31–36 of 36 posts
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I used blender a bunch in 2.5 era and then coming back to it in 2.8 - can't say I'm a fan - old UI sucked discovery wise but it was streamlined, new UI is too clicky - but I've only did a few basic things
Spacebar -> type command name -> do anything from the keyboard
Blender is a fantastic piece of software. Its UI never agreed with me that much, but watching experienced users, it reminds me of VI. As in, it appears to be optimized for power users, rather than ease of use, or discovery. It does seem to have been steadly improving. I'll try again.
It's been a few years so I've forgotten them, but should I need to learn Blender again that will be my go-to.
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I am an expert, which is why I am even more amazed about the crazy speed at which Blender improves and how they managed not to fall into the pits so many Open Source projects regularly walk into with open eyes.
I am so no expert, but have been able to create a logo animation for a fake TV show for a university project of my significant other this year. It was a blast and the tutorials were great. Using the software was a pleasure. Looking forward to the next few months were I will have some time to just play a little bit more with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am an expert, which is why I am even more amazed about the crazy speed at which Blender improves and how they managed not to fall into the pits so many Open Source projects regularly walk into with open eyes.
As someone who is not at all involved in that community, I'd love to hear what are the pits many projects fall into and what does Blender avoid.
* Gets good enough, but not great. Then most contributor lose interest and the pace slows. It makes the original roadmap impractical and more devs lose interest, which spirals into a dormant project (Inkscape)
* Maintained flawlessly, but no new groundbreaking features get added and there is a slow exodus of users toward new-shiny until it is a perfectly bug-free irrelevant piece of code (most JS stuff, GnuPG, some crypto libs, OpenBSD).
* Maintained into the ground by aggressive/oppressive/elitist/cultist/dogmatic core team followed by a split of the community (pre re-merge of glibc/eglibc, GCC/EGCS, ffmpeg/libav, Gnome/MATE/Cinnamon/Unity, Vim/NeoVim, all of Suckless, most of GNU)
* Fancy/overkill roadmap made at a time when there is plenty of contributors, but so hard to achieve most of them give up before the finish line (KDE4, GIMP 2.10)
* Unresponsive/exclusive community toward new contributors and/or SJW attempts accidentally FUDding a previously functional community (lets not point fingers and start a flame war)
* Unwillingness to break things or pay up the tech debt in order to stay relevant (EMACS, pre-LLVM-era GCC)
* Break everything consistently and often and/or remove your contributions because of a dogma (Gnome)
* The Free-software people and the commercial contributors revolt against each other (OpenOffice/LibreOffice/StarOffice/CollaborraOnline, OwnCloud/NextCloud)
* Misguided attempts at making money by breaking things for your users (GhostScript, eLive, Mepis, Mandrake, every project who moved to AGPL)
* No attempt at ensuring the project can exist without its founder (CentOS, all single-person-army projects out there, all BDFL who refuse to let go when they lose interest)
* Sabotage (ion3, ffmpeg, Cyanogen)
* Suicide by committee (many Apache/Eclipse foundation projects like Apache OpenOffice)
* Make a major incompatible upgrade with no clear migration paths (Python, GTK, KDE, Gnome, AwesomeWM)
* Promise a major upgrade, tell your users to wait for it, then backtrack (Perl)
* Maintain multiple branches of your software forever until you fragment your user base so much you compete with yourself and lose to new-fancy (OpenSSL, pre-rolling Firefox, MySQL, most "enterprise grade stuff")
* crazy rebranding ideas leaving most of your users unaware of the new project (Apache OpenOffice, my own SFLPhone->Inutchuk->Ring.cx->GNU Ring->GNU Jami->Banji fiasco, KOffice).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am an expert, which is why I am even more amazed about the crazy speed at which Blender improves and how they managed not to fall into the pits so many Open Source projects regularly walk into with open eyes.
"Crazy speed"? Blender was a commercial product in 1995. It went open source in 2002 after the vendor went bust. It had the UI from hell. It took another 15 years to crawl out of that pit. Finally, it has an adequate user interface.
Blender had more and bigger updates at a faster pace than any of the programs I used in the past decade. This includes commercial software as well.
And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me or that. Most of the time it was more like: "Remember that thing that took you half a week to render? That now got 10% faster, because magic".
The commercial past of Blender doesn't really play that big of a role other than the very efficient binary file format it gave us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Crazy speed"? Blender was a commercial product in 1995. It went open source in 2002 after the vendor went bust. It had the UI from hell. It took another 15 years to crawl out of that pit. Finally, it has an adequate user interface.
Yes crazy speed. I use this thing since roughly 10 years, and used 3Dsmax and Maya before and parallel to using Blender (I work as a freelancer in the field). Blender had more and bigger updates at a faster pace than any of the programs I used in the past decade. This includes commercial software as well. And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me or that. Most of the time it was mor…
Blender's usual problem is "where did they hide that feature in this update?" Questions on that come up in the forums often. In the 2.8x series, visibility of an object is controlled by three different checkboxes in different places, all of which have to be on. Importing older Blender files sometimes resulted in some of them being off.