Blender 2.57 Released — and It's Easy To Use! 221
An anonymous reader writes "Past Blender releases, as capable as they were, had learning curves somewhere between straight up and down and 90 degrees. The release of Blender 2.57 changes all that. No longer are simple features 'non discoverable.' It has more or less a completely redesigned user interface that is clean, sensible and newbie friendly (hey, I'm using it!). It has a handy tab interface for Actions/Properties such as Render, Scene, World and Object etc. Plus, it's fast and CPU friendly. I'm running the official Blender standalone binary on Fedora 14, with 2GB RAM , Radeon X1300 (free drivers) and a cheap CPU Intel duel e2200. No more more slow GUI, no more 100% unexplained CPU, just great stuff. Kudos to all who made this possible."
Not just a gui (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fantastic News (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No, it is not! (Score:5, Informative)
That's pretty much the case with any real 3D/CG application - even the allegedly easy Kai Krause built apps of yore (Bryce, Poser, RayDream/Cararra) required more than just a little bit of time and effort to grok the controls (let alone the concepts behind them).
Turn a complete newbie loose on Modo, Maya (*shiver*), Lightwave, or 3DS Max... or even a totally NURBs-happy app like Rhino. I guarantee you that 60% of those newbies will give it up in disgust in less than a few cumulative hours, and at least 20% more will give up on it after creating (and perhaps animating) a few crude meshes. It simply takes some work to know what's going on in a CG app. The closest I can remember any CG app being newbie-friendly? It was MakeHuman [makehuman.org], but in that app's case it was (and still is IMHO) pretty limited in what it could do offhand.
Hell, I've been dinking around with CG apps for 10 years now, and I'm still learning things when it comes to maximizing what even my most favorite and oft-used tools can do.
What a rubbish Meta Article Post. (Score:5, Informative)
1st of all: Blenders UI has been OpenGL accelerated from day one. It has allways been one of the fastest GUIs in existance. Way faster and more responsive than any other 3D Tool UI anyway. The GP is talking bullshit on this one.
2nd: Blender has never [slashdot.org] been [slashdot.org] particularly difficult to use for any 3D Kit with a simular set of features. In fact, it's UI design (non-overlapping, customizable, document/task based configuration, etc.) has served as a benchmark for quite a few recent creative tool UIs in the industry (Modo 3D, latest CS releases by Adobe, etc.)
3rd: The UI has been updated, yes. But it's more an evolution than a complete redo, from a user standpoint anyway imho. Simply because Blenders UI has allready been pretty good for quite some time now. ... Allthough the arcitecture actually is a complete redo. Python driven, new Icons and new panels. However "OMG I'M USING IT! IT FINALLY WORKS!" is way overboard, exaggerated nonsense. Blender has been a kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool for approx. 7 years now. And yes, that also goes for its usability. Anybody not familiar with other professional 3D Toolkits and the learning whoes associated with this field, please stay out of this on this issue. Thanks.
4th: There is no mention of the new tools and features, which are actually worth mentioning. F.E. a particle system that rivals that of Lightwave (the industry leader in this field) with particle path editing and other goodies, Smoke and Volumetrics rendering, NLA with an extra new NLA UI, etc. This has Blender closing in on competing programms even further and will shake up the industry once again. ... Can't wait till they finally get full Renderman compatibility. That will kick some serious shit. ... Anyway, Kudos to the Blender team for this great release.
As for the GP: Mostly Rubbish or stuff that no one wants to hear. "OMG I'm running Blender on XYZ with 2 Gigs of RAM. UNBELIEVALBE!" ... Idiot.
Re:Blender is a how-not-to GUI case (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree, one of the best pieces of advice I read was, keep one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. A few good tutorials later (I remember the first involved modelling and texturing a castle), the alien Blender interface seemed so streamlined compared to the lengthy menu navigation in Gmax, which I was also testing out.
Re:You're A Newbie (Score:3, Informative)
Did you even read the page? (Score:5, Informative)
ITs optional. You can go back to multi window mode if you like it that way!
From the page
"You won’t be forced to use it, if you don’t like single window! "
There : you have the best of both worlds