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Comment by dev0p

1 day ago

I love the general idea behind Blender's UI.

And I do appreciate the effort that goes into it, especially in the latest versions as it got much better,

But I really really really REALLY don't want that UI in anything else other than Blender.

Please don't.

If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.

If you're already using Blender to make assets, there's some benefit to stuffing Blender's UI into your game editor too.

  • In that case it would be competing with imgui, egui and similar libraries, but the submission is comparing it to GPUI.

    • Do imgui/egui have comparable numbers of interface objects and parameters to adjust their look and behavior? I certainly wouldn't suggest either as an alternative to QT-level interfaces—which seems to be what's offered here.

  • >If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.

    Not in an age of AI.

    I mean if you want to code all this stuff by hand, I get it. But that's a choice. And since it's a choice that means shoehorning a Blender UI into a "bargain-basement game editor" (and having a "bargain basement game editor) isnt really needed. You absolutely don't need to spend a lot of time arranging UI stuff.

    Game tooling is pretty trivial now and it's not user-facing. Again, I fully understand why someone would want to do this themselves still but let's not pretend thats not a choice at this point.

    • Depending on what you and the other poster mean by "arranging UI stuff", AI could either solve the problem for you or create larger problems, especially if you're not opinionated on either technical or UI matters.

    • Just curious: if this is really the case, why are you even spending time commenting on and thinking about one particular UI framework or not? As a dummy still writing code and making games by hand, I know why it interests me, but isn't this like an archaic topic for you? What is there to actually gain or learn from one library or another? Can't you just think about high level concepts and pure ideas now? Spend money to do the rest?

      3 replies →

  • After trying blender for about 20 years I still find the UI/UX awful. I think a lot of the new blender generation has baby duck syndrome.

    • Blender had a very different ui before and a big redesign, so most people have different opinions between the old and the new design. It sounds like you find all of them awful. I find that surprising and wonder what 3d program you find have good ui.

      6 replies →

    • > I think a lot of the new blender generation has baby duck syndrome.

      Maybe some of them do, but even though I disliked the UI at first, I've come to appreciate it as I've learned it. It's simply different from most other software, so that obviously causes friction. However, I think once you learn it, it's quite a good system. There's a tradeoff between optimizing for familiarity/new users, and providing an optimized experience for advanced users.

    • I'm not a professional designer or 3D modeler but I've used Blender quite a bit. I know what you mean but the latest UI post redesign isn't bad.

      Blender does a LOT of stuff. Its not an easy product to create an UI for. But I think the problem is much bigger when coming from a different 3D package than when learning from scratch.

      My teenage kids use Blender as the first 3D package they've ever learned. I was impressed with how quickly they ramped up through videos and learning from each other.

    • Apparently there is a crowd still using 2.79b, the last version with the old UI (current LTS is 5.2)

      My baby duck fingers could probably pick up LightWave 3D again in an hour or two. I could never gel with Blender.

    • I agree, I don't think blender has changed as much as people say. But I don't think it is baby duck, I think blender always had a good UI, it has just taken the rest of the world 20 years to catch up.

      A lot of people go "Blender UI was horrible, but they redesigned the whole thing and now it is good" Having used blender in a minor role for 20 years(i think I started on 1.7), I think this was just a big psyop by the blender team. Sort of how the client goes "Change things" and you change nothing, wait a day, and tell the client "I made the changes you requested" client: "I love it"

      I am not saying the blender team has not made substantial improvements to the UI over the years, but the core is still that same quick blender workflow, This is very different from the normal clunky GUI design of 3d modelers of the era and as such blender got a reputation for having a weird UI which was easily translated to blender having a bad UI. So what do you do when you have an unwarranted bad reputation? Especially now that the rest of the world has caught up and is using your flows and they are not so weird anymore. Make a dark mode and put out a big press release "we redesigned everything, it's good now" so people will try it.

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    • First time I hear "baby duck syndrome".

      > Baby duck syndrome is a cognitive bias where people automatically prefer the first system, interface, or product they learn to use, judging all later versions or alternatives by how well they match that initial experience.

      That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.

      6 replies →

Why not? For similar applications it would be really beneficial to not have to reimplement all the little UI interactions they've polished over the years

  • Polished is not the word I reach for when I think of Blender's UI

    • This is just repeating a common meme. Blender's UI layout and organisation is fine, but this is a UI library. There's nothing wrong with blender's UI technically, in fact its pretty decent overall

      2 replies →

    • Blender may be the single most polished open source project ever made.

      It is actually a miracle that it is as good as it is considering other open source graphics programs like GIMP are horrendous to use.

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    • There's a lot of thought in Blender's UI, and a lot of improvements over the years.

      Fundamentally all 3d modelers have inherent degree of complexity. The ones that give a "simple" facade with fewer options make other things harder or having to look into obscure places.

      All of that are beside the point however: people will use this as a GUI library, not as a Blender's UX design.

    • This was true 20 years ago but has not been true for a decade. Blender evolved from among the worst UI/UX on the planet to among the best. It's now fast, intuitive, decently hierarchical and well-organized, leans into search and pie menus, in general it's very polished and in some ways ahead of the curve.

No? I think there would easily be other use cases where Blenders UI would be very suitable, e.g. Audio software.

It is not a UI paradigm that you would use for just anything, but for certain poweruser software it is one of the best paradigms I have seen, especially since they managed to get rid of 90% of the rough corners in the past decade of development.

Egui also has terrible defaults: https://github.com/emilk/egui

But a good design system does the trick. Artcraft apps use this library and their Adobe clones come very close to the original apps.

  • Every Arftcraft app and non Artcraft related software clones trying to reuse the Artcraft libs (craft-libs) already have everything ready to use.

Yeah but, this can’t possibly be any worse than tkinter.

Q: “Whats wrong with tkinter?!?!”

A: It sucks, that’s what!

Typical HN top comment negativity :)

That UI is fine to be on many more places than Blender, given that many libraries people use are way worse. Imgui for one example.

How about a simpler UI consisting of just a text input field for AI.

  • Yeah, nothing like e.g. watching a video or drawing something and changing settings by asking AI.

  • Despite rumours to the contrary not everything is best interacted with via an LLM. If you want to go to that degree then have at it, all you need is an old school TTY on a serial cable, but the rest of us quite like having UIs designed to fulfil a purpose rather than a soup of Claudeish prose describing a progress bar.

  • "Oh you talk about different paint brushes and pigments? How about just hiring a painter?"

    Yeah you can do that. If you have low standards and don't need control of the details.