[dingus]

The interface overhaul is a huge accomplishment.

I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.

I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.

[bogwog]

> The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy

Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.

This new interface is great because it's easy to use for Maya/Max people, and it's still similar-enough to the 2.7 era so as not to alienate long-time users.

[knolan]

I would compare the Blender UI to Vim. Once you spend a bit of time with it you wonder why every other piece of software isn't this efficient.

I'd also go so far as to say that the 2.80 UI overhaul has slowed me down a bit. Things that were a single key stroke away are now an extra one or two. Menu items have been renamed and rearranged (often for the better) but now I have to go hunt for them and relearn them. If these help Blender become more popular, then that pain is worth it.

Bravo to the Blender team!

[thanhhaimai]

I used Corel Draw, Photoshop, Maya, and I had a hard time getting to Blender. It's not that it's badly designed. It's just the conventions I have in my mind for other design softwares are no longer correct.

Every action I take, I can no longer be confident about my "guess" of what it will do. It's like the door handle problem, where you see a strange unlabeled handle and are not sure that you need to push or pull to open the door. Then you tried to push, since that's the convention for all the door in this building space. The door doesn't open. Then you tried to pull, and it works. Maybe pulling to open the door is better than the normal convention, but sometimes it's not worth it to sacrifice consistency.

I think the new changes are for the better :).

[zamalek]

It is supposedly like Vim, intentional or not. It's contextual (Vim: command mode, insert mode, Blender: object mode, edit mode, etc.) and reverse-polish (e.g. "UVSphere 16 16"). It is an efficient, streamlined and, honestly, superior interface.

You cannot explore it, and that's the problem. RTFM is required.

> it's easy to use for Maya/Max

When I was 14, with not prior 3D software experience, I first attempted to use Blender (it's free!). After maybe 20 minutes I gave up trying to add a sphere to the scene. I figured out the Max interface in less than a minute.

Change aversion is a factor, but it also alienated complete newbies.

[doctorpangloss]

> Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.

When it comes to user experience, blaming the user is the worst sword to fall on.

[echelon]

> Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all.

It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.

Major kudos to Blender on this.

[egypturnash]

I’m an expert user of Illustrator and I found Blender’s core UI choices weird and clumsy in a way that paid 3D programs weren’t. Blender fundamentally feels like it’s designed by someone who’s never used another art program in their life.

[neya]

As someone who left the 3d Industry a while back and rejoined it again, I have to totally agree. At the time, I was on 3ds Max, running on Windows. Things changed and I switched to OSX and never looked back. And then, Blender 2.80 happened. And wow, now I'm hooked. For the sake of a fair comparison and to see if 3ds Max really was the simple software it once used to be, I installed Windows again and played it for some time. Max has gotten advanced now (obviously), but also increasingly complex. The familiarity of 3ds Max 2009 edition was gone.

And so, I started investing time into Blender. I started out with something as simple as modeling a speaker box. It was such a joy. Still, it's not perfect. The camera movement is really terrible in comparison with 3ds Max. You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max and to manoeuvre the camera is such a pain in the ass. Still, it makes up for that in modeling. I'm enjoying 3d now again and even building a new rig to support my renders.

Well done Blender team. Thanks for the 2.80.

[tinus_hn]

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/877/camera-to-us...

It won’t create a new camera but this shortcut moves the camera to show the current view.

This still is in the documentation but I haven’t checked if the key is still the same in 2.80.

[bkor]

It would be great to give this feedback to the Blender team. Once you're used to something it can be difficult to see the parts where it is more difficult than it could be. So Blender needs continuous feedback from people who haven't used it that much before.

[auto]

> You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max

I've never realized I needed something so badly that Blender didn't have as I do now.

[sam_bristow]

I'm really impressed that Blender has been able to pull off two fairly major UI overhauls (2.5 and 2.8).

Other Free Software projects quite often get stuck in a UX rut and resist any efforts to improve or change.

[keyle]

It's funny because, I for one, long time Blender user, is completely lost in the new interface.

[indolering]

That's the curse of UI development: improvements often mean breaking user habituation. Given how difficult the old UI was to learn, this is totally worth it. Blender needs more mainstream users.