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Comment by sydthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the pace of development is that its impossible to learn new interfaces etc in time

Some of the development funds should go to training materials.

I don't understand this? Blender has world-class training material provided for free.

Between the stuff they themselves offer[0] and the literally thousands of training videos on YouTube.. what do you think is missing?

[0] https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials

Agree with this. Blender has some of the best training material available, especially compared to its competition, because it's free and open source, so anyone can use it and, importantly, anyone can make tutorials for it!

Blender being well-documented is a relatively recent phenomenon, so I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of people simply don't realize that things have changed. Back in its early days it was infamous for having an impenetrable UI and practically no documentation (unless you bought what amounted to the official strategy guide, which was decent enough on its own terms but still wasn't a proper manual).

Spent many an hour digging through the source code to figure out what a particular button did…

To be honest, the basics are always the same.

I started recently with Blender 3.0 and I can watch without any problem tutorials made with Blender 2.8 (3.5 years ago). Now that I'm getting more confident I can even watch tutorials from older versions and follow them without a problem.

And btw, you don't need to learn every new feature. Blender is a incredible versatile and ginormous software and you only need to learn what you need for your specific workflow. I can maybe know 1% of Blender and I'm superhappy with what I'm doing nowadays!

I don’t know about it at a higher level, but the end of the first video of the Blender Guru donut tutorial series for 2.8 involved setting the monkey head on fire, and the instructions were broken by 2.92: what was described would no longer do anything—some kind of baking needed to be invoked manually. That was a part of what made me decide to wait until it was updated. (The other part was that my Surface Book could only barely reach 2fps for something that simple.)

In my experience, I actually find the community does a pretty darn good job of keeping up with the training side of things. There are several dozen YouTube channels that just make Blender tutorials 24/7 for a living, and every time a new update is dropped, tons of new beginner tutorials for the new features get made.

Have they changed much about the UI in this update? Seems like it's mostly about performance improvements and procedural generation this update.

They added a really nice quality of life change in the node editor! Now you can drag a noodle out from a node into empty space, release, and get the Add Node menu automatically popping up, which is something the community's been wanting for ages. It's how it works in basically every other modern node-based editor, so it's nice to see Blender keeping up.

Blender 3.1 changes in 5min (part of the this topic linked page) https://youtu.be/BCi0QRM1ADY

There's are LTS versions. You could always just use one of those and only upgrade when you feel the desire.

Then use the LTS versions?

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