[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.

[antoinealb]

I used Solidworks a bit and I would definitely says it has this first stage UI. After maybe 1h of tutorials you are already designing your first parts that you can 3D print.

[floopidydoopidy]

Yeah, well that steep learning curve everyone is complaining about for blender is about an hour. After that, you'll probably be doing rigged animation.

In my opinion, people associate cost with value. Something that's free MUST be worse than something that costs thousands of dollars.

[Pica_soO]

As Microsoft demonstrated - if something is equal in power and free- the cost drops dramatically. Cant see that happen with Adobe CS or Autodesk 3dsMax.

And its not a hour, even if you know other solutions. I guess in this sort of discussion, that is considered a defeat of the "opponent" - winning by him/her admitting in anecdata that he/she is stupid enough to take this or that longer to learn. Unfortunately feeling smart , doesn't help the cause of open source one iota.

I always wondered, why some people get full zealot for open source? Does explaining the problems away, instead of building a user-friendly OS/ 3D editing Software, supplies some sort of elitist "invites only Treehouse" kick?

[legodt]

Solidworks frustrates me because, as you describe, it is very easy to jump into and get moving, but once you start needing more advanced modelling or more intense surfacing, solidworks becomes an unwieldy beast of secret features and unintuitive workflows. There are many pros who scoff at this and just power through (like all things, solidworks is just a skill after all), but as a lower end user sometimes I just through my hands up and use a more intuitive modeller like rhino at the expense of solidworks powerful features such as the feature tree.

The 20 grand per seat price tag doesn't help much either

[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. :/.