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by zaphar 5918 days ago
I never really thought the barrier to entry for blender was that high. I tinkered in the blender codebase for a while and the code isn't that hard to understand. They've since made huge strides in code organization so it's even easier. Blender was my first real introduction to hacking on C code and I found the dev community very helpful and accommodating.
1 comments
chipsy 5918 days ago
From a user perspective, Blender seems to have cleaner code behind it than most of the commercial 3D apps; it starts faster, it crashes less, and I haven't encountered bugs in functionality.

As for the interface - I find it dire for detailed editing tasks(I opt to use Wings for modelling) but not too bad for managing the overall scene, applying materials, lighting, compositing, etc. I speak as someone who's invested a bare minimum of time into properly learning to use it.

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zaphar 5918 days ago
Blenders interface is built with power users in mind. They've made some progress in reducing how steep the learning curve but they still have a ways to go.

Your right about how clean/responsive and fast it is. They have justifiable pride in how many features they include in such a small binary. When I was hacking on it Blender weighed in at under 10 megabytes with features other apps needed 100s of megabytes to provide. I think they still come in under 20 but I haven't checked in a while.

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dirtbox 5917 days ago
Blenders interface is built by programmers. There wasn't a visually creative bone in the UI designers body.
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mgcross 5917 days ago
I would have agreed a few years ago, but the interface has come a long way, especially with the 2.5 alpha: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2...
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jcl 5917 days ago
Have you tried the new Blender 2.5 (now in alpha)? The interface is a major improvement... It's much easier to find things in menus and figure out what various options do. And you can edit the camera movement keys to match other 3D applications. There is still some weird modality, but I think this version's interface is becoming normal enough to see some significant adoption once it gets out of beta.

(But Wings is still a better modeller.)

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