as a junior developer, I am used to look at [log info] window, which works as history window that register every activity done by me, good to remember what actions I have done in past sessions or even the current (long) session. if you are artist, it's like the history tab in photoshop.
I have been teaching Blender for 5 years in a vocational school, that Diagnostic thing is absolutetly needed. One thing also is figuring out why a texture painted image suddenly is black
I used to work as an UX designer, though not anymore, i 100% agree with this. Blenders UI has come a long way, but it could use a lot of QoL features to make it so much more approachable.
@@blenderguruthanks for making the vids u guys make… I’m seventeen and idk why but making animations is just so fun… also I’m still new.. but as of now, what view transform should I be using… I use agx and open exr as of now
I think this really nails a specific problem Blender has - the "wtf is happening right now" moment. No matter how much Blender I learn, I inevitably click or hit something that lands me in no-man's land of "wtf is happening rn" and it takes half an hour to find the one odd button that does it.
@blenderguru if you only had worked in a studio or a team with other experienced blenderheads for a mid size project...you'll have real credibility. But you still roam in the small scale of things, the small user, and we don't see that changing? Your audience has been always the beginners. Blender aims to make people smarter and wiser, dumbifying blender for the sake of the beginner's ingenuity does not help anyone, it only makes people unaware of what they are making and how it works. Yes they need to know what vertices, edges, tris, faces, normals, and how 3D works. Masking core functionalities won't make Blender a better tool.
@@testacals You arrived to Blender only in the last 5 years it seems, maybe? that goal you mention is the last of the priorities.... For the last 20 years, it's goal is to be a very capable 3-x-D software, on any hardware or OS possible. It was never intended to be a kinder. If there where stats about this video, I will be certain that none of the real users ever watched this video, only frustrated newbies 'that want to learn 3d' and think they know better than the people that made the software...
True, but also, you can't please everyone... That's great why there is multiple competing software's and people can find what works for them. The most comment I've heard from people who gave up is "there is too many options" Most people would rather have a single "make exactly what I want and make it look awesome, so I don't actually need patience and skill and learn to fail or waste any time and I can make lots of money" button. I guess what I'm saying is, don't use that slide as a guideline for developing software by thinking that whole red "people who gave up" part should be green. Always do a cost benefit analysis, does it make this better, but what does it make worse.
@@DrTheRich I see your point but that's not really what I'm saying at all. I would never expect to capture the entire market. My point simply that the little things often matter more than most people realize. As a software developer myself, I've seen first hand how making some small tweaks and adding a little polish is often more valuable to customers than creating another half baked feature they didn't ask for. To be fair, I'm not saying it should be entirely one way or the other. I'm just saying that the little things are often overlooked.
This was a brave and important talk to give. Andrew explained the issues so clearly and proposed solutions. It's really hard to get Blender to change its user experience...I hope it works! Well done, Andrew, and kudos to Blender for encouraging him to express his concerns! (Didn't love the Ton impression. He can be difficult but I'm sure sensitive about that)
They're really receptive to these ideas. We'll talk more post conference once I submit the design docs. But honestly they just need good people and more money to grow the team. Hopefully they can grow the devfund contributions.
The real problem with H, is the hide action is not reversible. You should press H to switch hide/show state for selected things, that's something much intuitive.
CTRL+Z works to undo the action(unhide at this point), like for most of the actions in Blender. You pressed something, and something is gone, or happens what you don't want, press CTRL+Z to undo. Works for most of it, but not for all the things.
Great presentation as always from Andrew. My two cents, I'm not sure of a single example for where scale doesn't need to be reset on an object in Blender, at least in my use case primarily as a character artist. It would be great if we could simply check a box to automatically do this by default when scaling an object.
thanks Andrew, this was really good. Even thought I find Blenders UI pretty good (especially when compared to an abomination of Zbrush for example), there's def. always room for improvement. I think Blenders UX/UI team deserves some recognition and praise for what they've done already! keep it up.
This would be much clearer if the circle cursor was visible constantly when in this mode even without manipulating anything, so you can immediately see you've switched modes when your press O. Proportional Editing should be treated like a brush tool with a simple slider at the top of the screen for changing the radius just like any paint mode. Imo it should also be renamed "Soft Selection" for clarity (Proportional Edit might be an _accurate_ name but it's not exactly self-explanatory).
If i were to add one more suggestion.... pls make the theme editor easy to use so many repeated input of the exact same color even tho theres only a few main colors for most of the ui. changing every same color by hand took so long
The info tab reminds me of Photoshop’s history panel. When I was new to PS that panel was a lifesaver, and though I don’t use it anymore I would have it perma locked in on blender if it showed things like Andrew’s suggestions (action taken, keyboard shortcut for action, potential constraints imposed on the action). In my few years of using blender it would have saved me days and days of troubleshooting.
On the topic, when you start to have lots objects in your scene that'd be great to have Blender tell you if what's in the viewport will be rendered or not. Maybe a color highlight in the Outliner for objects having a discrepancy between "Viewport Visible" and "Render Visible". I wish I could make the add-on if I knew how to code!
Every now & then I do some ui design for work & 9/10 my starting thought process is “okay lets make it look like blender” 😂. I love the way the ui has transformed over the years
Absolutely! I'm using other software like Unity and Photoshop, and more often than I'd like to admit, I think to myself, this would be so much more userfriendly if it had Blender's UI.
15:19 Andrew Price being kicked out right after the talk ends🤣 That's why he chose to give the presentation at the last day of BCON. I'm joking, don't get serious guys =D
the key-binds section was all too relatable. one thing to help with keybinds would be a better key-bind menu. For the first time, i'm gonna actually ask Blender to adopt something from Maya. And that's the Key-bind menu from Maya, along with its keyboard graphic highlighting the bound keys, including modified keybinds such as "Shift + Ctrl...etc"
The GOAT of shortcuts in blender is that you can add to quick favorites almost anything and you can just Q>Click option, and when pressing Q again it automatically hoovers the menu on the mouse cursor for the last selected option. I used this since the first day I launched blender.
The best moment of the show when Riddler cames out "What can it be?" I just LMO was very funny. I've started from 2.79 and yeah it often confusing especially for new users. but great talk! We will wait till Updates came out.
I definitely agree that transform values should be placed near the object that's receiving the transforms rather than in the corner of the screen. I also am not opposed to having more diagnostic tools in the UI for the viewport.
These are some really great points and suggestions I did not even think of. The amount of problems that occur in Blender because of not having applied the scale is just unbelievable :D
Good point. It’s no exaggeration to say that Blender starts and ends with shortcuts. Sometimes, it’s hard to even know where in the menu these shortcut commands are located. This is because most tutorials on TH-cam only explain the shortcuts. For beginners starting with Blender, this is a real struggle, as it basically just emphasizes memorization.
Hit F3 and type the action you want to perform, you will see the shortcut on the right side. In my opinion they should have kept Spacebar from Blender 2.79 keymap for this very basic feature ...
What do you mean? If you open a menu, each operator shows a letter to use a shortcut. Then there are tons of shortcuts to opne menus in the viewport and all over the app. Each function is always highlighter by a character. What do you mean by "sometimes, it hard to even know where in the menu the shortcut command are located". Because that's what is highlighter, you see a letter having an underscore. That mean that command uses that character.
Then you can contribute (as much or as little as you can). It's an open source project. I can make the same exact statement you did with 0 years of experience in UX design, it's pointless.
one thing I would love to see ui wise is a little icon or some text on nodes that specifically states whether that node works in eevee, cycles or both, can even be a mouseover tooltip
Great point on the accidental shortcuts. I think that another method of 'obscuring' could be to hide it in a menu, like M for merge currently gives you a pop-up menu with three options, the same could be done for H, even if it's just one option (hide). Putting things in pop-ups also helps with learning shortcuts, if you see that shift+H is hide and alt+H is unhide you immediately know that. The info window being there by default instead of the timeline is definitely a good addition for new users
11:34 there is an add-on for it. It's called Screencast keys and it's built into default Blender. I use that not just when I am streaming but when I am working by myself, because it gives me a history of my button presses. For as much as I make a mistake hitting the wrong key, I do enjoy understanding the legacy of *why* it came to be that way. With that said, I do think it's important to look back on why hotkeys came to be the way they are, but understand if it still makes sense in the current workflow, or if it has become redundant.
I have to say that I’ve tried to attempt to learn blender several times over the years and much of what Andrew talks about here is what has stopped any momentum I ever had and I’ve never got around to getting very far at all
As a teacher, I confirm a lot of beginner issues come back to 'I pressed a key and something went wrong' and the 'apply scale' problem. A improved 'info/screencast' overlay would be great!
Also I think a lot of problems are down to some legacy defaults being very confusing like pivot being set to Median point instead of Individual Origins (so when you multi select a hierarchy and rotate, each part does not rotate individually as you would expect) or the fact that Only Show Selected Curve Keyframes is not on by default etc.
6:00 great extension and easy fix to a significant problem! Looking forward to all the discussion and fundamental design descision surrounding these 4 simple checkboxes to take until summer 2025 and then the development timeline with 23 rounds of code review and the obligatory "lets wait for the complete overhaul of feature XYZ before we merge this in" will stretch this out so that we will finally be able to enjoy this awesome diagnostic shelf (that probably took the developer of this video a long afternoon to implement) in Blender 4.9 :)
The best part of this talk is that it's not a criticism: it's a recommendation. Talk is cheap and criticism is worthless. This dude proposed a solution for testing and didn't pretend it was a panacea.
I remember back in the day before 2.8 came along, you did a few mockups I really enjoyed back then as well. I like the way you think. These are good ideas and I hope they influence the future of Blender's UI for the better. Cheers!
I think the info tab along with a way to have the f3 command search bar visible at all times would be a good idea, so if someone is trying to do something, they can at least search for it there and contextually they may get there. This is present in Rhino, a CAD software, which in my opinion is very easy to learn as a result
I love these ideas. May need a bit of change to fit blender more, but in general they are awesome and I especially like the the shortcut tab. Maybe make it a smaller square-ish area at the bottom left/right so the timeline can still be the main thing there, but it just doesn't take up the entire bottom part anymore.
For anyone that doesn't know: You can turn on Opacity on Face Orientation(correct one) and you'll see in red only faces in the wrong direction without blue color on correct ones It's in Viewport color settings :)
brilliant as always. (ps Rhinoceros has that info box, and I always check what happened in there, its handy!) Andrew, thanks for pushing this forward in briliant Blender !!
This one is the best part of whole show that actually talk directly with Blender users. Im a newbie Blender user and im also complain about most of Andrew's suggestion every time when i launch Blender. In most case everybody wants apply scale to 1 it must be default action, if you dont want you need to press 'apply modified scale' kinda options. And rotate angles on UI god you know how many times my eyes keeps turns to left corner and middle of the screen. Even i tried to find most of my problems solutions with some plugins but thats not helped my problems. Even i tried to learn how to write plugin :D Dev's please listen all of Andrew's suggestions, you'll gonna agreed with him eventualy.
It’s wonderful that someone finally addressed this topic. I think everyone intuitively feels that Blender’s interface is a real pain. At the beginning, Andrew beautifully illustrated the differences between various 3D programs, clearly showing that it all comes down to the learning curve. He even shows an infographic at the end with the number of people who drop out of the Blender learning process and ultimately don’t become its users. The problem is that in the middle part of the lecture, Andrew focuses on what personally bothers him rather than on the main issue - "Why is Blender so hard to learn?" And in my opinion, this is the fundamental question we should be asking before we take even the smallest next step. We need some qualitative research instead of quantitive first. I promise: I will contribute, but let UX'ers do their job, but dont push us to do it in the Developers manner ;)
I think showing us his personal projects that contained those problems was less of just showing "what bothers him specifically" and more-so providing concrete examples of problems that occur from the fundamental issues he was talking about - said issues then leading the many other users he's seen, surveyed and assisted to the specific problems _they_ run into down the line.
I have a saying that Right Click Select is a graveyard of good ideas. There are tons of cool solutions to common problems on the forum. But almost nothing of it, gets implemented. That being said...the info panel is a bit over the top for the issue of providing information to the user. I mean it's good that it's there but , I think the way blender informs the user for errors is good...with some info that is visible but then slowly fades away. The issue have with it is as Andrew says...it's way down on the screen and most of the time we don't look at it. It needs to be something big and in the viewport. And this issue is already solved...there are popup bubbles on windows and in most design software that inform you of some change or error.
Yep, I wrote an RCS proposal for fixing all the clarity and UX problems with Proportional Editing 5 years ago "Proportional Edit/Soft-selection should behave like Brush". It got 93% upvotes (only two downvotes from some folks stubbornly insisting it's fine as it is) and then nothing. Also wrote another proposal for "Unify similar operations into a single hotkey setting" which got 100% upvotes back in 2.7 days but the duplicate hotkey issue also remains unchanged. It's understandable that not everything can get implemented, but it would be good if there was an effort to comb through RCS for possible already thought-out solutions to these problems instead of issuing open calls asking "how to solve this?"
What would truly help are tools that do not modify the geo when activated without asking me, just because I move my mouse. What I want is a tool that is in neutral gear when activated, then I chose what to do with it. We also would need a tool shelf like in Maya and Houdini to put our collection of favorite tools without having to remember the shortcuts. That also help for pipeline integration a lot! What would be great is an outliner that works like USD with xforms and scopes, with the root start at "/" and collections that should be primitives, matching geo through procedural patterns.
Ask the question, why C4D crushes the UI category? It's because everything is accessible throught icons and menus. The toolbar. Honestly, I love blender's shortcuts, BUT: we should have a better mouse based experience. I would suggest multiple, reworked and extended toolbars, which could be enabled or disabled is the settings.
The viewport does not indicate overlapping faces but a somewhat recent update to Cycles makes overlapping faces impossible to not notice. It actually breaks quite a few old projects.
Great video! Here are the top of my mind most confusing or irritating things as a Maya user learning Blender. The most used functions should be on the optimal position on the keyboard. Fx. select, move, rotate, scale are all right next to each other in Maya, in a prominent QWER position. Don't get me started on frame selection and the tilde menu. ;) I accidentally rotate the view out of top/left/right into a new perspective view. (hope this makes sense) Just have a default camera I can manipulate like I navigate perspective view. Have the left corner pop-up for values when creating primitives be available until the object is changed. Why is it only available for a very short time? Add a pivot gizmo like the one in Maya, it is so intuitive that I feel so annoyed not having it in Blender and I can't even explain why because it's all muscle memory now. 😀 It's likely the number one thing I miss from Maya. When zooming have it be mouse distance moved, instead of horizontal or vertical only.
I'd take the QWER shortcuts but ideally they'd still work as "start doing this transform" rather than the "switch to this transform mode. As for the camera that moves as you look around the scene, you can select 'lock camera to view', but personally, the fact that in Maya you are *always* looking through a camera (and so have to effectively add a second camera to render through, and remember to switch) is the most insane thing.
I think the use of the "Spacebar" shortcut for animation play is not great. It is easily miss press and as Andrew said, not everybody is doing animation. Also, if you'r coming from a 2d program the Spacebar key is use for panning. My proposal is that the default behavior of the Spacebar should be the "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" function, and Play animation could be Shift+Spacebar.
You are Andrew's audience. The ones that yet don't know why Blender is the way it is. Once you have worked in real projects, you realize that Blender's interface is phenomenal, considering the software's broad versatility. Of course it has to evolve and so it does, thanks to very wise and experienced coders. Mostly the ones that know why Blender is the way it is.
Really great ideas! I recently became the blender tutor at my school and there are viewport issues from students, some of which I can not solve... all the time.
Info panel is a great idea. It also doesn't show everything that the user does; many non-Python operations aren't logged. Might be good to rename the Info panel to "Python log" or something like that, and have an Info area for non-Python stuff. But even if devs disagree or do something else, this is a perfect demonstration about the feedback issue. Beginners don't know what to look for, and advanced users don't get feedback of what they did wrong. Better UX leads to happier users.
Because he said that inverted normals were a major issue I wanted to share that you can "turn off" the front facing overlay by setting 'Face Orientation Front' to 0. Then you simply lower the value of 'Face Orientation Back' so that the red is not so obnoxious to look at. This way you can leave 'Face Orientation' overlay on all the time. The Face Orientation color settings are found in Preferences > Themes > 3D Viewport.
It still pisses me off that we don't have stacked view for curves in the graph editor, only because some dude five years ago decided that animators could "just hide the curves they didn't want to see." This is such a must-have feature for animators...
What do you mean by stacked curves? Your curves viewport should be pretty flexible to show you exactly what you need, you only have to set up a tab with the interface you need. But 4.3 is bringing animation blocks changes if that is what you mean
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 84 วันนี้!! คู่เอก "ก้องศึก vs เมืองไทย"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3kuzsAIDf1c/mqdefault.jpg)
we absolutely, direly, need that "when in doubt, apply scale" shirt
Where is this t shirt 😂😭😭
true
Yupp
ae
Same. I'm here ready to throw money at a general direction, but which, I dunno, because the rotation is not applied.
Two words - YES PLEASE. Add these ideas
Honestly the info tab alone is such a great idea, it would've helped me so many times. However the other ideas are also pretty good
as a junior developer, I am used to look at [log info] window, which works as history window that register every activity done by me, good to remember what actions I have done in past sessions or even the current (long) session.
if you are artist, it's like the history tab in photoshop.
The “history list” is an absolutely brilliant bit. All of these would be welcome.
I have been teaching Blender for 5 years in a vocational school, that Diagnostic thing is absolutetly needed. One thing also is figuring out why a texture painted image suddenly is black
There has literally been many days where I just go from user to user and help them apply scale and find flipped normals
I used to work as an UX designer, though not anymore, i 100% agree with this. Blenders UI has come a long way, but it could use a lot of QoL features to make it so much more approachable.
Andrew Price is always so entertaining to watch! Such an incredible talk! The shortcut list on the left, like how it is in Houdini, would be a great!
Great ideas!
From a King to a king. Love both of these guys, helped me immensely in my Blender journey.
Thanks :)
@@blenderguruthanks for making the vids u guys make… I’m seventeen and idk why but making animations is just so fun… also I’m still new.. but as of now, what view transform should I be using… I use agx and open exr as of now
Hey @RyanKingArt waiting for you to show up in the blender talk in the future 🔥
❤❤❤a lots of thanks our sir/teacher 🎉@@blenderguru
it's insane how amazingly simple these ideas are, and the difference in usage is gigantic! Sooo good
Having a running log info of what keys were hit and did something, and the ability to find and delete that step sounds great!
I think this really nails a specific problem Blender has - the "wtf is happening right now" moment. No matter how much Blender I learn, I inevitably click or hit something that lands me in no-man's land of "wtf is happening rn" and it takes half an hour to find the one odd button that does it.
'when in doubt, apply scale' is brilliant
I've been around long enough to remember Andrew getting grilled for suggesting UI changes back in the day. Ultimately he was right all along.
i remember that conference too, he came off a bit arrogant back then, im sure he would admit that too.
@@M_Lopez_3D_Artist Yup. And my proposal wasn't great then either 😅
@blenderguru if you only had worked in a studio or a team with other experienced blenderheads for a mid size project...you'll have real credibility. But you still roam in the small scale of things, the small user, and we don't see that changing? Your audience has been always the beginners. Blender aims to make people smarter and wiser, dumbifying blender for the sake of the beginner's ingenuity does not help anyone, it only makes people unaware of what they are making and how it works. Yes they need to know what vertices, edges, tris, faces, normals, and how 3D works. Masking core functionalities won't make Blender a better tool.
@@lambiance3246 Blender's goal is always to make creative process easier to access. That's the point of these UI changes
@@testacals You arrived to Blender only in the last 5 years it seems, maybe? that goal you mention is the last of the priorities....
For the last 20 years, it's goal is to be a very capable 3-x-D software, on any hardware or OS possible. It was never intended to be a kinder.
If there where stats about this video, I will be certain that none of the real users ever watched this video, only frustrated newbies 'that want to learn 3d' and think they know better than the people that made the software...
16:33 This talk, especially this slide, is a great lesson for developing any software (or any product at all). The little things matter a lot.
True, but also, you can't please everyone... That's great why there is multiple competing software's and people can find what works for them.
The most comment I've heard from people who gave up is "there is too many options"
Most people would rather have a single "make exactly what I want and make it look awesome, so I don't actually need patience and skill and learn to fail or waste any time and I can make lots of money" button.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't use that slide as a guideline for developing software by thinking that whole red "people who gave up" part should be green.
Always do a cost benefit analysis, does it make this better, but what does it make worse.
@@DrTheRich I see your point but that's not really what I'm saying at all. I would never expect to capture the entire market.
My point simply that the little things often matter more than most people realize.
As a software developer myself, I've seen first hand how making some small tweaks and adding a little polish is often more valuable to customers than creating another half baked feature they didn't ask for.
To be fair, I'm not saying it should be entirely one way or the other. I'm just saying that the little things are often overlooked.
On the other hand we dont need more people in 3d. its a oversaturated industry.
That impersonation of Ton was really on point, Kudos to Andrew !
This was a brave and important talk to give. Andrew explained the issues so clearly and proposed solutions. It's really hard to get Blender to change its user experience...I hope it works! Well done, Andrew, and kudos to Blender for encouraging him to express his concerns!
(Didn't love the Ton impression. He can be difficult but I'm sure sensitive about that)
these are some good arguments, just hope the devs look into them and probably do something.
Didn't you listen to the talk? The devs are trying, but they lack more people. They know they need to improve some things, but 1 guy can't work as 5.
They're really receptive to these ideas. We'll talk more post conference once I submit the design docs.
But honestly they just need good people and more money to grow the team. Hopefully they can grow the devfund contributions.
The real problem with H, is the hide action is not reversible. You should press H to switch hide/show state for selected things, that's something much intuitive.
CTRL+Z works to undo the action(unhide at this point), like for most of the actions in Blender.
You pressed something, and something is gone, or happens what you don't want, press CTRL+Z to undo. Works for most of it, but not for all the things.
Use numpad / instead. This will isolate objects and pressing again un-isolate without unhiding other hidden objects
@@dynamic5109 use numpad IF you have the numpad
Alt+H is “unhide”
@@True-VFX every other software uses toggle logic on the H button, alt+H will unhide all things in a scene though
Great presentation as always from Andrew. My two cents, I'm not sure of a single example for where scale doesn't need to be reset on an object in Blender, at least in my use case primarily as a character artist. It would be great if we could simply check a box to automatically do this by default when scaling an object.
The BEST talk so far. UI/UX is the biggest headwind for new users. And biggest productivity killer for all. (Yes I donated, I can complain 😄)
The introduction of 2.8 from 2.79 was a real turning water to wine moment
thanks Andrew, this was really good. Even thought I find Blenders UI pretty good (especially when compared to an abomination of Zbrush for example), there's def. always room for improvement. I think Blenders UX/UI team deserves some recognition and praise for what they've done already! keep it up.
Thank you, Andrew. As always, a pleasure to attend your lectures
Loved this video, I was thinking I was the only one making mistakes and turning my cursor into a circle 😂
This would be much clearer if the circle cursor was visible constantly when in this mode even without manipulating anything, so you can immediately see you've switched modes when your press O. Proportional Editing should be treated like a brush tool with a simple slider at the top of the screen for changing the radius just like any paint mode. Imo it should also be renamed "Soft Selection" for clarity (Proportional Edit might be an _accurate_ name but it's not exactly self-explanatory).
If i were to add one more suggestion....
pls make the theme editor easy to use
so many repeated input of the exact same color
even tho theres only a few main colors for most of the ui.
changing every same color by hand took so long
Yes! Finding the right function to alter is a nightmare. It shouldn't be so hard to set a shortcut.
The info tab reminds me of Photoshop’s history panel. When I was new to PS that panel was a lifesaver, and though I don’t use it anymore I would have it perma locked in on blender if it showed things like Andrew’s suggestions (action taken, keyboard shortcut for action, potential constraints imposed on the action). In my few years of using blender it would have saved me days and days of troubleshooting.
I just wanna say the UI change to 2.8 was really the reason I made the switch and never looked back.
On the topic, when you start to have lots objects in your scene that'd be great to have Blender tell you if what's in the viewport will be rendered or not. Maybe a color highlight in the Outliner for objects having a discrepancy between "Viewport Visible" and "Render Visible".
I wish I could make the add-on if I knew how to code!
There's the two buttons in the outliner telling you whether it will be visible in render/viewport.
@@lajawi. I know, but when you've got hundreds of objects it's really easy to miss which one is checked or not
Every now & then I do some ui design for work & 9/10 my starting thought process is “okay lets make it look like blender” 😂. I love the way the ui has transformed over the years
Absolutely! I'm using other software like Unity and Photoshop, and more often than I'd like to admit, I think to myself, this would be so much more userfriendly if it had Blender's UI.
Thanks so much Andrew! Your work is greatly appreciated.
15:19 Andrew Price being kicked out right after the talk ends🤣 That's why he chose to give the presentation at the last day of BCON.
I'm joking, don't get serious guys =D
EVERYTHING you proposed is GOLD!!! It would be a TRUE game changing for blender
the key-binds section was all too relatable.
one thing to help with keybinds would be a better key-bind menu.
For the first time, i'm gonna actually ask Blender to adopt something from Maya.
And that's the Key-bind menu from Maya, along with its keyboard graphic highlighting the bound keys,
including modified keybinds such as "Shift + Ctrl...etc"
The GOAT of shortcuts in blender is that you can add to quick favorites almost anything and you can just Q>Click option, and when pressing Q again it automatically hoovers the menu on the mouse cursor for the last selected option. I used this since the first day I launched blender.
3DSMax's material editor was essentially an asset browser with settings, but it was sure great for new users
The best moment of the show when Riddler cames out
"What can it be?" I just LMO was very funny. I've started from 2.79 and yeah it often confusing especially for new users. but great talk! We will wait till Updates came out.
thanks Andrew for pointing out these issues / problems
Some really great ideas in this talk. That info box suggestion would be a game changer!
I definitely agree that transform values should be placed near the object that's receiving the transforms rather than in the corner of the screen.
I also am not opposed to having more diagnostic tools in the UI for the viewport.
These are some really great points and suggestions I did not even think of. The amount of problems that occur in Blender because of not having applied the scale is just unbelievable :D
I like the info box concept, especially if you can modify (undo) specific actions without deleting everything leading up to the mistake.
Good point. It’s no exaggeration to say that Blender starts and ends with shortcuts. Sometimes, it’s hard to even know where in the menu these shortcut commands are located. This is because most tutorials on TH-cam only explain the shortcuts. For beginners starting with Blender, this is a real struggle, as it basically just emphasizes memorization.
Hit F3 and type the action you want to perform, you will see the shortcut on the right side.
In my opinion they should have kept Spacebar from Blender 2.79 keymap for this very basic feature ...
What do you mean? If you open a menu, each operator shows a letter to use a shortcut. Then there are tons of shortcuts to opne menus in the viewport and all over the app. Each function is always highlighter by a character.
What do you mean by "sometimes, it hard to even know where in the menu the shortcut command are located". Because that's what is highlighter, you see a letter having an underscore. That mean that command uses that character.
As a UX designer of 20 years I can say that Blender misses some basic UX principles that makes it really hard to learn.
Help themi guess
Then you can contribute (as much or as little as you can). It's an open source project. I can make the same exact statement you did with 0 years of experience in UX design, it's pointless.
It’s crazy the 1-9 for collection is still there. Changed mine to views ages ago
Same. 1 - 9 for the views is so much better since I don't have a numpad.
one thing I would love to see ui wise is a little icon or some text on nodes that specifically states whether that node works in eevee, cycles or both, can even be a mouseover tooltip
These proposals are extremely useful! They should defo implement them
Just made a donation after this inspired talk to help improve the essential basics.
Great point on the accidental shortcuts. I think that another method of 'obscuring' could be to hide it in a menu, like M for merge currently gives you a pop-up menu with three options, the same could be done for H, even if it's just one option (hide). Putting things in pop-ups also helps with learning shortcuts, if you see that shift+H is hide and alt+H is unhide you immediately know that. The info window being there by default instead of the timeline is definitely a good addition for new users
Probably Andrews best talk
Brilliant talk from Andrew !
11:34 there is an add-on for it. It's called Screencast keys and it's built into default Blender. I use that not just when I am streaming but when I am working by myself, because it gives me a history of my button presses. For as much as I make a mistake hitting the wrong key, I do enjoy understanding the legacy of *why* it came to be that way. With that said, I do think it's important to look back on why hotkeys came to be the way they are, but understand if it still makes sense in the current workflow, or if it has become redundant.
Briliant. I've been suffering these issues for years and it never occured to me that they could be addresseed in the UI!
Yes, please! These features sound great. As a Blender noob, it really slows down the progress of learning.
the aura of this man 🔥🔥🔥
Those are extremely good ideas! and probably quite easy to implement. We need this!
I have to say that I’ve tried to attempt to learn blender several times over the years and much of what Andrew talks about here is what has stopped any momentum I ever had and I’ve never got around to getting very far at all
Amazing ideas. This would be super helpful and especially for beginners!
this was amazing and yeah i agree with the suggestions
Love all of this, great suggestions!
As a teacher, I confirm a lot of beginner issues come back to 'I pressed a key and something went wrong' and the 'apply scale' problem.
A improved 'info/screencast' overlay would be great!
Also I think a lot of problems are down to some legacy defaults being very confusing like pivot being set to Median point instead of Individual Origins (so when you multi select a hierarchy and rotate, each part does not rotate individually as you would expect) or the fact that Only Show Selected Curve Keyframes is not on by default etc.
6:00 great extension and easy fix to a significant problem!
Looking forward to all the discussion and fundamental design descision surrounding these 4 simple checkboxes to take until summer 2025 and then the development timeline with 23 rounds of code review and the obligatory "lets wait for the complete overhaul of feature XYZ before we merge this in" will stretch this out so that we will finally be able to enjoy this awesome diagnostic shelf (that probably took the developer of this video a long afternoon to implement) in Blender 4.9 :)
The best part of this talk is that it's not a criticism: it's a recommendation.
Talk is cheap and criticism is worthless. This dude proposed a solution for testing and didn't pretend it was a panacea.
I remember back in the day before 2.8 came along, you did a few mockups I really enjoyed back then as well. I like the way you think. These are good ideas and I hope they influence the future of Blender's UI for the better. Cheers!
11:07 THISSSS!! Godot has this and it's a GENIUS ui tool for a piece of technical software.
I honestly expected Andrew to propose something ridiculous, like let's copy the * software solutions. But surprisingly, I like his ideas this year
Great talk and also very entertaining. Thanks!
Beautiful presentation
The idea on 11:00 is absolute gold!
0:15 We Are Ready for a Spicy Donut
I think the info tab along with a way to have the f3 command search bar visible at all times would be a good idea, so if someone is trying to do something, they can at least search for it there and contextually they may get there.
This is present in Rhino, a CAD software, which in my opinion is very easy to learn as a result
Great presentation! The auto-normals/overlapping faces/scale feature would be incredible
Blender Devs - Please add these suggestions to Blender! Kind regards - a Blender newbie
I love these ideas. May need a bit of change to fit blender more, but in general they are awesome and I especially like the the shortcut tab. Maybe make it a smaller square-ish area at the bottom left/right so the timeline can still be the main thing there, but it just doesn't take up the entire bottom part anymore.
BRAVO, ANDREW!!!
For anyone that doesn't know: You can turn on Opacity on Face Orientation(correct one) and you'll see in red only faces in the wrong direction without blue color on correct ones
It's in Viewport color settings :)
brilliant as always. (ps Rhinoceros has that info box, and I always check what happened in there, its handy!) Andrew, thanks for pushing this forward in briliant Blender !!
This one is the best part of whole show that actually talk directly with Blender users. Im a newbie Blender user and im also complain about most of Andrew's suggestion every time when i launch Blender. In most case everybody wants apply scale to 1 it must be default action, if you dont want you need to press 'apply modified scale' kinda options. And rotate angles on UI god you know how many times my eyes keeps turns to left corner and middle of the screen. Even i tried to find most of my problems solutions with some plugins but thats not helped my problems. Even i tried to learn how to write plugin :D
Dev's please listen all of Andrew's suggestions, you'll gonna agreed with him eventualy.
It’s wonderful that someone finally addressed this topic. I think everyone intuitively feels that Blender’s interface is a real pain. At the beginning, Andrew beautifully illustrated the differences between various 3D programs, clearly showing that it all comes down to the learning curve. He even shows an infographic at the end with the number of people who drop out of the Blender learning process and ultimately don’t become its users. The problem is that in the middle part of the lecture, Andrew focuses on what personally bothers him rather than on the main issue - "Why is Blender so hard to learn?" And in my opinion, this is the fundamental question we should be asking before we take even the smallest next step.
We need some qualitative research instead of quantitive first.
I promise: I will contribute, but let UX'ers do their job, but dont push us to do it in the Developers manner ;)
I think showing us his personal projects that contained those problems was less of just showing "what bothers him specifically" and more-so providing concrete examples of problems that occur from the fundamental issues he was talking about - said issues then leading the many other users he's seen, surveyed and assisted to the specific problems _they_ run into down the line.
I have a saying that Right Click Select is a graveyard of good ideas. There are tons of cool solutions to common problems on the forum. But almost nothing of it, gets implemented.
That being said...the info panel is a bit over the top for the issue of providing information to the user. I mean it's good that it's there but , I think the way blender informs the user for errors is good...with some info that is visible but then slowly fades away. The issue have with it is as Andrew says...it's way down on the screen and most of the time we don't look at it. It needs to be something big and in the viewport.
And this issue is already solved...there are popup bubbles on windows and in most design software that inform you of some change or error.
yes. sometimes like 10 people are agreeing for your idea and than there is like one person who destroys everything
Yep, I wrote an RCS proposal for fixing all the clarity and UX problems with Proportional Editing 5 years ago "Proportional Edit/Soft-selection should behave like Brush". It got 93% upvotes (only two downvotes from some folks stubbornly insisting it's fine as it is) and then nothing. Also wrote another proposal for "Unify similar operations into a single hotkey setting" which got 100% upvotes back in 2.7 days but the duplicate hotkey issue also remains unchanged. It's understandable that not everything can get implemented, but it would be good if there was an effort to comb through RCS for possible already thought-out solutions to these problems instead of issuing open calls asking "how to solve this?"
What would truly help are tools that do not modify the geo when activated without asking me, just because I move my mouse. What I want is a tool that is in neutral gear when activated, then I chose what to do with it.
We also would need a tool shelf like in Maya and Houdini to put our collection of favorite tools without having to remember the shortcuts. That also help for pipeline integration a lot!
What would be great is an outliner that works like USD with xforms and scopes, with the root start at "/" and collections that should be primitives, matching geo through procedural patterns.
Yes, Yes and Yes, would love those ideas.
Wow, this was excellent.
Thank you for this great presentation
Ask the question, why C4D crushes the UI category? It's because everything is accessible throught icons and menus. The toolbar. Honestly, I love blender's shortcuts, BUT: we should have a better mouse based experience. I would suggest multiple, reworked and extended toolbars, which could be enabled or disabled is the settings.
i love Andrew ,I think his ideas for the info box 11:05 ! could greatly improve the Blender experience!
that is the best idea of the generation we need that please
the infobox would be such a good feature
The man, the legend, the infinite digital donuts fabricator: The GOAT
The viewport does not indicate overlapping faces but a somewhat recent update to Cycles makes overlapping faces impossible to not notice. It actually breaks quite a few old projects.
Great video! Here are the top of my mind most confusing or irritating things as a Maya user learning Blender.
The most used functions should be on the optimal position on the keyboard. Fx. select, move, rotate, scale are all right next to each other in Maya, in a prominent QWER position. Don't get me started on frame selection and the tilde menu. ;)
I accidentally rotate the view out of top/left/right into a new perspective view. (hope this makes sense)
Just have a default camera I can manipulate like I navigate perspective view.
Have the left corner pop-up for values when creating primitives be available until the object is changed. Why is it only available for a very short time?
Add a pivot gizmo like the one in Maya, it is so intuitive that I feel so annoyed not having it in Blender and I can't even explain why because it's all muscle memory now. 😀 It's likely the number one thing I miss from Maya.
When zooming have it be mouse distance moved, instead of horizontal or vertical only.
I'd take the QWER shortcuts but ideally they'd still work as "start doing this transform" rather than the "switch to this transform mode.
As for the camera that moves as you look around the scene, you can select 'lock camera to view', but personally, the fact that in Maya you are *always* looking through a camera (and so have to effectively add a second camera to render through, and remember to switch) is the most insane thing.
I think the use of the "Spacebar" shortcut for animation play is not great. It is easily miss press and as Andrew said, not everybody is doing animation. Also, if you'r coming from a 2d program the Spacebar key is use for panning.
My proposal is that the default behavior of the Spacebar should be the "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" function, and Play animation could be Shift+Spacebar.
Are we not gonna talk about how spot on that Ton impression was? 😂
Never used Blender, I'm just a graphic designer. From a UI perspective however, this was really interesting to watch. So many good points.
You are Andrew's audience. The ones that yet don't know why Blender is the way it is. Once you have worked in real projects, you realize that Blender's interface is phenomenal, considering the software's broad versatility. Of course it has to evolve and so it does, thanks to very wise and experienced coders. Mostly the ones that know why Blender is the way it is.
A great presentation. All great ideas. Loved the Ton impression. 😂
Really great ideas! I recently became the blender tutor at my school and there are viewport issues from students, some of which I can not solve... all the time.
Info panel is a great idea. It also doesn't show everything that the user does; many non-Python operations aren't logged. Might be good to rename the Info panel to "Python log" or something like that, and have an Info area for non-Python stuff.
But even if devs disagree or do something else, this is a perfect demonstration about the feedback issue. Beginners don't know what to look for, and advanced users don't get feedback of what they did wrong. Better UX leads to happier users.
Because he said that inverted normals were a major issue I wanted to share that you can "turn off" the front facing overlay by setting 'Face Orientation Front' to 0. Then you simply lower the value of 'Face Orientation Back' so that the red is not so obnoxious to look at. This way you can leave 'Face Orientation' overlay on all the time.
The Face Orientation color settings are found in Preferences > Themes > 3D Viewport.
Andrew for President! Make blender great again!!!
Even just having a hotkey overlay that tells you what hotkey you used and what it enabled / disabled would be huge.
+1 for a resizable hotkey chat log/overlay.
It still pisses me off that we don't have stacked view for curves in the graph editor, only because some dude five years ago decided that animators could "just hide the curves they didn't want to see." This is such a must-have feature for animators...
What do you mean by stacked curves? Your curves viewport should be pretty flexible to show you exactly what you need, you only have to set up a tab with the interface you need. But 4.3 is bringing animation blocks changes if that is what you mean