I'm always told how blender is amazing and there seems to be some impressive tech under the hood, the simulations look amazing and some stuff produced with it looks great but every time I try to use it, it is incredibly frustrating, like it's close but still so far away when it comes to the UI. I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half, I have made intros and virtual sets for TV shows so I have some experience with the industry. I just really hate the Blender UI, I have used many different 3D programs and blender by far has the most friction when it comes to creation.<p>Blender users have baby duck syndrome and will argue that it's not the UI it is me and I always wonder why is it only blender's UI that has so much friction? Just manipulating the view port can be frustrating at times. Even the three.js 3d web editor feels much more intuitive to use than blenders UI.<p>The best analogy that I have come up with is someone who has learned to ride a bicycle without a seat, while uncomfortable is still 100% usable, but when you come and say you prefer the bicycle with a seat and it's a better experience they tell you, no you are wrong for liking the seat.<p>This gif represents what it feels like to use blender vs any other 3d software; <a href="https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif" rel="nofollow">https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif</a><p>Please Blender foundation hire some great UI and UX people, give them a budget and don't add any features until the UI is no longer a pain to use.<p>I want to use blander very much but life is too short to deal with awful UIs.<p>I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8
Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use.<p>Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup (<a href="https://lulimjewelry.com" rel="nofollow">https://lulimjewelry.com</a>) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints on a piece of jewelry and then 3d print it for them. I build the pipeline in blender on the backend using NYT's blender docker containers. Everything can run headless (although headless rendering with Eevee was a pain to set up).<p>I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities.
New features of Blender never cease to amaze me. It gives me some kind of satisfaction to see how much this piece of software has grown since first I used in in early 2010s.
Similiar tool would be great for movie players - interface where one can see overall view of a plot but also references to particular actor's appearance for instance.