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The Shortcomings of Blender


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@@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.

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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.

Cerez likes this
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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 and Boothand like this
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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.

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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.

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