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Comment by trashE | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! Would like to learn blender just so I could use such tools.

Blender 2.8 is much easier to pick up after a major revamp of the interface, it's far more friendly to get into.

Eventually you'll move on from using any of the icons and shortcut everything anyway, because you can be so blazing fast.

Try it out, it's fun and free.

Blender 2.8 looks like an improvement but as someone fairly adept in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3DS Max, After Effects, Ableton, Unity etc I still find it one of the trickiest apps to wrap my head around.

It's not that the apps I already know have an especially good UX or that Blender is especially bad - it's just that Blender makes few concessions to existing conventions and doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability.

2.8 is definitely a step in the right direction but lets not get ahead of ourselves in praising it as suddenly becoming a paragon of usability.

As someone who downloaded 2.8 just to poke around a bit and see what it can do for fun can you give some examples of "makes few concessions to existing conventions"?

The only thing that I need to keep track of is that the idea of no-overlapping windows. The hotkeys behaves differently depending on which windows your mouse is on. Here is a example on the case: C on 3d windows trigger circle select tool, but C on the outliner create a new collection.

But this behavior has exception. Sometimes some keys have global effect. For example, Shift Space always runs the animation.

What other things you find tricky in Blender?

One thing I've run into most recently : working with materials is a pain. There's no easy list that you can delete them in a classic-UX way (that I can find). Copying and pasting/duplicating ends up creating large numbers of identical materials and there was no immediately obvious way to prevent this. The interface for creating shared material parameters is unintuitive compared to something like Unreal.

You can accomplish it in the Outliner, by searching for "Material". There are other ways, though I guess they could do with some sort of purpose-built view that only exists to list and show materials.

doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability

Space or Shift-Space or whatever the new 2.8 default shortcut is opens up an action menu with every possible action available to you and a search bar to explore them.

Actually, with this feature Blender surpasses most other creative suites in terms of discoverability. Perhaps what you are really looking for is a tutorial? They have those, too.

Yeah, back when 2.5 was new i was annoyed that space changed from showing the popup menu in 3D view to showing that action search list but this annoyance quickly went away when i realized how faster it was to find new stuff with it.

Shift+A makes sense for the new default 3D menu though, it's Shift+A(dd)

IIRC the pre-2.5 menu wasn't just for adding stuff (though it was its most common use).

I first tried Blender a few years ago and it felt inscrutable. I was able to do some very basic things but always felt like I didn’t get what was going on or how things fit together.

I picked it up again about a month ago, and this time it seemed to just click. In my case part of it might be that I did use it briefly before, but as well I think the combination of a very thoughtful redesign and the excellent new “Blender Fundamentals 2.8” videos[1] that they lead you to right after you download Blender.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAks...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkSdlbXB_U

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