[hardmaru]

This is beautiful. Despite what critics say about Blender3D, I am constantly amazed at what can be done with this piece of open source software. The learning curve can be more difficult at the beginning but it is one of those systems where once I get used to the commands, I can express myself efficiently in the rich UI environment it offers.

[astrodust]

The learning curve is difficult in any 3D application and Blender is no exception. It's challenging to learn, but a very capable application in the right hands.

I don't get the hate for Blender. It can use RenderMan, it supports Python scripting. It's just different from what people are used to.

[TeMPOraL]

> It's just different from what people are used to.

It's probably just this. You have the same with Vim and Emacs, and tiling window managers - they're different from what people are commonly used to, therefore hated. Even though the paradigms employed in those applications make you many times more efficient in using them.

It seems that a lot of people - even many professionals - have allergy for learning. They feel they've learned enough when they first discovered how to operate computer (yes, every single one of us had to learn that at some point), and they hate being forced to learn further, regardless of how much benefits it brings.

[chadcmulligan]

I've used Vi and Emacs 25 years ago - I used to give courses in Vi and I used to write LISP macros for Emacs as a developer support job for some time. Why anyone still uses them is beyond me, I don't see how they make you more efficient than modern IDE's like Visual Studio or Jetbrains et al, but to each their own.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, I can tell you how - because they're superior at text editing. Modern IDEs are superior at staticly typed lanaguages such as Java or C#, where you also deal with so much boilerplate it's literally faster to tell the editor to write / modify code for you. With those languages, it is also possible to make things like autocomplete/intellisense you can trust is giving you 100% information, so this is a huge win too.[0] I use Java at my $dayjob, and I stick to IDE there too, because of those features. But there is a noticeable (and very low) efficiency ceiling in things like text editing, or doing project lifecycle tasks (like version control).

Switch from Java and C# to more flexible and dynamic space, and suddenly, IDEs give you nothing over Vim and Emacs[1]. There you can finally feel the efficiency of a properly internally integrated text editor. I could elaborate much more on this, but in the interest of brevity I'll just mention magit[2] in Emacs as an example. This is probably the single best integration of Git with a development tool. You get to use 90% of git (!) with simple shortcuts and no modal popups to stop your flow (+100 efficiency). I can prepare, review and commit my code in it in the same time it takes IntelliJ to load the version control popup. And I get to use all of the superadvanced text editing and navigation features throughout the entire tool.

It's little things like this - extremely powerful editing and navigation, tight internal integration of everything, that makes Vim and Emacs so powerful and worth going over the learning curve.

--

[0] - As for why this isn't backintegrated into Vim and Emacs so well, my understanding is that intellisense and semantic refactoring engines are huge piles of complicated code that don't fit the architectures of Vim / Emacs code well and need to be done as external application. Languages that benefit from those features are few and - while popular on the job market - not exactly liked or respected among the hacker crowd. So there's little incentive in making projects like ENSIME actually 100% feature-complete or even easy to set up.

[1] - But they still lag and consume insane amount of RAM and CPU power.

[2] - https://github.com/magit/magit best to look for screenshots to really see just how much tooling it packs inside.

[qwertyuiop924]

Absolutely this. As somebody who primarily writes Scheme, I can't imagine using anything other than Emacs: paredit, geiser, and flycheck are better than any IDE for that.

[chadcmulligan]

glad it works for you, it's not something I'll ever do, unless someone offers me a large bag of cash :-)

[Pica_soO]

That allergy is called limited time. You might bump into it, once you venture outside of university/ rich daddys attic.

Every time somebody reinvents the wheel, to save a click- and breaks my workflow, that might seem very reasonable for those who either have lots of money/time - and or already did that investment.

Well, i dont, i have things to create, places to be. If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off. You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.

PS: The Miyazaki tribute is absolutely gorgeous. Im not trying to claim, that blender cant be a excellent tool once you have sunken the cost. Its just that retraining for absolutely no reason..

[TeMPOraL]

> That allergy is called limited time. You might bump into it, once you venture outside of university/ rich daddys attic.

That may be one of the causes, but the allergy I talk about is internalized myopia. Time is limited, yes, but it's worth to sacrifice some of it for learning in order to significantly improve your efficiency at using the rest of the time.

> If you re-invent a scissor, that only trained experts can use, because its basically two razor-blades taped to the thumb and forefinger- you accomplished all you have dreamed off. You reduced weight, you allowed for more precise use - and the likes of me will still call you out for missing the obvious.

And I'll still be calling you misguided, if such scissors after few days of training will allow those "trained experts" to outperform regular scissor-wielders by factor of 2. Or even factor of 1.2 - it'll pay for itself pretty quickly.

This approach that every tool should be made for the lowest common denominator, so that people can master them in 5 seconds of use, is IMO stupid. I understand that software designed by that may sell better, but for the tools professionals choose themselves - do people really think they've learned everything humans can learn the moment they leave high school?

[Pica_soO]

That is why professional software usually has two stages- First the UI, designed to be used by everyone with little training and not demanding from everyone to become a Renaissance level expert at everything. Second stage are short-keys and creating your own tool additions. And that is where blender falls short- the first stage is the second stage.

[Grue3]

>That is why professional software usually has two stages- First the UI, designed to be used by everyone with little training

I have never seen actual professional software that included this first stage.

[astrodust]

Wow, that is so laughably wrong. If anything the UI is often as complicated and difficult as possible so that the company can generate more money by selling training packages or licensing other companies to do training.

Autodesk makes a mountain of money off of this stuff.

If you don't want to be a "Renaissance level expert at everything" then either give up on 3D or stay narrowly focused on one aspect of the pipeline and learn that well.

Blender doesn't fall short in either department. It's just different. Get over it.

This is just as bad as Max people whinging about Maya being stupid, broken, and useless.

[astrodust]

Limited time? If you can't commit to learning tools you need to use as a professional you're just going to get passed over and eventually dismissed as out-of-date.

Where are all those Softimage professionals now? Crying in a bar, presumably, if they didn't commit to learning other tools.

Your arrogant attitude implies your tools are better, that they will always be better, that there's never a reason to waste time learning other tools. Maybe that works for you, but for many other people they have to swing from one package to another simply to keep a job.

This isn't rich kids with too much time on their hands, rather the opposite: People who's employment isn't guaranteed and they need to be prepared in case opportunity comes along.

[pekk]

Did you just imply that all vim or emacs users live in "rich daddys attic"? Do you have any idea how many things have been created by people in a flavor of vi or emacs? Who is missing the obvious here?

[Pica_soO]

Yes, but these tools are created from programmers for programmers. And i know those tools, i use them to hack my commit messages in. All nice, for me, but me and you are not the audience.

Having different demands on tools for non-programmers, seems eh, reasonable?

You can type in Vim all you want, but the day you will try to introduce it company wide - you will meet some people you never knew and you are going to have the same discussion you did have here, and as reason does not seem compelling enough, i guess they will use hierarchy to cling "for no apparent reason, but plain stupidity and unwillingness to learn" to Microsoft products.

Here we are again, on the cultural san andreas fault- preventing open source from ever becoming successful. Sad Panda.

[TeMPOraL]

> Having different demands on tools for non-programmers, seems eh, reasonable?

Depends. I'm not expecting 3D artists to write a lot of Python (though it wouldn't hurt them at all). But what makes Emacs and Vim so powerful actually does translate pretty well to other domains (like 3D - hence, Blender). We're talking about efficient workflow. Something that makes the learning curve steeper in exchange of giving you a set of operations you can execute as quickly as humanly possible, and mix and mash together just the way you like. The end result is, after going through the learning (which is exactly the point at which people give up and go complaining), you end up thinking in the tool and focusing your mind on what you want to create instead of fighting the UI.

Unwillingness to learn is the real problem here, and it's mostly a psychological one. It's not about Open Source. I'd never recommend Emacs to Java developers because there are better tools for this niche, but I've seen the overwhelming resistance about e.g. switching to IntelliJ because "Eclipse is good enough", that's only overcome when a socially popular cow-orker does the switch and shows all the cool stuff he's now doing. It's silly to watch how the same people who so strongly complained about unnecessary learning suddenly find the time and will to do that learning, just to do the same thing the popular friend did.

So I guess the way to make powerful tools more popular is to make learning sexy (and expected!) again. Which is something the current web and mobile industry is definitely not helping with. :/.

[pfranz]

I haven't really seen the hate for Blender--just indifference. I can see dissuading someone from investing time in learning Blender if they want to work in the commercial VFX/Animation industry because it's just not used.

[buovjaga]

It is used by some studios (and other companies) and they are investing back: https://opensource.com/article/16/11/blender-enthusiasts-gat...

"For the next year at least, Blender is going to have 10 additional full-time paid developers. Some of those developers will be paid by the Blender Foundation or Blender Institute, sponsored with contributions from AMD, Aleph Objects, and the Nimble Collective.

More importantly, developers are being hired by production studios that use Blender, such as Tangent Animation and MAD Entertainment. These developers work on Blender for in-house productions, but their changes get submitted as patches for the version of Blender that we all get to use. This is a far more sustainable development model than sponsored grants and has been incredibly successful in other open source communities. It's only now starting to catch on in the realm of open source creative tools."

[Ericson2314]

Wow, real investment desktop free software for advanced users. I don't even use blender and I'm thrilled.

[jordache]

i wonder if blender is the gimp equivalent in the 3d world.. gimp is just horrible.

[yoklov]

If Photoshop was Maya, Blender would be much better than GIMP.

IMO Blender is still worse than Maya (but not by that much), although Maya is also substantially worse than Photoshop -- to make a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

[jordache]

I have been out of the 3D scene for a while now.. I remember Maya was the knees bees, on par with Softimage..

Is it no longer the case?

[geoka9]

Maya has always been the gold standard for animation. Modeling, not so much. Softimage has been discontinued by Autodesk.

After all we've seen from Autodesk (buying out and discontinuing the competition and forcing the customers to migrate to subscription licenses) I think it's unwise to ignore Blender if you are serious about 3D.

[jordache]

Oh man it's discontinued!?

http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/53bca41869bedd8b0d0...

Who else used to get a hard-on from seeing the footage of jurassic park animations in Softimage? I remember building up a machine with a Glint card back in the late 90s just to be able to fire up Softimage..