[neotek]

Blender is truly one of the most incredible pieces of software I’ve ever used in my entire life. The user interface may look daunting at first glance, but it’s actually incredibly intuitive to use and contains a host of amazingly powerful features that I desperately wish would find their way into every other program I use.

For example, absolutely any aspect of the interface can be bound to any key combination simply by right clicking on the control and choosing “assign keyboard shortcut”. You can adjust values, check and uncheck boxes, execute any menu command, trigger any action, and reconfigure it all on the fly in whichever way suits your workflow in that particular moment.

Another example: every internal function is searchable and executable by hitting F3 and typing a fragment of the code path / menu item title / function name into the box provided. Can’t remember how to slide a vertex along an edge? Just hit F3 and type “ve sl” and the function you’re looking for will be right there at the top of the list.

And another example: every input field can derive its value from simple Python calculations, called Drivers. Let’s say you have a 300 frame animation and you want to change the strength of a mesh deformation from 0 to 1 based on the current frame number. Rather than keyframing anything, you could simply enter ‘#frame / 300” into the deformation modifier’s strength input field and Blender will take care of the calculations for you. You can reference other input values by right clicking on that input and choosing “copy data path”, which will copy the internal reference to that particular piece of data to the clipboard so you can use it to power another input’s driver. So for the above example, if you weren’t sure how many frames your final animation was going to be and you didn’t want to have to go back and change the “300” every time you changed the animation length, you could simply copy the data path for the “frame end” input field and use that in the calculation instead, ie ‘#frame / bpy.context.scene.frame_end’ (that may not be the exact correct path, I’m describing this from memory just as an example of the concept). Every variable is exposed and can be referenced by almost any other variable. If your Driver is more complex than a one liner, you can open a fully featured driver editor window which lets you set and name variables within the driver’s scope, describe parametric functions, and tie multiple drivers together across multiple objects.

Everything is extensible, everything is controllable, everything is connected to everything else — the power it gives you is simply unparalleled, I’ve never used any software of any kind that even came close to putting this much raw control into the user’s hand.

[another_kel]

> I’ve never used any software of any kind that even came close to putting this much raw control into the user’s hand.

Features you are talking about are present in many other professional 3d packages.

The impressive thing about blender is not it's feature set, but the fact that we can seriously compare a piece of FOSS software with professional products that cost thousands of dollars.

[barcoder]

While I totally agree with you that Blender is a joy to use I often think how would Larry "No Modes" Tesler program Blender?[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Mode_e...

[Doxin]

I feel like if you wanted a no-modes blender you'd need to split it up into 5 or 6 separate programs. There's the vertex modeling aspect, the camera and object tracking aspect, the video editor aspect, the sculpting aspect, and probably a half dozen more things I'm forgetting.

Blender is an absolute massive collection of interrelated functionality. It's mental that they managed to make it all work so well.