Blender has been an incredibly useful tool and I use it almost every day. The number of things it can do is remarkable. Video editing, 3d modeling, animation, physics simulations, ray tracing, procedural texture generation, camera tracking, 2d image editing, character rigs, particle systems, the list goes on and on. The Blender Foundation continues to push out theses amazing updates despite the fact they only have a handful of people working full time. Blender is truly something special.
Blender is very much the Emacs equivalent for 3D editing software. It had a kernel of functionality written in C but the majority of the functionality is actually written in Python, which means there is really robust support for extensions and plugins.<p>Also like Emacs, the UI changes based on what mode you are currently in, which is super confusing at first because it is often not clear which mode you need to be in to accomplish some operation.<p>Also like Emacs, they have managed to cram an amazing amount of functionality into the program so it seems to do everything, and is rock solid (it would never crash, when 3DS Max would crash 3-4 times a day).<p>It's not for everyone, but it is very powerful.
I really, really like Blender. I use it only as a hobbyist, but pretty reliably once a year it's super useful - modeling furniture in my apartment before moving, making visualizations, even playing with little artistic ideas.<p>Contrary to some other comments here, I like the interface. My only experience with competing software was ~8 years ago, but I find blender's interface faster and intuitive once you get over a slight learning hump.
Just wanted to point out that Blender also has a surprisingly decent video editing workflow. The usual caveats about the weird user interface and steep learning curve still apply, but I gave it about two days of practice and am very happy with the results.<p>Someone wrote a review claiming that Blender was the least painful way to edit video on Linux. I'm not sure if that was/is still true, but after trying two or three crash-tastic alternatives, I'm willing to believe it.
The interface is the one thing that has kept me far away from Blender. Maya has many faults but, in the end, it has a UI philosophy that let's you reach escape velocity once you understand it. I have given Blender a chance many times, and every time, its interface makes my head hurt. It has improved, for sure, but still doesn't beat Maya in many ways. This is in now way a wish of poor luck to Blender as a project.
Blender is fantastic. Not only the modelling package is great and free (compared to the alternatives, aren't exactly cheap) and plugins are numerous and really good on average. Then beyond that, the renderer Cycles is GPU powered, and a beast, also for free. I've been using Blender every day for the last 2 years and I can't recommend it enough. Yes the UI will drive you mad at first until you get the hang of it. It's gotten better, but it's still different, at first.
This seems like an incredible amount of features in a single release, especially for such complex software. (I don't use 3D software, including Blender, so I may be wrong).<p>Does anyone know what their codebase health is like, and how they retain the ability to ship so much?
A lot of people got problems with the interface of Blender. Comming from 3dsmax I also did.<p>What helped me a lot is to learn all keys. I even printed out a shortcut cheat sheet.<p>Then I followed a moddeling tutorial and now I can say it's maybe the best software I ever used.<p>But the key to learning Blender is to learn to use your keyboard.
How's Blender's support for WebGL? I use Three.js quite a bit to make fun little animations, and for what it is I think it's the bees' knees. But for me, the lack of GUI means it remains slightly more time-consuming to be anything more than a labor of love.
I have been using Blender on and off since around 1999. I initially struggled and kept my 3ds Max. After the 2.5 update it has been uphill since then. I now use it as my primary 3d application. (I am mainly an animator but do everything else.)<p>It's interface, once understood is blazing fast to me. Yes it has caveats. So does every other big 3d package. I prefer some of the ways that Maya does things, and other times the way Blender does things. (I will never go back to the crashing fits of 3ds max, so much lost work.) But in the end it's the same as all the other tools. You just need to keep at it and it will become second nature.<p>The UI idea of no overlapping windows is probably my favorite feature of Blender's GUI. The ability to split windows and swap them to ANY part of Blender allows you to set it up exactly how you want, plus you can save your workspaces. Set it up once and forget it.<p>I can agree that some common commands have obscure shortcuts, but EVERYTHING is customizable. I do mean everything. (Side note, not everything is customizable in Python. :*( But most things are.) I have my own tool panel for all of my animation tools, I have custom shortcuts that overwrite some shortcuts that I never use. In the end I'm faster because of it's UI. Most of all I feel like I have a custom studio proprietary software because of how customizable it is, with just a tiny bit of Python knowledge. I don't claim to be a good programmer, but if you can write some html, you can customize Blender till you get what you want. Heck you can even make Popups/overlapping windows with 1 hotkey + mouse gesture.<p>I may be an advocate of Blender, but I have used just about all 3d packages and can gladly say that I'm happy with my experiences with Blender. (Since 2.5)
I was working with Blender for the last few months and it can be quite confusing. Yesterday I had this weird occurrence where I had call bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT') everytime before changing the matrix_world.translation values of some meshes. (Even though I didn't select anything in between). It took me hours to find out why the meshes weren't moving correctly.<p>I guess Blender is not perfect for using it with python only.