.x line and there aren't many UI changes. They've had betas and release candidates for 2.8 for a while now, so there's already a pretty good body of tutorials available.

Outdated tutorials aren't totally useless, since they'll still give you an idea of how to approach a modeling problem. But the UI won't match what you're working in, so I certainly wouldn't recommend them for trying to learn the software.

There should be a lot of great tutorial content coming out now/soon. I know a lot of the big training vendors (e.g. cgcookie) have basically been building for 2.8...lots of new courses and old stuff getting redone and updated.

my sentiments exactly. once you know how to solve a problem, you can Google newer UI equivalent of those tricks.

I find blender to be one of the tools that is built to be fast, rather than friendly. It defaults to a minimal state and assumes you know how you want to set it up. Two things that will help you a lot is firstly, to go into preferences and enable pretty much every plugin that doesn't have an exclamation mark next to it and secondly, print out all the keyboard shortcuts and tape them to the sides of your screen.

They've done a redesign of the UI with this version.

I'd say it's a bit easier to grasp for someone new.

It may be difficult to grasp initially. I did not find it too hard to use afterwards, though; it becomes reasonably logical.

I did not do animation, though, only 3D-modelling and architectural scenes.

When exactly did you try it? It has changed significantly at least a few times in the last 10 years.

Blender is very much like vim. Hard as hell to start, but once you know your way around, its very very efficient.

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