Comment by BadBadJellyBean
5 hours ago
I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools).
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.
But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
> but are awful at UX
This is such a weird trope.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
> This is such a weird trope.
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Those products likely have UI / UX people behind how they look, feel and behave. ;) Except maybe Jira, Jiras always been the Excel of ticketing.
Teams are decent, wdym?
Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
We should consider public funding for open source projects.
Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
I think it's an issue of "what matters".
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
True, but PLM is an area where the bar for UX is very low indeed. I think the main barrier to an OSS one is the will to make one and the large list of checkbox features they're often selected by.
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.
Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).