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First impressions are important. Blenders right click selection is what people first run into and it's an immediate turn off. I love Blender but there are more than a few quirks that gnaw away at me.
Meh, Blender isn't that hard. Moving the camera is middle click while in camera view. Shift or ctrl middle click generates different camera moves. When not in camera view, the camera moves like any other object, if it's part of the active selection. The only really difficult thing about blender is it defaults to Right click select, which every other thing in the world use left click. Of course, you can change that in the preferences.
Weeks of study is a bit of an overstatement. It takes trying to do a thing.
I check out blender vids on the regular to see if I can learn new things. One thing that strikes me, is very few tut makes do things the same way. This why Blender isn't nearly as hard as people claim. There are bout 9 billion ways to any one thing in Blender. Some are more efficient than others but there'snot necessarily a right way or wrong way, as long as you get the same result.
For ex, I use "middle click" to move my camera. Some tut makers select the camera (even in camera view) and use G to move. It's not "I'm right and they're wrong." Either way will move the camera. I think it's more intuitive to move it my way. I assume these other people will disagree. Either way, the camera ends up where it's wanted, so what's it matter?
If you don't actually try to use Blender for something, (Make something, follow a tut, etc) then yes, it will take forever to learn to use it. This is no different from nearly anything else.
Some time ago my mouse's middle wheel button quit working. I had to turn on "emulate 3 button mouse" to navigate ( alt + L click to rotate, shift + alt + L click to pan, ctrl + alt + L click to zoom) which is coincidentally Modo's default navigation controls.
After replacing the mouse I realized I preferred the Modo style navigation to Blender's default. It felt more natural and much less fatigue from using the middle mouse button constantly, plus the middle mouse scroll wheel can still be used to zoom.
Middle click? Seriously?
ugh
Sorry all! I didn't mean to derail the thread from more practical things.
It was just meant as an off-hand comment that different people find different things "easy" and with software it's all personal/individual reaction.
haha! Yeah, user unfriendly for sure, although in Maya the middle mouse button is used for one of the navigation controls (pan I think). And while I forgot to mention it DAZ Studio also uses the Modo style navigation.
So it makes going between Blender and DS a little easier. As impractical as that may be.
You're being facetious, right? Or perhaps you tried out some very old version of Blender and aren't aware of it, but Blender has manipulators exactly like DAZ Studio, and little toolbar icons that make it obvious how to change the manipulator mode.
If you don't like using the right mouse button (RMB) to select things, you can change that in User Settings. I did because I couldn't get over the disconnect between being required to use the RMB to select in the 3D viewport but LMB to select in the outline that "everybody" keeps up on the screen at the same time. I'm very happy now that the LMB works to select everywhere. IMNSHO, Blender.org should just do away with the RMB thing. It makes such a bad first impression but doesn't seem to add any value.
There are few who would disagree with you on that. It is very hard to retrain muscle memory from left click select.
There is a reason though, it allows you to select through the manipulator with right click. A very small thing but quite useful in some cases.
LMAO... Don't you know, they bake the rings into the bagels? ;-)~
Inkubo: No. I've tried to use Blender a bunch of times, and each time found the interface confusing to the point of 'I can't figure out how to move the camera.'
Maybe there's been an update since the last time I tried it, I don't know.
So far, Substance Painter and Carrara have been adequate and easy to understand for morphs and texturing, but I keep looking at launching to a more advanced modeler. I'm debating saving up for 3d Coat (which I hear good things about, though the interface is a little meh) or Mudbox ($10/month, but it doesn't look like I can set it up to go off of Paypal balance, which is a minus), or spend time (money) trying to wade into Blender.
If you want to give Blender another go, you don't have to spend money: Grant Abbitt has great YouTube videos to teach Blender modeling in very bite-size bits. And there are many other great YouTube tutorials.
Blender 2.79 RC 1 is apparently due this week; it will have a PBR shader that works a lot like DAZ Studio's Surfaces pane, with slots to plug in the different texture maps, so we should be able to get DS-style rendering results without having to learn a foreign, complex shader node system. I have a feeling it will soon be very easy to use DAZ content in Blender.
I'd rather stab myself repeatedly than get instruction via YouTube video.
I hear ya give me a good printed manual anyday
I know I'm sounding like one of Those People, but I (and others) have brought it up, and it's a big turn off when the first thing anyone suggests to learn it is 'go watch all these videos.'
I find videos useful about 1% of the time they are used. The rest of the time I want written out references that I can easily page to, rather than 'wait, when did they talk about X? Got to start over from minute 43'
Wiki is my favorite, since it's somewhat auto-indexed so you can find stuff you need.
Everything is video, these days. I want to find out how the new functions in Morph Loader Pro work, I search vainly for so documentation and eventually have to give up and go watch a video, because A) Daz is staggeringly poorly documented, and B) most people make videos about Daz features. It takes hard work to find actual text about Studio that is also current.
I don't really see how that turn off is relevant given that. Blender is pretty well documented and has lots of tuts in text, as well as communities where one can Q&A. It's not people are trying to seduce you into a Blender cult. They aren't getting paid or anything. They've no compelling motive to turn you on. What you have going on here is just a basic disagreement, which more about chalking points for the side than it is about winning hearts and minds.
I'd rather not watch videos for anything other than entertainment. Based on the success of video tutorialists, I'm in a minority. Unfortunately for my preferences, it's not a protected minority, so I gotta get used to the idea that even the very well documented in text Blender will see less and less print about it and more and more videos. Because each last gasp from Moore's Law makes it easier for people to make videos, and thus more appealing to those who would otherwise have written something.
I don't care about blame or scoring points, I'm just explaining stuff that apparently needed explaining.
When a lot of stuff is video documented and someone doesn't like video documentation, that skews their evaluation more strongly toward easier, more immediately graspable UIs. That's why it's relevant.
I have watched only one video tutorial for Daz, for some finicky stuff about geografting nobody had written down or explained. It was excruciating. But it was also just about the only time I had to; everything else someone could either comment on or I could figure out.
I use Carrara a lot. Granted, it still has written (if out of date) info from the bygone 'before video tutorials were so common' days, but, again, I've only really picked it up and used it for modeling in the last year, and, again, I haven't needed video tutorials.
I use Substance Painter 2. I'm sure there are loads of video tutorials, but, again, I could figure it out, plus occaisonal glancing at posts on their forum.
I don't think Blender folks are trying to seduce me, but in their excitement they often discount or openly deride the way other people think and work with software. At the very least, it leads to frustration when 'oh just do EASY STUFF' and the user hits problems. At the most, it makes people less willing to actually try Blender out because their concerns are constantly dismissed.
Having said all THAT, someone's comment about a documentation center and the comments about UI becoming more approachable in recent updates are certainly good news. For folks new to Blender, might want to open with that. ;)
Part of the reason that video has become the medium of choice is that good software developers are often poor writers. Like any othe clique, they have their own language which often consists of acronyms and insider jargon that we, the non-clique public, are just expected to be familair with.
The Blender User Manual (avoiding the acronym) is ok but it is very matter-of-fact and doesn't walk you through examples of how to use the various features it describes. But Blender is so big and so open that there's a whole community of people willing to add to the literature. Go to Issuu.com and search for Blender. Lots of text based guides and magazine articles there if you want to dive in. This one looks good for starters... Learning Blender and they had Blender for Dummies available previously but I can't find it now.
For myself, I prefer not to open a guide or a course of tutorials and work my way from beginning to end. I prefer to learn how to do what I need to do right now and, if that means learning a few basics first, then I'll do that but not get side-tracked into lessons on modeling sharks teeth when I want to fix poke-through on a T-shirt.
...+1.
I took to Hexagon quite readily Fortunately when I first started with it, there were a few PDF tutorials (Vids do little for me because I have poor retention with them and admittedly, a lot are just poorly made). I have little trouble moving about the workspace, selecting the parts of the mesh to work on, selecting the tools/functions I needed, etc. Whenever I opened Blender, I would reach for my trackball, but then stop short as I realised it was useless because the UI requires key commands to move around which I find rather clumsy (at least for myself).
You're assuming things need explaining. Same as everyone else. Sometimes, though, they don't need explaining. Who knows if that's the case here. But explaining what you think needs explaing is how scoring points happens. Just because people get into these kinds of discussions, it doesn't follow that they're conciously aware of what they're doing. This is how the internet works.
For example. You say you don't think Blender people are trying to seduce you, which no one said you did. The statement I made about seduction was a means of deconstructiong being turned off by video via absurdity. Video can be a turn off, sure. But people are just trying refute your objections, not convince you change your mind. By framing that response as if it had been said they you did think people were trying to woo you, you're chalking up points, whether that's your intent or not. It's just happens. It's the basic mode of human interaction, magnified by whatever it is about the Internet that makes it a causual debating society.
From there it really veers into strawman territory, because no one's come at you with excitement or derision. At most there was my saying characterising Blender as needing weeks of effort was overstating things, and Inkubo asking if your were joking. Because it is overstating, and that did seem like a joke. Obviously, those were also rhetorical devices, much the same as you raising the stakes by elevating them to derision is rhetoric. But there's nothing derisive about saying that you won't learn unless you have compelling reason to. It's just true. That goes for anything and everything. People don't go after things otherwise.
I don't doubt you have experienced something. This is the Internet. People become derisive over anything and everything. But today, no one is deriding you. We just find your characterisations extreme, and disagree. It's been quite civil as far as I can see. Which is what makes the strawman. You're asking us to defend people we've probably never met for actions we didn't witness, and ascribing their motives to us. But that wasn't us. So we can't really help you with that. For my part, even if I could, I wouldn't. Because only you can choose to use Blender and I get nothing if you do. I'm not trying to change your mind.
From my perspective, given that I learned Blender pretty much on my own, coming from a working knowledge of 3DS, I find your general argument misleading at best, and your argument by analogy somewhat lacking. I was able to learn Blender's basic interface without help from the web simply because I had a thing I wanted to do, and I was motivated to do the thing. I wasn't burdened by any particular feelings that would diminism my motivation.
Over the next months, the things I learned had less to do with blender and more to do with modeling in general. In fact, much of what I learned from the web was aimed at different programs, and I had to work out how to apply that Blender. However, picking the use of Blender to maek stuff took about half an hour. Sure, I wasn't good at it, but I knew how to start. So my anecdata is the opposite of yours. Blender was frankly easy to pick up. Studio was a pain in the ass. I had to learn a whole new metaphor. Does this mean Studio is bad? I don't think so. It means learning new interface metaphors is hard, and gets harder the more interface metaphors you know.
So you have a perspective and I have one. I'm not going to ascribe you a motive for voicing yours. When I say chalking up points, I mean that's what all of this reduces to, no matter what your immediate motive is. My motive is simply to provide a counter to your perspective, because I think it overstates the difficulty and might disuade someone else who could benefit from using Blender, or at least giving it the old college try. It's really quite selfish. If people flee from Blender on overstated claims about it's difficulty, then the Blender user base will wither. And lacking a user base, the project will die. And if the Project dies, I won't get Eevee.
Motivated self interest. I've never sugar coated the fact that Blender is not really easy to learn. But I stand by the point that it's no more difficult to learn than anything else. Because, if one's idea of "learning" Studio is loading a figure, putting clothes on it and apply a pose, I'd say they haven't learned anything except how to invoke presets. Studio is way deeper than that, and takes some getting used to. Blender is no different. I gooogled "learning to use blender 3d" and found an instructable on the first page that would teach you 2 or 3 times what I learned in my first half hour, and that was 2 or 3 times what I needed to know to reach my objective and then decide I could do better than that, if I figured out how. While I don't expect that change your point of view, I do think it's important to challenge your POV. Because I want more Blender, and that means trying to give people a realistic expectation of the software. It won't be easy, but it's not terribly hard either. And if you stick with it, it's infinitely more valuable than anything you could buy. It won't be easy. But it also won't be weeks of effort to get the basics. Maybe an evening, at worst. Perhaps weeks to be competent if you've never 3D'd before, but that's the same as anything else that's not driven by presets.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, I understand. I was just suggesting one way to save money. I myself prefer printed manuals almost any day.
However... I spent about $70 on a printed manual, The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics Third Edition, and guess what I find convenient? YouTube. I have a Roku Stick connected to my 55" TV, so I can sit there with a laptop and work through the exercises and follow along at my own pace, hitting Pause and Play as necessary. With the book, I've got to find a place to lay it, find something to hold the thick tome's pages down so it doesn't close or lose my place as I work, and then when I look away for a bit to operate the computer, when I look back I have to search for wherever I was in the page. For this particular application, there's just more friction and annoyance trying to use the book.
To each his own, absolutely. I didn't mean to disparage anyone's learning methods; I was just trying to be helpful.
..so that was what I chipped my tooth on the other morning
No full featured 3d software is easy to learn. Those are all complex beasts.
...something I carried over from my gaming days. Split the spine, separate the pages, either three hole drill them and put them in a ring binder or use a coil binding. Manual now opens nice and flat. Of course it does take some bindery skill to do that (or going to a place that does professional binding).
Thinking back to when I first opened Blender, I had exactly the feelings that Will and Kyoto Kid express. The RMB was the least of my worries. What would happen is that I would click something or touch a key by mistake and something weird would happen and I had no idea how to get back to familiar ground (not that anything was familiar). So I let it sit on my computer for years, only occasionally having another go and getting caught out again.
But I had access to ZBrush for a while and found that even more confusing so, eventually, I committed to teaching myself the basics of the Blender interface and not giving up when I got stuck. That was very recent and I am still splashing around in the shallow end but at least I can do the things I set out to do: simple clothing morphs.
This hobby is expensive: content, computer hardware and other software are all expensive. I, like many hobbyists, have a small fixed income so $800 for a program to create morphs is not an option for me. I understand why professionals might be prepared to invest that kind of money - at least they can see some returns. The only return for a hobbyist is fun and a little creative satisfaction. With a little endeavour, Blender can provide most of the things I would be likely to use in the $800 option so it is an obvious choice. And even if I had the money to spend on ZBrush, there's still that awful interface to contend with. You can add Hexagon and Poser to my personal list of awful interfaces too. I happen to find DAZ Studio much easier and more natural to navigate but that's how I lean.
...and that is precisely why I like Hexagon as it is dedicated to modelling without all the other functions (which I already have duplicated in other programmes).
Here's the deal regarding software that some find difficult...
Anyone can learn anything given the time and patience. But that's not the issue.
When you design software, you have two choices:
Option 1 leads to well designed interfaces. Option 2 leads to junk, and frustrated users wasting their time learning stuff they shouldn't have to learn.
Clearly, ZBrush falls into option 2, IMO. And Blender does too, but to a much lesser degree. Anyone who designs software that selects objects with a right mouse click is clearly in the #2 category. Blatantly. No excuse whatsoever for a 3D app to be so much different from every other 3D app, and even non-3D app out there.
Calling objects "tools" is clearly #2. Yeah, you can learn it and get used to it, but the question is WHY? How does that benefit the user? It doesn't. Just like loading ALL 3D objects as 2.5D images serves no purpose. Just ASK the user "hey, do you care at all about 2.5D stuff?" and allow him to change it in preferences if it's that important.
All of this is the difference between well designed UI's and poorly designed UI's. Whether someone finally gets used to poorly designed UI's is irrelevant. They are still poorly designed.
Way OT and just by the way but every time I see your user name I think of this guy:
Ed Begley Jnr.
...@ Marble,
Been In the same financial boat as well, which is why I never even had such an essential programmes as Photoshop or Painter and why I became very adept with software like Gimp, and Krita. The same reason I pretty much stuck with Daz and Hexagon (though I paid what I thought was a lot for the latter which was long before the price dropped to where it is today).
The one advantage I don't have is coming from working with software that is as, if not more, complex such as ZBrush or 3DS. Coming from Daz and Hexagon, programmes like Blender and 3DS seem overwhelming.
I like ot think of Daz, Hexagon, & such being like flying an old Piper J-3 Cub while with Blender or 3DS it is like suddenly being seated at the controls of the the latest high performance corporate jet with sophisticated instrumentation while still knowing only the "stick and rudder IFR ("I Follow Roads") style of piloting. Yeah a lot of old habits don't translate very well, and true, with an aeroplane, the wrong move can lead to disaster, while with software it tends to manifest in frustration and the feeling one is not getting anywhere.
Meanwhile going from one model of corporate jet to another is a smoother transition, same for going to say a Taylorcraft from a J-3. Within both types there will be a few adjustments which need to be made along with a few new things different that may need to be learned, but it is not as radical a leap as going between the two different aircraft, or our case, software types.