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points by luckydata 1 day ago | 0 comments

Polished is not the word I reach for when I think of Blender's UI

This is just repeating a common meme. Blender's UI layout and organisation is fine, but this is a UI library. There's nothing wrong with blender's UI technically, in fact its pretty decent overall

[–] fc417fc802 1 day ago

> Blender's UI layout and organisation is fine

I absolutely detest it (TBF I haven't used it for the past ~2 years) but I also recognize that it's an incredibly difficult problem space that lacks an obviously good solution, the tool itself is inherently and irreducibly complex, it's a free project with extremely limited resources, it's been consistently improving over time, etc, etc.

[–] DrewADesign 1 day ago

Everybody hates all serious 3d application interfaces… they’re just complicated. I’m professionally competent in Houdini, Maya, Max, Blender, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, the UE editor… they all suck in various ways but it’s all a giant set of trade-offs and priorities. Beyond that, lots of these programs have lineages that go back decades longer than almost any modern dev environment and being so complex, UI changes can be quite disruptive. Kind of like why so many *nix cli tools are the same as they were decades ago. A lot of (no, not all) developers think they have the most complex tooling in the computer world — they definitely don’t.

[–] Jtarii 1 day ago

Blender may be the single most polished open source project ever made.

It is actually a miracle that it is as good as it is considering other open source graphics programs like GIMP are horrendous to use.

[–] Andrex 1 day ago

I'm using it as a video editor for Linux, and I'm constantly surprised how rock solid and fast it is. DaVinci wouldn't even run on my PC without a GPU, but Blender can run on anything I throw at it. And aside from those two, the video editing situation on Linux is a wasteland. I'm so glad Blender added VSE, and that I found it and learned it.

[–] coldtea 1 day ago

There's a lot of thought in Blender's UI, and a lot of improvements over the years.

Fundamentally all 3d modelers have inherent degree of complexity. The ones that give a "simple" facade with fewer options make other things harder or having to look into obscure places.

All of that are beside the point however: people will use this as a GUI library, not as a Blender's UX design.

[–] omnimus 1 day ago

Can you give examples of what are polished UIs in your opinion?

[–] soulofmischief 1 day ago

This was true 20 years ago but has not been true for a decade. Blender evolved from among the worst UI/UX on the planet to among the best. It's now fast, intuitive, decently hierarchical and well-organized, leans into search and pie menus, in general it's very polished and in some ways ahead of the curve.