omg, sry.

btw, i dont use it, and hate the ui. But blender is good.

Sorry too. I am simply a bit frustrated that you can never talk to Blender users without the usual result. Arguments? Who cares. The holy grail is under attack ...



That's all i said too. I never said Blender is bad. I just said that the UI is bad enough that Blender is useless for me, and that 2.5 may bring relief here. And whoosh the discussion goes the usual route: Blender has best UI ever, i am too dumb for everything (user's fault) because i say Blender UI is bad, am not willing to learn ...

Alright.

So in nutshell Blender has bad UI because it is splitscreened and has horrible GUI.

Then take some time and make it like in Max, XSI or anything. They have split screens too, at least when I tested Max '09 it had split 4 screens.

The confusion in the GUI comes from the lack of experience. If all of the GUI's would be that customizable, people would be horrified of the basic Windowsian blocky toolmenubars.

Myself? I love it. I can have all the windows I want and need in order and placement I need. There is absolutely zero "cluttering" or being bad. The anti-blenderians are just inexperienced of the GUI-system. At least I haven't seen senior Blender user with having sad face everytime they launch it.

why do you need it? probably it's buried somewhere in my backups (and would take long to find) if i still have it at all.

I never really said that splitscreen is bad, just that i personally dislike it. My software offers me splitscreen too. But not only. Blender though just offers splitscreen when you want more than one window.

Anyways, you have convinced me that splitscreen is no argument for or against. That is indeed a thing of personal flavour. Count me as convinced at that point.

But yeah, the Blender UI is horrible for me.



Nope.

I definitely don`t lack of experience. I've used and seen lots of software over the years. And to repeat myself, 3D is also nothing new to me.

The confusion comes form a UI that follows no standards. Blender has menu items all over the place (parts at the top, parts in the middle, parts left, parts right, parts hidden by mode, and at absolutely curious places ... i talk for example about the settings menu at the top that you can pull down, means when you know that there is a settings menu, or about menuparts that just appears when you have entered a special mode), is officially completely hotkey driven (I am simply not made to use just hotkeys. And NO, i don't have anything against hotkeys, i use them too.) with the limit that you can't even customize these hotkeys, every new tool just gots added over the years where there was free space left, means curious hotkeys and button constellations (there is just the word cluttered for it), i talk about buttons where i don't really know are they active or inactive. I was more than once trapped by this. Is hilighted active? Is it really a this big effort to make a button animation that is pressed down? ...

I also talk about things like the odd DOS load/save dialogue for example. Gives me half an heart attack every time i need to load or to save something. But yeah, Blender is made for Linux. So count that one out when you want.

A button or icon driven UI has buttons or icons, means this UI has in best case tooltips and/or a symbol that can tell you what tool awaits you. This is what i call intuitive.

Hotkeys don't have symbols. Hotkeys have no tooltips. Hotkeys even don't tell you that they are there. Now go figure ...

In Blender we talk about a UI where you have to learn everything from tutorials or manual. Nothing is intuitive. There is no chance to figure anything out by yourself. And you better never ever forget your needed hotkeys. Means the workflow is as follow: starting Blender, starting manual, starting a Blender forum, starting tutorial, and first SEARCH ...

I have for example still not found how you can simply move in the workspace. This is very first basics. Such things should jump right into your face when the UI is good. And even here i get quickly stuck. Middle mouse button at least rotates the workspace, and you can zoom in and out with scrollwheel. Fine, but not enough. I could not model that way. And again i am at the point where i would have to open the manual, or to ask somebody ...

And what is this curious red-white ring with the fadecross good for? And and and ...

That's what i talk about when i talk about the bad UI of Blender. It simply is bad arranged (and that you can put parts to other locations doesn't really help. I don't even know which part does what, so how can i arrange it?), it has a very steep learning curve, is hard to handle, and is counter intuitive. I stay with my opinion, it is an example of how a UI should not be.



*cough*. Not every Windows software has to have blocky toolmenubars. And not every UI has to be this limited than the Blender UI. Give me at least customizable hotkeys, that would help alot ...



I'm fine with that. Best of luck.



We will never have a consensus at that point.



Because those with the sad face have already left. And never became a senior user.

So I was a bit misleading. I meant the experience with Blender.

there is no standard in 3d software guis. if you sit a newbie in front of maya or houdini he will be totally lost without a manual or tutorial. it took me weeks to get somewhat productive with maya. have you ever tried maya or houdini or some other high end software like that? it would be interesting to hear your opinion about them...

i don't think you can expect to learn 3d software just by intuition without ever having to look something up.

when learning blender my biggest problems were the trackball navigation (until i found the preferences - but nowadays almost every tutorial mentions the preferences first so i don't really see the problem with it) and that there were no transform widgets like i was used from maya (transform widgets got added as an option in later blender versions). i didn't have any serious problems with the rest of the gui.

the normal windows file dialog wouldn't really work for blender since in blender the file browser is also meant for browsing into other blender files for appending and linking objects. if you absolutely need a windows file dialog you could open one with a few lines of python and put this python script into a menu somewhere.

they are working on that right now. it simply wasn't feasible to work on it earlier.

With Maya the GUI was not very much of a problem because it is all windoze-like. The hardest part about learning maya is just learning what all the things do.

Kloppt Euch!

I think Vent is perfectly right here.
Frank has mentioned it, too.

It doesn´t matter if you take Max, Lightwave, Maya or Blender.
You´ll need a lot of experience and patience to get along with all bells and whistles.
It´s just a matter of taste, not a matter of different approaches.
I´ve evaluated the demo version of Lightwave, I´ve downloaded Truespace, Sketchup, Blender and other countless modellers.
To me, blender makes the best impression.
Indeed, the learning curve is steep, just like in every other advanced modeller.

Three years ago I switched from Paint Shop Pro to The Gimp.
I had a lot of headaches, but after two months I was glad that I´ve switched.
Now I´ve evaluated the demo version of Photoshop and I was disappointed. It just feels wrong to me.

But you can find a lot of Photoshop users that will bash Gimp.
It just feels wrong to them.

So I tend to say that it is 100% a matter of taste which tools someone prefers.

Don´t blame me for my awkward germlish please.

if buttons or menus look like windows gui elements or not doesn't make much difference to me. there are many things in maya which aren't very likely to be figured out by intuition. the hotbox, mouse gestures, viewport navigation,... just like with blender you have to read some tutorials first. ...and once you got the hang of the basics then maya starts to get really complicated with its DAG node system and so on.