Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.

Not really. It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.

The ideal UI would do both. Given where Blender comes from, the "skilled user efficiency" optimizations were far more important. I suspect there will be a lot of resistance to decreasing the efficiency of the UI to skilled users in the name of improving it for newcomers. If the latter can be done without sacrificing the former, then that will be welcome.

-Rob

Make a 90% transparent glass object. Make it cast a shadow on a surface. Notice the shadow is as dark as it would have been if the object was 100% opaque.

With a ray tracer, on the other hand, the shadow's darkness would depend on the transparency of the object casting the shadow (as in real life).

Another solution, of course, would be to have Blender export POV-Ray scenes.

Other than this, I'd say Blender *rocks*, the interface is great, once you get the hang of it.. just a couple of evenings playing around, and it should pretty much feel fine. Remember, just because the interface is different, it doesn't have to be crap (yes, steeper learning curve blah blah).

Does Blender have a real ray tracer yet?

As far as I know (which isn't much, sorry), 2.23 didn't have anything to do with raytracing. If you ask my honest opinion, Blender really needs support for external renderers (Renderman?) - the rendering engine is not always that logical, and (precisely hand-tuned!) environment maps, (nicely arranged!) shadow-only spotlights and (painstakingly manually tuned!) radiosity meshes don't quite cut it...

I agree with you, raytracing would rule. I can't even remember how long I have wanted that...

I did have some random success with the export scripts (to export to Renderman and PoV-Ray), but the colors didn't work in the old scripts and new scripts just bombed.

Hope future will bring help in this respect...

As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).

I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.

And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?