[socalgal2]

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly.

That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.

Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.

There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.

I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.

[diamondtea]

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

So it’s

1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.

2) where that tool is and how it works

Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.

Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.

Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.

[Animats]

> almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

Then, in the next release, they move.

Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.

[diamondtea]

Blender - or any super successful FOSS - feels to me like stumbling upon amazing vehicles and technology left behind in the fields in a post-war environment.

Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.

You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.

Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.

But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines

[scotty79]

> not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

The problem is it's someone else's very messy kitchen where nothing is where you expect it to be.

It matters where things are. Photoshop vs Fireworks, CAD vs Sketch-Up.

The problem with this software is that you can't make it yours when you enter it.

I think AI will solve this, by searching where the utensils are and putting them where it is convenient for you specifically.

[10000truths]

A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:

a) Having lots of options

b) Making those options discoverable for beginners

is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.

[socalgal2]

> A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental.

I believe this is false. I believe we just haven't figure out how to do it. I know it's not the same but if you give a sculpture a piece of clay they do not need 10000 options to mold it. Even a carpenter or wood smith don't need that many options.

I'm not saying I have the answer. I learned 3DSMax in 1995 and write extensive plugins for both 3DSMax and Maya (and PowerAnimator). I think someone just hasnt't figured out the better way and eventually they will.

[10000truths]

> I know it's not the same but if you give a sculpture a piece of clay they do not need 10000 options to mold it. Even a carpenter or wood smith don't need that many options.

The digital equivalent of those disciplines are only a tiny subset of what people do with Blender, though. If all I need to do is shape a 3D model, I could boot up SketchUp (or a similarly "easy" modeling program) for that.

To extend your analogy: if the sculptor makes a career out of creating hour-long 60-FPS claymations with perfect interpolation between key poses, grandiose scenery, and every frame fully painted in detail, be absolutely assured that the sculptor will have an entire workshop filled with jigs, armatures, robots and any other specialized tools to speed up the process and automate everything that can be automated.

[shawn-furyan]

That exists. It's called ZBrush (https://www.maxon.net/en/zbrush). But ZBrush can't replace Blender.

[Bruises]

Right on. And for all people's whining about it's UI and terminology being too confusing, it was designed for traditional maquette sculptors and it was hugely successful in helping them move into working digitally.

[sysguest]

well if you looked at blender 2 days, UI was really "user-hostile" level difficult/un-intuitive

I think about blender 4? there was a big UI overhaul here

[bigyabai]

One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.

It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.

[orbital-decay]

> If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable.

Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.

[jamesfinlayson]

I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.

I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.

I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.

[arvinsim]

I created a whole Counterstrike map back in the day in a few days.

Meanwhile, I can't get anything substantially done in Blender in a week. I just gave up.

[zeratax]

i mean blender has to support a lot more than a mapping tool for a game. it seems pretty expected to me that it would be more complicated to have complete freedom to do whatever you want vs the strict limits that such a tool imposes on you.

[yowlingcat]

My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.

That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.

I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?

If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.

What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.

[kg]

> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.

And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.

It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

[raincole]

> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.

It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.

Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?

[dgently7]

in 3d we have "blinns law", someone else probably has a better definition but basically it says that we keep adding complexity and details to a scene until it takes about an hour to render a frame. that being about as long as any artist is willing to wait to see their work. so even though a computer today could render toy story 1 in faster than real time, toy story 5 probably rendered per frame as about the same amount of time as toy story 1.

[throw0101d]

> There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.

As the old saying: everyone needs just 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for teach individual.

[alightsoul]

There's already ai models that create 3d assets

[uncivilized]

Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.

[pilaf]

Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.

Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.

[unsignedint]

The way I've come to think about Blender, and to some extent other tools in the same space, is that being a master of the tool as an operator and having the artistic ability to create meaningful work are two different skills. The best artists often have a good balance of both, but plenty of people are much stronger in one area than the other.

Since Blender is free, I think it's attracted a lot of people whose strengths are heavily weighted toward one side or the other.

Going back to the soccer analogy, you might be incredibly good at kicking the ball, but playing competitively and making meaningful plays on the field requires a completely different set of skills.

[uncivilized]

Sure kicking around and putting it between the posts is easy enough, now try it with full power in a specific corner.

Blender is much easier to use than the pre 2.78 days, but that doesn’t mean one can just build animation without developing skills.

[another-dave]

that feels like the opposite analogy though - filleting a fish to the precision of a Michelin starred kitchen might be hard, but knives in general are easy to use, even for a beginner.

[uncivilized]

Using your analogy, creating work in Blender would be like the chef whereas using something like an image viewer would be like using a knife to cut tape on boxes.

If knives were easy to use you wouldn’t see as many kitchen mishaps as we do.

[mohamedkoubaa]

A future where everything is very easy to learn is kind of dystopian

[ColdStream]

I think it is more an attempt at a difficult task. Easy to pickup the basics but having lots of room to grow.

[bs94]

Why does it take a year for the cow to produce a calf?

Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?

Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?