The Shortcomings of Blender

[Cerez]

@@mrwonko, you've mentioned in my nonsense thread that you've noticed Blender falls short in certain areas. I know this is largely a personal preferences, and extent of knowledge and practice with the tool question, but I'm interested in your experiences, and in anyone else's who's felt that Blender didn't do a good enough job in a certain working area, and/or wasn't the optimal tool for the task.

 

As any other professional software, Blender has a lot going for it, but it would be interesting to see where it falls short in its functions and design, currently.

 

My recent Blender-mania, and joking aside, I'm always interested to see both the potential strengths and weaknesses of any tool used.

[Boothand]

As much as I love it, the outliner is really hard to understand for me. I want to select things, re-order the hierarchy, parent things, drag things around. There is perhaps a way, but since I can't figure it out by trial and error, I'd consider this a convention-breaking shortcoming.

[mrwonko]

Off the top of my head, a mix of both common criticism and my own experience:

• The whole UI has a steep learning curve; being fully customizable has its drawbacks.
• When in object mode, one undo erases all the changes made in edit mode. From a programmer's point of view I can see why this is, and I occasionally use it to my advantage, but it makes it really easy to lose work.
• The reference counting resource user system is really weird to non-programmers as well.
• Right click to select
• Can't edit vertex normals
• Can't weight empties
• Can't display vertex indices let alone set them
• More stuff I'm forgetting

[Cerez]

Off the top of my head, a mix of both common criticism and my own experience:

• Right click to select

I think this comes as a trend from some older operating systems. It is easily changeable to the modern standard left click select in the File > User Preferences > Input tab. In the left-hand-side menu, under "Mouse" in the "Select with" option click "Left", and click "Save User Settings" at the bottom left of the window.

 

Which brings us to: the settings user interface could be more modern standard-like. There's really no need for the "Save User Settings" button, for example. It just complicates things when people miss noticing it.

 

• More stuff I'm forgetting

 

Feel free to chip in with extra, whenever you remember them.

[Cerez]

I came across this video:

 

 

It gives some valid workflow reasons for the use of the right mouse button to select in Blender.

[mrwonko]

I'm not saying it doesn't work, and after 10 years I'm used to it, but it's not intuitive for beginners.

[Cerez]

I'm not saying it doesn't work, and after 10 years I'm used to it, but it's not intuitive for beginners.

Oh, definitely. It was what scared me off and gave me a bad impression of Blender at first, actually. And it's the first thing I changed once I've decided to start learning it.

 

It's as far from intuitive as it can possibly get when starting out.

[AshuraDX]

@@mrwonko, @@Cerez

I jsut stumbled across something to fulfill your normal editing needs: https://www.blend4web.com/en/article/131/

[Cerez]

I just stumbled across something to fulfill your normal editing needs: https://www.blend4web.com/en/article/131/

A bit further down the line for me, but that's a very interesting SDK! And these normal edit options are impressive to say the least. Thanks for sharing.

[mrwonko]

That looks useful, though it's only a plugin, and I'd probably need to update my plugin to take advantage of this.

[AshuraDX]

@@mrwonko for the handful of people willing to actually learn blender that plan to create content for JKA this could be immensely helpful

I use custom normals to hide dismemberment seams from my meshes

 

and have some toher stuff in mind I want to try...

http://polycount.com/discussion/154664/a-short-explanation-about-custom-vertex-normals-tutorial