Landmark 2.80 Release of Open Source Blender 3D With Improved UI Now Available
'"In the 3D content creation space, where are lot of professional 3D software costs anywhere from 2K to 8K Dollars a license, people have always hoped that the free, open source 3D software Blender would some day be up to the job of replacing expensive commercial 3D software packages," writes Slashdot reader dryriver:
This never happened, not because Blender didn't have good 3D features technically, but rather because the Blender Foundation simply did not listen to thousands of 3D artists screaming for a "more standard UI design" in Blender. Blender's eccentric GUI with reversed left-click-right-click conventions, keyboard shortcuts that don't match commercial software and other nastiness just didn't work for a lot of people.
After years of screaming, Blender finally got a much better and more familiar UI design in release 2.80, which can be downloaded here. Version 2.80 has many powerful features, but the standout feature is that after nearly 10 years of asking, 3D artists finally get a better, more standard, more sensible User Interface. This effectively means that for the first time, Blender can compete directly with expensive commercial 3D software made by industry leaders like Autodesk, Maxon, NewTek and SideFX.
Why the Blender Foundation took nearly a decade to revise the software's UI is anybody's guess.'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/08/11/1842258
Cheers, Peter
On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 10:54:33 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'This never happened, not because Blender didn't have good 3D features technically, but rather because the Blender Foundation simply did not listen to thousands of 3D artists screaming for a "more standard UI design" in Blender. Blender's eccentric GUI with reversed left-click-right-click conventions, keyboard shortcuts that don't match commercial software and other nastiness just didn't work for a lot of people.'
There was always a preference setting to switch the buttons if you wanted. The preference setting is still there. Along with most of the “keyboard shortcuts ... and other nastiness”. The one important improvement I have found in this area is separate keystrokes for select-all versus select-none, as opposed to the old single-keystroke toggle.
I never understood the left-click/right-click issue anyway. In apps where you left-click to select, selection is a tool that you have to switch to first before you can use it to change the selection. Then you switch to a brush or whatever to do things to the selection.
In Blender, selection is not a tool, it’s something that’s always available. Hence the usefulness of a dedicated button. For example in weight-paint mode for animation rigs, you left-click to apply the brush to adjust the weight for the current active bone, and you can right-click on a different bone to change to adjusting the weights for that, and then keep on painting with the left button. No need to keep switching tools at all.
Unless you switch the selection preference to left-click. In painting modes, left-click still paints; only now you have to do control-left-click to change the selection.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann