When 90% of the plugins and tutorials are available for proprietary software it’s hard to support blender.
It also doesn’t help that the UI of the blender is extremely hostile for new users. When other tools are easier to use and have better tooling it’s hard to justify the usage of blender.
They’re also finally switching the default to left click select. Having to select with right click was one of the big things that made the UI feel really alien for anyone who hasn’t used it a lot.
Blender 2.8 is literally the reason I am starting to actually learn 3D modelling. I have repeatedly tried 2.7 and could never get around that clunky interface along with the default mouse controls.
It is a good step forward. However a lot damage has been done already as blender is known to be the tool that is extremely hard to learn. It’s hard to lose the mark when it’s there.
I’m genuinely surprised that FOSS projects like Blender (or, for another example, GIMP) don’t offer ABI compatibility to allow the use of plugins made for the specific nonstandard ABIs of popular proprietary systems.
Anyone know why they don’t? Is it just a platform thing—e.g. having to support those plugins would mean having to compile winelib into your project?
Probably the internal data model is different? So ABI compatibility would mean rewriting an entire model into the in-memory format of the other software, running the plugin and converting back.
Blender addons are written in Python and routinely break between Blender versions (2.8 broke basically every existing addon because of API churn). If there is not even compatibility between Blender versions, there is no chance compatibility will be maintained with random proprietary programs.
Also many of the features are quite different than their equivalent elsewhere (armatures for instance).
I would imagine it is due to copyright concerns-see Google's Java API implementation woes. Additionally, the wine devs have very specific rules [0] about who can contribute, ideally they don't want contributions from people who have read the win2k leaked source. And I certainly wouldn't want to give Adobe any reasons to sue me, especially as Blender almost certainly can't afford to fight them in court.
I didn't downvote, but I would expect most programmers to be able to guess at the gigantic amount of effort required to maintain compatibility across a considerable semantic mismatch and at least understand the choice to spend resources elsewhere, especially in the context of open source, where there is no payroll to mitigate drudgery.
This. Back when I was trying to learn Blender as a hobby I had no issue finding tutorials, but they were for a variety of Blender versions. For most programs that would be a non-issue but Blender seemed to radically alter its UI with every update. Buttons were moved to different submenus, entire menu categories were added or dissolved, and keyboard shortcuts would either not work or do something different than described in a tutorial that was only a few months old.
This is a general issue for software I find - where is function X [now] (when I know function X exists).
For settings, eg on phones, MS Windows, Linux, this used to be a big problem to and it has been solved by simply including a settings search.
Is it time apps had a "search" on the application menu that would then open the relevant dialog, or perhaps optionally allow the finding of the menu item (eg open the menu, open the sub-menu, highlight the menu item that opens the dialog, pause, open the dialog)?
I had the same issue earlier, where is the Voice settings in Steam -- it strikes me if I can type "voice" in a function-search on the main menu that would be better than trawling for help info online.
It also doesn’t help that the UI of the blender is extremely hostile for new users. When other tools are easier to use and have better tooling it’s hard to justify the usage of blender.