Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gotodengo 1798 days ago
I have to admit, I'm a bit concerned about Blender's future development.

I've been a Blender user for 15 years, I jumped on somewhere before the 2.4 redesign.

There have been some really awesome advances in Blender over the past two years. Things that really changed my typical workflow in an absolutely good way, Eevee and all of the node work for a couple amazing new additions.

They've also changed a lot of things, namely keybindings, UI, certain modifiers, that had been done in a certain way, and that I'd committed to muscle memory, for over a decade. Those changes also had the effect of breaking years worth of accumulated tutorials and bookmarks as the workflows they mentioned are not longer relevant.

It's intensely aggravating to spend 10 minutes figuring out how to do something that you used to know how to do with the flick of a wrist. Especially when you fall back to searching how to perform the action and only find 4 year old stackoverflow posts which state the old way to do it.

I've even recently taken a weekend reimplementing the old full color icons, which required a full custom compilation, due to the lack of contrast in the new uneditable monochrome replacements.

I fully admit this may just be my initial steps into the grumbly guy who doesn't like change in my software. But I can't help but compare Blender to Firefox.

Awesome tech and a great mission, sometimes aggravating UI and workflow changes, important relationships with would be rivals.

As someone who is also still on Firefox, my opinion is that loads of cash didn't necessarily turn out great for them either.

For me at least I consider my custom hacked up, modified keybindings as best they can be, Blender to be nearly feature complete for the work I do. It's awesome that it being opensource has allowed me to nudge it in the direction that works for me. Like I said though, as a long time user I am a bit concerned.

2 comments

I think the biggest motivation behind the UI change is that Blender's old UI was just very non-standard (and not exactly intuitive either). Now it's close to the others, so I'll imagine there won't be any large changes until some massive shakeup (VR becoming common?) happens. A lot of documentation being outdated definitely sucks though.
I've started with Blender after the UI changes and wouldn't have otherwise (I know, because I've tried several times).

The next x users are many more than the current y users.

Annoying the y for no reason would be stupid. But not making improvements for the x because the y were there first is a recipe for declining relevance.

Isnt this a recipe for always taking your current users for granted? [Not saying it applies in Blender's case, but more generally]
This is part of my concern, as well as the potential dilution of power features. See Firefox's recent decision to stop supporting the compact styling due to low usage.

It is a topic which does have ongoing discussion within the Blender community going back a few years [1].

[1] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-bet...