whyroc

This is a slightly different way to bake specular than what I was doing.. a little simpler with the extended material nodes. I learn something new every day!!!

Blender bashers beware.. blender is a sensitive animal if you poke it it will bite! If you stroke it and caress it and tell it its the best then it loves you back!!!

So if you are the type of computer user who still clicks the edit->copy then the edit->paste in MS word instead of crtl-c ctrl-v then blender is definitely not for you!! Don't even bother .. seriously..

-why

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Come visit our new City on Blue Mars, now open for preview:

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Miriel Enfield

Lies. Blender loves nothing but your cries of torment and the slow disintegration of your mind.

CaleVinson

"Counselor?"

"I'm sensing anger Captain."

(under breath) "No shit Sherlock."

Dancien Graves

Both the ZBrush and Blender UI's make my head hurt. But this coming week I plan on sitting front of them until I learn how to make sculpties.

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whyroc

Its true.. one mind cannot hold enough blood sweat and tears that can be easily dished out by The scale and the pickyness of the infamous blender interface. But it's not supposed too.. nor does it need too.. Blender is the amalgamation of about 10 year efforts on the part of hundreds of contributions, it can do many many things, it has its own game engine for example.. how about fluid dynamics for scientific simulations, how about feature length cgi movies?.. the options are numerous and diverse. The trick is finding out what it is you need to know how to do and filter out the stuff you don't need to know. Starting at page 1 of the Blender wiki is not the best if you are only wanting to make sculpties for SL. The basics yes.. interface could use an update.. but you can blame it all on this guy:

blender.org - History


The hot keys are really the essential point to using blender effectively for SL sculpty mesh modelling... either you like it or you don't. Compare it to learning to play the piano.. once you take the middle C sticker off

Rev Eponym

Helpful? More like, revelatory.

Thanks, Miriel, I had missed that, and wouldn't have looked for it in the Oblong Sculpts thread anyway.

Warkirby freakin' rocks.

specbakerender.jpg
spherenodebake.jpg

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Raindrop Drinkwater

Oh yes this tutorial is the best.

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Miriel Enfield

So? Yes, Blender can do a lot. But the interface is inexcusable. Let's take one example: the layer system. The layer buttons are very small and totally unlabeled. They have no markings (except for a dot in the newest version, when there's something in the layer). They have no mouseover text. Beyond them, there is no label anywhere on the interface saying which layer you're on. Forget about naming layers, a feature that image editors have had for ages. The hotkeys for the layers are the row of numbers at the top of the keyboard, which are relatively easy to hit by accident. Should this happen, your work will disappear, and there will be no indication what has happened, beyond a small change in a small, easy to miss button -- and that's if you're in the right mode. If you're in the wrong mode, the hotkeys still work, but the teensy buttons aren't present. Hitting undo won't fix things, because you didn't actually change anything, you just switched your view.

And that's just one feature. Then there are the buttons labeled by pun, "translucency" abbreviated two different ways, "screens" abbreviated as "SR", the extensive menu accessible only by pressing "w", the convoluted method of baking specularity instead of just adding a "specularity" button to the bake window, the fact that shift deselects selected things except when it doesn't, the update that silently and significantly changed the functionality of the "use alpha" button, the gray on gray on gray default color scheme, and on and on and on.

Mastering a new program takes time, but learning the basics shouldn't be like learning the piano. It shouldn't take a week. I wasn't kidding when I said that learning Blender is like learning a program done in a foreign language. If you memorize what you're supposed to be doing, you'll be fine; otherwise, you'll flail helplessly. And programs simply shouldn't be like this. I'm tired of seeing Blender defended on the basis of "well, you can do a lot with it and I eventually learned how to use it!" Well, me too. Given the same amount of time I spent with Blender and a tutorial, I could learn how to use a program written in Sanskrit. That doesn't excuse whoever was nuts enough to release such a thing, or make it anything other than a ridiculous and unreasonable bitch to use for non-Sanskrit speakers.

Yes, volunteers put a lot of time into this and you can do a lot of things with it and I'm glad it's free and you get what you pay for so on and so forth. But you know what? They messed up. With all the effort going into coding the thing, someone should have taken the time to design an overhaul to the interface, even just an optional one. Usability is important. For all that the Blender devs have accomplished -- and it's not inconsiderable -- this is a major area and they fucked it up utterly.

Now, I'll back off a bit and say that some of the latest updates have been better in the UI department. The locking features in sculpt mode, added a number of versions ago, are intuitive and sensible. The dots on the layer buttons are a step in the right direction. Sensible interfaces for new features, however, aren't enough. The thing needs a whole overhaul.


EDIT: Whyroc, sorry if that came out as snapping at you.

Vaelissa Cortes

You know, Miriel, nobody forces you to use Blender (as far as I know!).

Miriel Enfield

No, nobody does.

That doesn't change the fact that user interface is important but truly and honestly sucks, and caused me no end of frustration and wasted time when I was trying to learn it. It also doesn't change the fact that Blender itself is a lot of wasted potential, thanks to its lack of usability.

Rev Eponym

The important thing to remember about Blender is, it's free.

This removes an important component from the motivations of the developers. Commercial devs are always under pressure to be at least halfway user-friendly, or else no one will buy their product, and they'll be out of a job. They have to make their product usable.

Blender, while it was once a commercial app, is now built by a cadre of volunteers, and as such is under no such stricture. This principle also applies where the bad documentation and support are concerned.

That said, Blender does a hell of a lot for something that people are making, for no money, in their spare time, out of the goodness of their hearts.

I am grateful to the Blender dev team, and to the people who provide information about it.
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