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Of course, Blender doesn't require right click select. It just defaults to it.
Probably because Blender is old. 22 years old, to be exact. It's 15 years old as Open Source Software.
It started out weird and quirky and then raised 100,000 euros of crowd funding be come free and open source weird and quirky, becoming hostage to that userbase. "Fixing" the click behavior means running against the installed user base who either like it that way, or "don't care as long as you don't make me care." The obvious compromise was to leave it the way the user base expects and put in an option to allow that setting to change. Which was done.
It's probably grown to be a signature, now. Like Macs and their pointlessly different command key. But it is, at least a signature you aren't welded to. And while I am a promoter, I'll be the first say, if figuring out how (or asking) to change the click behavior is a barrier to use for a person, Blender is not for that person. If you can't handle that kind of investigation, then the rest of the UI is definitely beyond you.
No need to dismiss the use of software solely because it's poorly designed. I love Blender, and have used it for years. But the counter-intuitive aspects are a pain. Not a reason to throw it in the trash, just a reason to comment and push back.
Even after many years of using Blender I still scratch my head trying to remember how to do some things. Yeah, I've customed a LOT of Blender to make it useful. And doing Python to really customize is easy and extremely useful, and automate stuff that's counter-intuitve.
But none of that is a reason why they couldn't have made it default to intuitive in the first place, and maybe make the counter-intuitive stuff as options for those who want it differently, rather than vice-versa.
ZBrush's weirdness is at least in part down to how it started as a sort of pseudo-3d painting application. That's why there is the neccesity to first go into edit mode to be able to any actual scultping. Without that you're just in 2.5D painting mode. I honestly think in ZBrush 5 they may clean out some of that stuff or at least make it so it's not weird by default. They already fixed the transform handle to be more like any other 3D package rather than this weird (useful, but weird) thing with a line and 3 circles.
The rest of your ZBrush argument goes a little overboard though, clearly ignoring the enormous benefit that it brought to the industry and the undeniable fact it is the industry standard sculpting software. Some of its weirdness supposedly comes from their desire to make a scuplting application that a traditional sculpter would be comfortable with, rather than catering to users of other 3d software. I'm not sure they succeeded and of course pretty much every pro out there knows more than just ZBrush anyway, but at least that was their goal and apparently the weirdness wasn't enough to prevent it from becoming the de facto standard.
Right-select in Blender though? Don't get me started... to me this seemingly little thing that can easily be changed in the preferences is still one of the most audacious things that ever existed in software. Selecting things, the most used function in any 3d software, thousands upon thousands of times used every day, put on the right mouse button to facilitate some other edge case nobody gives a damn about. It's like giving a car square wheels so it doesn't accidently roll down the hill. Defying pretty much all standards of selecting, from simply clicking things, selecting text, moving windows around, absolutely everything ever to do with selecting and activating. Ergonomically unwise as well because the most used actions need to be on the most comfortable mouse button which is left. And to this day the default behavior. How easy it would be to change it, what a none issue it would be for existing users to switching it back to retro, what enormous benefit it would be to everyone just trying the software and being utterly confused by the little black icon moving around in the viewport.
Yes it's easy to change, and a minute or two of googling will find the solution, but don't underestimate the first bad impression. And with that kind of defying of a standard, it gives way to thoughts of how alien other features might be. It also feeds into the narratve that open source software is crap. Even partly justified because in any commercial software such a thing would have never made it through QA and the poor devs who thought it was a useful feature would have been ridiculed until the end of time.
One of the problems of 'but you can customize it' is that it then makes every tutorial (video or otherwise) harder to follow.
Oh yeah, with Blender especially. Because if for example you choose Maya viewport navigation, a lot of other shorcuts now don't work anymore.
And the other problem is this:
Why insist on making the counter-intuitive stuff standard, and having to customize to make it intuitive?
Why not the reverse? Make those who want counter-intuitive do the customizing?
I've never understood that
I'm not even going to try and defend rmb select. I think it is dumber than dumb. But I can say that I've gotten completely used to it. I think anyone who wants to could.
I wanted to mention a tutorial set that I thought was very well made. Neal Hirsig taught Blender at a college and made his curriculum available online. The course is no longer available but the videos are on vimeo. They are quite dated but sometime post 2.49 and most of the course is still pretty relevant. The nice thing is the videos are short and concise, no babbling nonsense, and laid out in a logical manner.
Anyway, now that we've beaten up Blender mercilessly and made it so noone wants to go near it, lol, here is a link:
https://vimeo.com/channels/blendervideotutorials/videos
There may be higher quality versions of the videos available somewhere
Yeah, I have never seen a tutorial for blender that constantly said "right click to select." Again, if concern over connecting your own changes to your UI is going to throw you, it's the same as being unable to figure out how to make those changes, to begin with. Blender really isn't for you.
Frankly, I'd say 3D isn't for you, because 3D UI's are like battle plans. Neither survives contact.
I contantly have to stop and think about how a n00b would do a thing in studio, because my UI is not set up that way. For a great many fairly common tasks, Studio demands too many clicks. Way too many. It's pain. So I sorted it so I don't click like that.
I know exactly why Blender defaults to right click select. It's pretty obvious why when you left click in the viewport. So it's less a question, to my mind, of why as much as it's a personal preference about what action is more important.
While it seems like Blender's choice there is counter intuitive, it really boils down to your metaphor. If you view 3D space as your desktop icons, right click select doesn't make sense. If you view it as a document or painting, then what blender does when you left click makes sense.
Copy some text into note pad. Press Ctrl+End. Now left click the first line. Think about what happened. Pretty sure you didn't select anything. You cursor moved and now you know why Blender is set up the way it is. Left click moves the cursor. Like every other document editor in the world. Now decide that's not for you, and begin worrying about all of the tutorials that you won't understand if you swap to left click select.
Agreed.
I found Zbrushes confusing, seeing what folks do with it, I wish I had managed to do 'something' before my trial expired; I might have bought it if i had.
Ctrl Z is your friend, and you can increase the number of undos allowed in Blender's preferences. I've not found anything I cant undo in Blender, the same isn't true of Studio.
All software has its quirks.
The manipulator tools that 3D packages have - I hate em, they get in the way. Simple to hide em away in Blender, and I believe the same is true in Studio, but less convenient to manage without them.
Ask a pilot or a Starfleet captain which axis is up, they'll say Z. Ask Wavefront or Daz, they'll say Y.
I don't know or care who is right. I just know not all programs agree which way is up. Similarly, I don't care who is right about whether left click should select or move the cursor. I just know that when your UI has to both at the same time, one has to give and not be left click. Blender allows you to choose. Strikes me as a non-issue, beyond that.
This justification doesn't hold up IMO. Let's say for the sake of argument I will accept that the black Blender thingy is comparable to a cursor in a text editor. The price they paid for making that cursor left-click is akin to Notepad having all other select actions on right-click, which it doesn't have. I can still select a word by double left-clicking. I can select parts of text by dragging over it with the left mouse button pressed. Not to mention, and this is no different in Blender, using buttons in toolbars, getting through the file menu, dragging the Notepad window itself around, all left-click. So I guess the problem is not the Blender cursor on left-click but the horrible compromise of having select (which is the by far more used function) on right mouse button as a consequence. Like I said, car with square wheels. Solve one tiny problem and sacrifice everything else.
Both are right in this case. Although admittedly I don't know why a captain says Z is up, I at least know that Z up ws born from architects et al drawing on paper laying flat on a desk. Looking down on it the two axis are X and Y. Now if you wanna add a third, it would come straight up out of the paper so Z up.
I'm sure that CTRL-Z would have been the first thing I tried but I can't remember the exact sequence of events now. I do remember getting muddled with suddenly having different panels open or the one I was looking at suddenly disappeared. I've got used to moving the panels around now so it seems quite easy but back then it scared me off.
As for the RMB - I decided at the outset that if I was going to follow tutorials it would be easier to stay with the default, so I did. I am used to it now so my brain kind of clicks into Blender mode and automatically selects with RMB. I can't abide some tutorials which seem to be describing a totally different program because the interface is so customised.
I liken switching from DAZ Studio to Blender as something like living in the UK and then suddenly having to drive in France. Occasionally I would try to change gear with the window winder (something car doors used to have) but generally it wasn't a big deal.
Yknow everyones focusing on my example of selecting with right mouse click, but anyone who's used Blender for any length of time probably has a long list of counter intuitive stuff.
Just the other day I was making piping around the seam of a pillow to respond to a post in this forum. Basically just selecting the edge loop around the seam and giving it circular thickness. But in Blender you have to convert the edges to a curve, bevel it, change the default from half to full bevel, and increase the subdivisions. Now Ive since made a simple python script to automate that for next time, but come on. How many people consider that a bevel? Its hard to defend stuff like that.
And the list goes on and on.
Youre in camera view, you click to move your view and it jumps out of camera view. Then you have to manually change that default. Come on.
So I guess your point is "If you're not tough enough to handle poorly designed interfaces, you should give up 3D altogether"?
Seriously?
We're merely commenting on what many/most Blender users consider a difficult to understand interface. Which is why this thread was started 5 years ago, and keeps on going.
It's a great tool, and it's worth sticking with it and getting around the confusing interface with customizations and python and such. But that doesn't mean we can't comment on things that could be improved. That's how things get better, right? Rather than pounding your head against the wall over and over, you identify the bad stuff. That's why Blender has improved so drastically over the years, because people complain.
Right, but the bevel thing has little to do with UI. Annoying things like that are in any 3d software. The more of them you know, the more you will miss how simple it was to do that one thing in the other package. But then of course some things are more intuitive in Blender than they may be elsewhere. And I'm sure how inutitive something feels also has to do with your own brain and which method you learned first.
Feature requests are often full of that stuff. Make this so it works as in Max, this from Modo, this from Maya. The ideal software would be a symbiosis of all available 3d packages. Don't think anyone would mind a modifier stack im Modo for example :)
I only use certain parts of blender and completely
ignore the rest.
I have and older MODO and Maxon C4D and Silo for all of my modeling needs
thus I will never model anything in blender.
As an animator /VFX artist I have Realflow thus I will never use Blenders Fluid simulator.
Nor its particle system.
I use Iclone, Endorphin & Daz for my Character animation
thus I will never use any blender character tools .
I only use blender as a free unbiased PBR with a world class node based shader system
that is about to get even better with the universal principled shader of 2.79.
Cycles is a fast, hardware agnostic branched path tracer
that I personally find far superior to the
Dumb, hardware specific, brute force approach of DS Iray
I dont use the key board short cuts.. dont need them
I import my daz content via the teleblender script and render PBR stills when I need them.
For all of my animation /vfx work I use other programs.
I quite like how the mouse works in Blender.
While I have a slew of Blender tutorials video I too am not a fan of panning back and forth on the video play time to repeat an instruction as I struggle to keep up and although I'd done enough to know that I could save money by gritting it out through the entire download stash of video tutorials I decided to order a Introduction to Blender book from Amazon.
It arrives today and covers everything I need to do in Blender to create a character than can be used in an animation or video game. I figure I will get competent enough to keep up with the videos without panning back and forth so much on the video and it will be more enjoyable, and quicker to do the lessons in the video; although to an extend the videos will be just me repeating the same lessons using different character designs until I improve my competency with 3D modeling.
Blender is no more complex to learn than most 3D applications. Nor will I say that IU has the friendliest. But neither is the worst. In all these ways, this is going to change. After 2.78c, 2.79 will be the last "compatible" upgrade to complete production works. After 2.8 comes and they are warning that it will be a kind of big earthquake including the user interface. Big changes are coming in the world of Blender and everything is expected looks great.
Not being able to figure something out without a manual does not mean it is a bad design nor less intuitive as 'counter-intuitive' as that might seem. While these are often good indicators, sometimes they are very poor indicators of quality of design. Specifically, it usually means the design doesn't follow previous conventions that we rely on, to a large extent subconsciously. In general, following previous designs makes sense for it makes for a shorter learning curve so one of the fundamentals of good design is to follow said conventions unless one has a good reason not to. In the case of software that does what Blender does, and covers as many tasks, workflows, etc... There is no roadmap. It is the sheer vastness of what it can do that is overwhelming to a large extent.
While it may not be as good at rigging as Maya, or as good at fluids as Houdini, there really is no single software package out there that covers as much ground as Blender. What other package includes sculpting to retopo, node based high end and realtime rendering, full video editing from vse, timelines, dopesheets, etc..., a built in Python scripting console/environment which can call on any of the myriad of scientific or AI python libraries/environments and bring them in for visualization purposes (this last one is HUGE.) There is nothing else out there like it currently. It's not best of class in many areas, but it is high end across the board and it covers pretty much 'all' bases. To expect this complex of an environment to be 'intuitive' is asking a lot, and yet the Blender team is currently working on a rewrite of the software from the ground up that will move closer to exactly that goal without giving up any of the power.
A lot of the idea of Blender having a terrible interface is based on people thinking of Blender as being a souped up 3D version of an MS Paint application instead of a package that can do things Maya and 3DS Max don't even dream of doing while also being able to put out work that stacks up against them in their areas of specialty (albiet with a bit more work in some cases, like Maya's rigging tools or zBrush sculpting.) But even this last tradeoff comes with a counterbalance of working inside of a fully integrated environment instead of having to shuffle things between multiple applications to do the same things.
Speaking of things Blender can do that most packages can't, here is an interesting video from Martin Lindelöf of a Blender add-on called Animation Nodes 2.0 which is quite interesting. I can see a lot of possibilities especially when combined with the new Eevee PBR realtime render environment due out in the next release of Blender. Doing something like this in 3DS Max or Maya would require scripting it yourself afaik (not at all trivial.) I don't know of an add-on that does anything like it in these packages, but even if there is one I've missed, they tend to often be on the not cheep side.
In summary of the last post, I would suggest people quit thinking of Blender as a lesser version of 3D software that happens to be free. That is misleading and wrong. It is a fully functional high end piece of software that in many ways is the most powerful tool out there in it's class that just happens to be free. (I think some people would complain about a Mercedes if it was free.)
Yes, this is an example of something they really should have followed convention on. I think it's based on the concept that this 3D Cursor was innovative and they wanted to really push it as being 'the new thing' in 3D but regardless, it fails. I really wanted to give it every chance, got used to it, but after many years of keeping it as right click selecting, in the end decided it was a poor decision.
Blender 3.0 is supposed to allow a much easier way of putting together an interface that just includes task specific items which would help people who use Blender for task specific functions quite a bit. Related to that though is something I've been trying to push (just mentioned to Jonathan Williamson recently for instance) is related to Blender's rewrite of the code base that is supposeldy scheduled. It is, if the various components in Blender, like Modeling, Sculpting, VSE, etc.. were fully modularized, it would theoretically make it easy to only load the specfic components/modules one is planning on using through a 'loader script.' This should also help in making a tool that takes advantage of the integrated environment Blender provides (for passing assets around fully featured internally) while also having the simpler interface of specialized tools. Also, it would theoretically optimize performance for task related functions.
Yes, worth putting focus on. After 3.0 it will be a different world supposedly, and all tutorials currently will need to be redone. That doesn't mean put off learning until then since as it's been pointed out by others that the real challenge isn't actually the interface as much as understanding 3d concepts. A top notch modeller who only knows Modo will get up to speed in modeling in any other package in very short order.
I've used 3DS Max, Maya and other packages but my main tool is Blender. I still watch videos from the other tools when they are showing something where the approach/concept is valuable, then translate that into how I would do that using Blender. A somewhat extreme example of that is C4D to Blender since they are quite different, but since C4D has a particular audience (vfx for commercials, sports and short videos.) There are often tutorials in their area of specialization that are covered more in depth then other software. I'm not planning on using C4D anytime soon but the concepts are valuable.
Perhaps Blender's tagline should be "Blender, the Swiss Army Knife of 3D." ;)
Definitely should be that
I also think it should be modular where if you want to do modeling you select modeling and all you have is the modeling tools, same for animation or UV mapping
I also think you should be able to undock everything for use on multiple monitors
I just wanted to pop in and say thanks for this is a great thread. Being a Carrara user, I've only dabbled with Blender a bit, and always found it very frustrating and quit (I even have a couple great books for it). This thread has re-inspired me to give blender another serious look. Thanks to Will's comment I opened Blender to see if I could figure out how to navigate in the viewport (I always forget and need to look it up) ..... but I figured it out on my own this time .... Woohoo!! When I have time, I will seriously give Blender a real try this time. It has sooooo many features that would cost a lot to purchase in commercial software that I'm beginning to realize it's probably the best way to go, since it seems like DAZ has decided to abandon Carrara development
I also ran across BlenderSensei Alchemy and Zero Brush, which looks like a possible alternative to make Blender a bit better as a alternative to zbrush (and to some extent Substance Painter). I was wondering if anyone has had any experience they could share with either of these? The cost of both would be about the same as the educational version of 3D Coat (the full version has been on my wish list for years), so really not to bad if they really enhance Blenders sculpting and painting capabilities/workflow.