powerful, but not good
Don’t get me wrong, I love Blender. (an open source 3d modeling and animation program) I love what it does. I love what it is. I love the principle behind it. And I love that there are so many people freely putting their time into making it better.
What I do not like about it is that its designers have absolutely no intention of providing a traditional interface. Folks: different is not always better. Did you ever stop to think that the reason why so many 3d applications have similar ways of doing things is that it is a proved, successful, easy, and natural interface? Blender, on the other hand, seems to go out of its way to do things differently. There are so many functions out there that only exist through special keyboard shortcuts. (Although is it really a ’shortcut’ if there is no alternative?) So if you’re not sure about a specific function, you can only hope you can find something helpful online. Sometimes there is a menu option, sometimes there isn’t.
Speaking as somebody who designs user interfaces on a daily basis, let me say without a doubt that Blender’s interface falls under what is known as “mystery meat navigation.” It might be cool if you know what’s going on, but if you don’t it’s confusing. The benefit of having nice orderly icons for all of the functions is that you know what’s available. If you’re in a face edit mode, and you see an icon of two faces being joined, and you roll over the icon and it says “Join Faces,” then you know you can join the faces. You don’t have to wonder, “Hmm, I’m in a face edit mode. I wonder if I can join faces here? Should I try the “J” key? Or maybe this program calls it “weld,” or maybe “merge.” Maybe I should try the “W” key and “M” key also.”
Another thing that really peeves me off — and this goes for a lot of open source software — is that there are no really good indications on when an upgrade is going to give you nice new features or not. Blender is currently on version 2.37. Which has followed 2.36, 2.35, 2.32, 2.3, etc. I hear they’re going to jump all the way to 2.4 next time! Wow! But what does that mean!? You have to delve into release information pages in order to get a current ‘feature set.’ And this also makes finding information online more difficult. Sometimes methods of accessing a certain function in one release, change by the next one. Unlike other applications, where if you wanted to find a tutorial on making UV Maps in 3D Studio Max 7.0, for instance, it’s easy enough to include 7.0 in your search. But what about Blender? Should you look for the most recent release? Good luck, it’s probably only been out for a few months or so, so there won’t be much material about it. And prior releases aren’t guaranteed to work the same way.
If you can’t tell, I’m having a really frustrating time with this. I do have the most recent version of Blender. I just don’t know if I should.