Blender Compared To the Major 3D Applications

LetterRip writes "Recently TDT 3D published a comparison of the major 3D digital content creation applications such as Maya, 3DS Max, and XSI, and of course Blender. Blender came out surprisingly well, although it definitely still has some weaknesses."

It's the UI that kills it

[l0ungeb0y]

I've always thought Blender to be a solid but completely useless application because for whatever reason, the developers created the most heinous god aweful UI known to man. It's a freakin eyebleeding headache that leaves one happily shelling out the hundreds or thousands of Dollars for a modelor with a usable GUI.

It's a shame. Because Blender could be a contender, but since the developers live in their own little world with the attitidude that their app is made for a "certain group of people and not everyone", the application is basically a sick joke. If you're looking for a free 3D package and don't care how painful it is to use it, Blender might be for you. Otherwise, go with Maya or Lightwave. Also, Modo is a good modeler with a great UI, if you just want to model and not animate/render.

On the Interface

[Smerity]

First off, the name is a tad misleading, it's more "Major 3D Applications Comparison (including Blender)" as opposed to a focused against Blender - but that can be easily forgiven. What is good is that the author has used a wide range of industry standard tools (Maya, 3ds max and Lightwave etc) in everyday tasks, so it's not a fanboy style review where the outcome was and always would be 'Blender best'.

Blender is maturing well, especially considering if you look at the progress they've made since the code was first open sourced, and I'm confident that they will be able to continue this progress in to the future. I won't comment on the feature to feature comparison, I will just reiterate what the author said early on in the article - it's the artist not the tools - and in this case the an open source and free tool is sufficient to create some stunning art. Check out Elephant's Dream [wikipedia.org] to see an example.

And my one note to those commenting later - the interface. Many people complain about the interface, how it's difficult to learn. Unfortunately, many of these people are trying to 'learn 3D' over the weekend - and I'm sorry, that won't happen, regardless of the package. To become truly proficient in any 3D software package takes a long time.
I also see many people compare the UI disaster to that of GIMP - I don't think that's really an accurate comparison. Read reviews of people who have actually mastered the Blender UI and they will confess that once learned it is very effective. The author in the article also states this, with him saying that it's a "Fast workflow, (but) can be more intuitive".
I'm not saying the Blender user interface is perfect, or that improvement can't be made, merely that even in its current state, once learned and mastered it is a powerful tool.

Overall however, I'm glad that Blender has progressed so well, and look forward to seeing it's progress in the future. Without it I would never have begun my exploration into 3D at all.

it's all in the details

[Dubbie99]

Comparison lists like this are very misleading. The devil is in the details. It's not about how many buzzword columns an app can check, it's about whether the app has had a userbase that has thrashed the software through years and years of real production work and had the software evolve into a powerful tool. It's very easy to add a feature in a 3D app. Most interested hobbiest weekend coders could whip up most functions found in any given 3D app. Whether that feature is production ready is another story. Going by the list it would seem that something like Blender of C4D is on a par with Maya and Max. They're not. They don't have the huge in-depth expert user communities and the benefit of thousands of users pushing them to the limit day in and day out. If you're choosing a 3D app, talk to some real 3D artists who have been in the industry for years and depend on their 3D application system for their living. Don't compare checkbox lists.

It's the UI that makes it

[Max Littlemore]

Some people don't like blender's UI like some people don't like vi.

Once you spend the time (say a day or two) it's really quick and productive. The UI is a major asset.

Re:It's the UI that makes it

[paganizer]

This is a rebuttal.
Background: My very first job, in the late 70's, was as a Draftsman. I used the very first version of Autocad, back in '83(?). I've been using 3dstudio since before it was a actual product. I used Lightwave on an Amiga in '91 (VideoToaster rocked).
I changed careers, and only play with 3D these days. But I play with everything, Vue d'esprit, Poser, Maya. I've tried pretty much every 3d application I hear about just to see if it's worth parting with my limited hobby money. Never had a problem figuring out the wildly different UI's (except Maya, a little. I was overthinking it).
Do you get what I'm saying here? I figured out Truespace from a german language version. I don't read or speak german.

I tried out blender first when it was shareware.. 2001 I think. The UI was a nightmare. I had a decently new copy of 3ds, so shook my head and forgot about it.
Then the game "The Movies" came out. I got hooked. after poking around, I found out that the only import/output scripts for customization were blender scripts, so i grabbed the latest version of blender.
I tried. I really, really tried. I grabbed the tutorials, FAQ's. I bought "The Official Blender guide". I even had a "Blender Guru" come on to my system in VNC to walk me through the (allegedly) simple process of opening a file, applying textures, and exporting using the plugin. it took 3 flipping hours.
Blender may be a great engine. But the interface is a crime against logic, nature and makes me revise my opinion on whether or not true Evil exists.
If you are thinking of getting into 3D software in some way, as a career or a hobby, keep this in mind: If you waste your time learning the Blender interface, you will not be able to use that "knowledge" with ANY OTHER APPLICATION.

Re:It's all bunk

[KDR_11k]

CSG is just a means, you could just as well use NURBS or subdivision to represent a highpoly model. The problem is that you have to downres it to a point where it's not just fewer sides on a cylinder or something but where the entire surface has to change. Details must be removed from the geometry and put onto the texture instead. Some things will be faked with alpha. The software would have to automatically recognize which details are important and need to be kept. Even worse, for organic objects it has to understand where and how the object will deform and how to make that look good. And finally, it's just unnecessary work to model every little detail on a model when 90% of them will be lost in the downressing anyway, that just wastes time and time is money.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[ajs318]

Mod parent up.

Too many people confuse "hard to learn" with "hard to use". For example, typing less-than, e, m, more-than followed by text to italicise then less-than, divide, e, m, more-than is much quicker -- once you know how to do it -- than highlighting the text (an operation requiring leaving the keyboard, getting hold of the mouse, manoeuvring it with pixel precision, clicking and dragging), either clicking on an icon (invariably an italicised "i") or selecting something from a context menu (involving a tricky finger-swap or possibly even a keyboard operation), and then returning to the keyboard.

Also, anything that was hard to learn will be even harder to forget.

Robust?

[starwed]

I looked at the comparison table, but couldn't figure out whether "Good" or "Robust" was a higher score...

Sorry but that's just wrong

[Sycraft-fu]

Just because you can learn to use a harder system, doesn't mean it isn't harder. Since car analogies are popular let's go for another one: The difference between a stick and an automatic. I drive a stick, always have, always will if I can get away with it. I'm an ace at it, never causes me any problems. I don't even think about it, I just do it. However there is no way I can argue that it isn't harder than driving an automatic. There is simply more to do, more to learn, and I remember how painful learning to drive on a stick was. It certainly isn't an unusable or unlearnable system, and once you've learned it well you are plenty efficient with it, but it is not as easy as an automatic.

Well same deal with interface. Not all choices are arbitrary, it isn't as though all UIs are created equal. There really are things that make it easier and things that make it harder. Just because you spent the time learning it and now don't have a problem, doesn't mean it is easy.

Also, some things are easier for computer people than non-technical people. I've seen many things that make assumptions in relation to a level of understanding of how computers work that if you lack that, you are really screwed. A good example would be regular expressions. If you understand how a finite state machine works, regular expressions are likely to be easy for you. I remember when I learned about them and as soon as I was shown the syntax, a light bulb went off. I found them quite easy, once told how they work, but then I'd been tinkering with FSMs before I knew that term. However a non-technical person could be hopelessly lost on them because they just don't understand the logic behind them.

Trying to defend bad UIs in OSS does no good for anyone. People don't want excuses and they certainly don't want to be told that it is their problem.

Re:OSX

[boaworm]

I dont see why that is such a big issue ?

Apple's implementation of X is fast, stable, easy to install and blends very well into OS X. It's freely available and you can download it from apple.com.

Sure a native application would have been even better, but this is really very far away from "unusability".

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[gaspyy]

[...]they have to factor in that blender will undergo 5 or more years of development before they hit the job market after uni. They'd be insane to learn a closed source one, which might go bust in that time, as opposed to coming into the market with 5 years of Blender

Sorry, I disagree.

First, all the major 3D apps have very strong markets; it's highly unlikely to see any of these disappearing any time soonn. Even when Autodesk purchased Maya, they didn't kill it, but rather refocused the programs a little: 3ds max for games and architectural visualisation and Maya for film.

Second, by learning any of these programs (I'm thinking of Max, Maya, Lightwave and XSI) a student would more easily jump to another program than from Blender.

Third, if a graduate goes to an interview and says he only knows Bldender, their chances of being hired would drop dramatically.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[sabernet]

But they have to decide whether they want to please their niche or appeal to the greater audience. The niche may like it enough to stick with it. But a great many people, some with influence, some just with experience in industry apps, don't. And not everyone has time or the ability to throw those out the window.

Italics

[Per Abrahamsen]

Should you use <i>text to italicize</i> rather than em? <em> is for text you want to emphasize, rather than text you want to force a specific slant on.

Blender's UI is good once you master it?

[Michael_gr]

That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution. Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.

Re:It's the UI that makes it

[grumbel]

### Blender may be a great engine. But the interface is a crime against logic, nature and makes me revise my opinion on whether or not true Evil exists.

Could you elaborate on that? I mean, I can understand that people have trouble with the Blender UI, it certainly has issues due to being heavily focused on keyboard shortcuts, but "crime against logic"? There is nothing in Blender that makes opening a file hard, its not the standard OS file dialog, but its not all that different either. Applying a texture, ok, that can get difficult, because it is difficult and depends heavily on what the export plug-in supports, a texture setup that Yafray or Blenders internal renderer might render fine is often impossible for a game engine to handle. Blender just happens to be a general purpose app and not something like Milkshape that is specifically designed for gaming, so things can get more complicated.

How about those unhappy with the Blender start a page in the Blender Wiki detailing all the tasks they wanted to archive but couldn't do to Blender being more illogical then it should be? While the Blender developers might oppose a completly UI rewrite, since there really is no need for it, they have been quite open to cleaning things up and fixing them.

Blender's UI is good once you master it.

[Tetsujin]

That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution.

Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.

True, that - when switching between the two I often find myself wishing Gimp worked a bit more like Blender... And certainly there are a lot of people out there who wish Gimp worked more like Photoshop...

But this whole idea of "one paradigm to rule them all" doesn't work for me. I think it's premature. People are still figuring out better ways to do things in UIs and - here's the clincher for me - what's best is domain-specific. If you're writing, say, an e-mail application - there's a certain set of tasks that program has to do, and probably there's an expectation that lots of people with all kinds of different backgrounds will use the app. In that case, sure, familiar UI concepts are a strong asset. But even then, even in something as simple as e-mail, the emphasis on making the app "easy-to-learn" emphasizes things like hiding or removing lesser-used features, to simplify the interface.

But a 3-D modeler is a different beast. You don't expect everyone to learn 3-D modeling, not everybody needs or wants to - which is quite understandable due to various difficulties involved. (For instance, dealing with 3-D space but 2-D display and input, using a giant library of different modeling tools and techniques to create the desired effect, and even dealing with things like individual vertex placement, since the computer can't quite handle that on its own in "specialized" cases, like low-poly modeling or animation...) The task of 3-D mesh modeling is inherently complicated - at present, anyway. People, in general, aren't sculptors or model-makers. In any medium (clay, plastic, polygons, whatever) the process of learning to model isn't simply "how do I make this", but "how do I make this with these tools and materials?" So users of a 3-D modeling app have a considerably higher initial investment: this suggests a higher level of sophistication as well.

So, here's the thing about making the interface fast-to-use vs. easy-to-learn... How many times do you have to use a given function? How does that weigh against the one time you have to learn how to invoke it? Let's suppose, for instance, that I had a polygon model with "smoothing" turned on. (That is, smoothing via shading algorithms, like Phong or Gourad shading) - And I wanted to specify edges that would appear "sharp" - discontinuities in the "smooth" surface. Now, it may be simpler for me to find this functionality if it's laid out nicely in a button bar somewhere - and I honestly have no idea if Blender has such a button, since I use keystrokes for most functions like this... If this is a task I have to do lots and lots of times, it's worth my t

Re:Sorry but that's just wrong

[caseih]

Yeah you're right. That is a horrible analogy, and pointless one. Why did this get modded +5, insightful?

An 18-speed heavy truck unit is not only a stick shift, but has unsynchronized gears, requiring training, skill, and also an inherent understanding of how the transmission works (expected rpms at shift points, etc) to drive adequately. By your flawed analogy, this is clearly an overall negative thing that is adversely impacting the trucking industry in general.

Seems to me that if there really are things that, say 3Ds does in a slick, intuitive way, without compromising power and features, then we should be able to exactly quantify that. Instead we have an entire series of posts whining about how horrible the interface is and how obviously more intuitive other interfaces are, without a single example (other than the texture example, which is an acknowledged problem on blender). I mean really, does having "save" and "load" in a slightly different menu position (or even UI position) really make blender suck? No, I don't believe so.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[Bob-taro]

Now, if the Blender team could ever pull theierr head out of their ass and bring in a UI developer and stay out of the way... they might have something. But it's been ears coming and I doubt we'll ever see Blender become usable.

Hey, I do UI development and I'd love to work on Blender! How much do they pay? ... Oh, yeah.

I suspect that's why so many free software projects have poor usability. That last bit of "polish" can be pretty expensive in man-hours, and I think the volunteers on these projects tend to be more interested in the challenging work of adding new features than they are in mundane usability work (I know I would be).

Re:Sorry but that's just wrong

[babyrat]

furthering your analogy, while an automatic is easier to drive than a standard transmission, there are things you acn do with a standard transmission that you can't do with an automatic. So yes there is a steeper learning curve to driving a standard and it is certainly 'harder' to drive a standard than an automatic at any given point in time, but when you need the features of a standard transmission and all you have is an automatic, then you are screwed.

Trying to defend bad UIs in OSS does no good for anyone. People don't want excuses and they certainly don't want to be told that it is their problem.

Denying that a UI is bad is not defending it. A UI that is hard to learn is not necessarily a bad UI. It might be if it were a telephone that grandma has to use, but Blender is not a telephone.

Re:The slogan of bad user interfaces everywhere...

[ikekrull]

That may be true, it may have a bad UI, it may turn new users off, but theres nothing that can be done to fix it without people who have the skill, and the will to change it.

So, in the short term, if you don't like blender's UI, go buy a package with a good UI. There is no free alternative. In the medium term, your best bet is to help to fix it, and in the long term, eventually, this issue will be addressed by somebody else.

Its a matter of how much time have you got to contribute vs how much time youre prepared to wait for Blender to get a new UI.

I mean, if i never bothered trying to edit text files in POV-Ray (oh yes, i've been there too), i would never have gained the knowledge i use daily with Blender and other 3D apps. I never once threw up my hands and said 'too hard' - i was too busy learning and creating stuff.

So while it may be 'the slogan of bad user interfaces everywhere', its also the cry of the project that is trying to be too many things to too many people, with not enough hands on deck.

Its a simple matter of resourcing and a lack of consensus - so if Blender is losing users because of the UI, well, thats regrettable, but unfortunately not addressable without compromising other goals in the short term.

Blender can, and will be, so much better than it is now - and its not like anyone is stopping anyone else from reorganising the Blender UI in a newbie-friendly way like GIMPShop does with GIMP.

Inkscape is wildly popular because a bunch of developers took the oddball sodipodi interface and changed it to their liking, not because the sodipodi developers were influenced by the UI complaints on slashdot.

And really, when you look at the size of the Blender community, does it really seem like there is a problem with the number of users?

Re:It's the UI that makes it

[carlmenezes]

Thank you. You have just described my experience with Blender as well. There is no denying the power behind this application. There is also no denying that this app is like a car whose accelerator is the handbrake. I for example love modeling the interiors of buildings as a hobby. I have no background in architecture and none in graphics but I could figure my way out in 3dStudio Max, Lightwave, Maya, Poser & Sketchup to create pretty realistic versions of real world interiors. I love open source and at every single opportunity I get, I try to use an open source solution first. Hence Blender. Over the past 3 years, I have made at least 15 attempts to figure it out. Heck, it took me less time to figure out how to build a Linux system from source with no prior background. If I spent that much time on any one of the others, I would be able to do a LOT more in either of the other applications.

Which reminds me, this being slashdot and all, if anyone wants to start up a project to create a decent user interface for Blender, you've got my time & support. Its an open source project. There should be nothing stopping us from designing a useful UI. Lets do it.