[djcapelis]

This is a generally well respected feature comparison chart: http://wiki.cgsociety.org/index.php/Comparison_of_3d_tools

Blender is generally feature rich, but has a fairly different UI than other products. People vary on whether or not they find that a good thing, Blender was originally built in an animation studio, for the most part, the interface prioritized ease of use for the knowledgeable user over ease of use for the new user whenever there was a conflict and sometimes neglected the latter altogether.

The project has since put in a lot of work to try and make the interface a bit easier to pick up without compromising on the speed with which current artists who use Blender heavily rely on. The 2.5 series of releases is the latest attempt at making this better.

[Smerity]

Very good point regarding the UI.

I find it quite annoying when people complain about Blender's UI. VIM's UI is also not "new user" friendly but VIM's UI itself is very powerful.

Blender and VIM are made for speed with familiarity.

[georgemcbay]

I agree with you to an extent but one important difference between VIM and Blender is that VIM tends to be the only tool a VIM user will use for editing code/text while a 3D artist will often use half a dozen or more tools to create a finished product (using focused tools in different areas of the pipeline -- it is not uncommon to use a focused modeller, say, even though technically you can model in Blender or Maya).

When you're using half a dozen tools and all of them either ship with or can easily be configured to handle Maya-style camera/mouse movement and Blender alone uses some wacky non-standard interface, it can really be jarring to context-switch to the Blender UI even if you are already familar with it.

I believe this lack of following de facto standards (and prior to 2.5 having no way to really configure to these standards) is a bigger factor in the rejection of Blender's legacy UI than the fact that it is hard to use for a beginner was.

[tintin]

Totally agree. It took me a while to learn how to use the UI. But when I did I was amazed about it's usefulness. Shortcuts are very easy for your hand (using qwerty layout). It all feels very natural.

I worked with 3D studio 1 (DOS) up to 3D Studio MAX 8. But working with Blender is so much faster already. Even tho I started using it some years ago.