[dingus]

The interface overhaul is a huge accomplishment.

I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.

I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.

[bogwog]

> The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy

Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.

This new interface is great because it's easy to use for Maya/Max people, and it's still similar-enough to the 2.7 era so as not to alienate long-time users.

[knolan]

I would compare the Blender UI to Vim. Once you spend a bit of time with it you wonder why every other piece of software isn't this efficient.

I'd also go so far as to say that the 2.80 UI overhaul has slowed me down a bit. Things that were a single key stroke away are now an extra one or two. Menu items have been renamed and rearranged (often for the better) but now I have to go hunt for them and relearn them. If these help Blender become more popular, then that pain is worth it.

Bravo to the Blender team!

[thrax]

Btw there is a toggle to make the UI work more like 2.79.. it definitely helped me transition.

[knolan]

Oh I know. I’ve deliberately chosen to follow the new default. I’m one of those people who avoids customisation because I often have to work with students and remote machines.

[Mirioron]

I agree that even just following a few tutorials of Blender 2.79 was enough to make the UI understandable for most things. The problem the UI had was with discoverability. It was usually easier to find out how to do something from Google (especially YouTube).

[lenkite]

What are the single keystrokes that are now doubled or tripled ?

[Old_Thrashbarg]

Good comparison. I compared to Gedit which just has unusual UX conventions. As soon as I heard of vscode, I switched over.

[thanhhaimai]

I used Corel Draw, Photoshop, Maya, and I had a hard time getting to Blender. It's not that it's badly designed. It's just the conventions I have in my mind for other design softwares are no longer correct.

Every action I take, I can no longer be confident about my "guess" of what it will do. It's like the door handle problem, where you see a strange unlabeled handle and are not sure that you need to push or pull to open the door. Then you tried to push, since that's the convention for all the door in this building space. The door doesn't open. Then you tried to pull, and it works. Maybe pulling to open the door is better than the normal convention, but sometimes it's not worth it to sacrifice consistency.

I think the new changes are for the better :).

[Wistar]

I had a similar disconnect coming from 3D Max and Adobe. I couldn't get Blender to do anything as the user model seemed so different. I watched a few video tutorials and spent 1 hour a day for about three weeks and the light finally came on and now it is comfortable enough that I am able to translate my past 3D Max (and distant past Softimage and Vertigo) experiences within Blender 2.79. Still hunt around a bit.

[meerita]

It seems that the only way is to do a serious video tutorial series, something pro. Both 3D Max and Blender look huge things you cannot start learning on your own.

[slavik81]

Admittedly it was 17 years ago, but I gave up my hobby of making maps for Westwood games because I couldn't figure out how to use 3dsmax. Of course, there weren't any YouTube tutorials back then.

A couple years ago, I learned to use Blender through cgcookie tutorials and googling. Nothing was easy, but everything made sense eventually. It really makes me appreciate the free tools and learning resources we have today.

[zamalek]

It is supposedly like Vim, intentional or not. It's contextual (Vim: command mode, insert mode, Blender: object mode, edit mode, etc.) and reverse-polish (e.g. "UVSphere 16 16"). It is an efficient, streamlined and, honestly, superior interface.

You cannot explore it, and that's the problem. RTFM is required.

> it's easy to use for Maya/Max

When I was 14, with not prior 3D software experience, I first attempted to use Blender (it's free!). After maybe 20 minutes I gave up trying to add a sphere to the scene. I figured out the Max interface in less than a minute.

Change aversion is a factor, but it also alienated complete newbies.

[doctorpangloss]

> Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.

When it comes to user experience, blaming the user is the worst sword to fall on.

[ekianjo]

If you think good user experience means making everything obvious or intuitive then Blender or Vim do not have it. But if you trade some learning time off, in not too long this translates to faster and more controlled end user experience which is also desirable.

[p1necone]

Eh, there's a difference between "bad user experience" and "optimizing for the long term pro user at the expense of initial learning curve", I believe Blender falls into the latter category.

[echelon]

> Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all.

It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.

Major kudos to Blender on this.

[preommr]

There's absolutely no comparison between the horror that is/was gimp and the previous blender ui.

Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.

[knolan]

I would really disagree, the 2.5–2.7 UI was excellent. It was fast, efficient and extremely customisable to match the style of popular alternatives. The 2.4 era UI was a very different beast however.

The main issues new users have are often related to management of the deliberately non-modal UI which allows you to split the main window up in any way you like, kinda like tmux. With 2.80 tool sidebars now have big clear icons instead of rows of buttons with sometimes impenetrable words written on them.

Ultimately the 2.80 UI is much the same as the 2.79 UI with a more fashionable dark UI and a reworking of some idiosyncratic design choices (changing from right click select to left click select etc).

[i80and]

The old old Blender UI prior to 2.49 (in 2009) was clumsy and felt 90's. But the pre-2.80 UI was fine; very snappy to work with, just a little obscure in some cases.

[bogwog]

You must have not learned how to use it then. That, or we have different definitions of the word "clumsy". It has absolutely nothing in common with Gimp, so that makes me wonder if you used it at all.

> Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not

That's subjective, but it did support themes and DPI scaling.

[lone_haxx0r]

You could justify any ugly design under the "subjective" premise, even pink buttons on a #FF0000 background. But to anyone with good taste, it looks better now.

[inflatableDodo]

It was nevertheless already a massive improvement on the early stuff. My first introduction to blender involved three floppy discs, printouts of all the keyboard shortcuts sellotaped around the monitor, and lots and lots of colourful swearing.

[gitgud]

Gimp's not as bad as it used to be. Feels like photoshop to me now.

UI design in open source software has been greatly under appreciated though... Maybe its having a revival

[soulofmischief]

It depends, even a decade ago the UI was an absolute disorganized mess. Sometime within the last seven or so years everything was completely reorganized into the beautiful interface we've come to know and love.

[egypturnash]

I’m an expert user of Illustrator and I found Blender’s core UI choices weird and clumsy in a way that paid 3D programs weren’t. Blender fundamentally feels like it’s designed by someone who’s never used another art program in their life.

[colmvp]

Yep. I've used Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere), Sketch, old Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, Shockwave) I know how to use a number of different IDE's, and yet when I opened Blender, I had to watch a tutorial on how to do even super simple basic operations.

[wwweston]

I suppose the question is if Adobe's choices are the optimal ones, or if there's other defensible choices.

I'm an occasional Photoshop and Illustrator user (longtime Fireworks diehard, though, RIP) and while some conventions make sense to me, there's plenty of things that I have to look up tutorials for, even if I've learned them before.

Sometimes different software is different.

[babyloneleven]

Sometimes it's not worth to optimize too farther from the current local optimum. UI designers have a "budget" for weirdness and unfamiliar conventions and must spend it wisely

[nineteen999]

I wonder what your take on the ZBrush UI would be then. It makes Blender seem positively sane and OCD by comparison.

Yet many artists make amazing stuff with ZBrush.

[njharman]

That's the point. Blender UI was for Blender expert users. Not some other program's expert users.

[neya]

As someone who left the 3d Industry a while back and rejoined it again, I have to totally agree. At the time, I was on 3ds Max, running on Windows. Things changed and I switched to OSX and never looked back. And then, Blender 2.80 happened. And wow, now I'm hooked. For the sake of a fair comparison and to see if 3ds Max really was the simple software it once used to be, I installed Windows again and played it for some time. Max has gotten advanced now (obviously), but also increasingly complex. The familiarity of 3ds Max 2009 edition was gone.

And so, I started investing time into Blender. I started out with something as simple as modeling a speaker box. It was such a joy. Still, it's not perfect. The camera movement is really terrible in comparison with 3ds Max. You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max and to manoeuvre the camera is such a pain in the ass. Still, it makes up for that in modeling. I'm enjoying 3d now again and even building a new rig to support my renders.

Well done Blender team. Thanks for the 2.80.

[tinus_hn]

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/877/camera-to-us...

It won’t create a new camera but this shortcut moves the camera to show the current view.

This still is in the documentation but I haven’t checked if the key is still the same in 2.80.

[neya]

Yeah, I tried this, while this sort of addresses my issue, it's still not as convenient as MAX.

[bkor]

It would be great to give this feedback to the Blender team. Once you're used to something it can be difficult to see the parts where it is more difficult than it could be. So Blender needs continuous feedback from people who haven't used it that much before.

[neya]

I agree. Will do. Thank you.

[auto]

> You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max

I've never realized I needed something so badly that Blender didn't have as I do now.

[sam_bristow]

I'm really impressed that Blender has been able to pull off two fairly major UI overhauls (2.5 and 2.8).

Other Free Software projects quite often get stuck in a UX rut and resist any efforts to improve or change.

[keyle]

It's funny because, I for one, long time Blender user, is completely lost in the new interface.

[indolering]

That's the curse of UI development: improvements often mean breaking user habituation. Given how difficult the old UI was to learn, this is totally worth it. Blender needs more mainstream users.