duststorm wrote:MealeaYing wrote:I was comparing Blender to Sculptris which again is totally unfair, but to me is sort of the goal of a UI, something that can be learned not just quickly but by trying it out.
Simply put, this is not possible.
You can make the deliberate choice of limiting the functionality of a program with the goal of keeping the user interface simple, which is what sculptris does by sticking to one specific task. Or you can build a tool that will be useful to many people and a wide range of different tasks. This is what Blender does, and why it is embraced by so many people.
The blender UI is not easy, because the software is not easy. The best they can do is make it consistent so that things once learned can be applied to other subjects.
Whether to stick to things that other programs do, is largely a subjective debate. There's the tradeoff between being fast to pick up the first time, but being tedious after that (maya and max actually require you to click a button in the gui
every time you want to move the camera!), or being to fast to work with once you have accustomed yourself a bit with the tool (which in my opinion is a must, blender is a complex tool, just accept this. One does not step into a car for the first time in their lives and drive 50km without first having accustomed oneself to it at least a bit, either. Even if it is an American car with automatic transmission and only two pedals
)
GRIN!!!
But but but....
It HAS to be possible! Its just software! Right?
All a GUI is is a picture of stuff that allows you to control bits of software, that's it, its just a mater of finding the right way of drawing the picture, in blenders case its a scribble in a lot of places.
Proof that it CAN be done is the sculpting tools, they are totally different now and they almost work (for me anyway, I just don't like how they "feel" at the moment) but a LOT of people can use them now where as in the past they were very hard to even find. I think maybe that I could do the same thing to the simulation stuff (at least making the "picture". The simulation stuff starts off ok, but than goes nuts as soon as you think its going to "just work". Im not fond of needing the Domain thing for stuff like fluid simulations but that not the real problem, the real problem is more simple, if I make a cloth simulation I hit the play button in the animation pallet to make the simulation "bake" in the fluid simulation I have to find and hit the Bake button. That's not the worst of it though, its in essence un-savable (in a weird sense) as well as its writing a godawful number of files somewhere where I don't want stuff being written and if I am not paying strict attention saving stuff more than once destroys the last one replacing it with the new, this is BAD. it could at the very least ASK me first. The domain thing is confusing and ought to go away at some point but I am guessing there is some pressing need for it at the moment, again this is software, the user should not need to take into consideration programming issues. I can say this because I figured out cloth simulation from scratch, than tried fluid and failed, then after looking at tutorials I learned more about both and got better at them, but fluid is still aggravating, smoke is just out, I cant make it work and some of the soft and rigid body stuff break so easily I don't mess with them even though I desperately WANT them. I think that if I could get rigid and softbody stuff to work a few times I could figure out how to make that easier too and with out sacrificing functionality. Those two are another example of me forgetting some little thing in a long process and having it not work or breaking what was working, UNDO being inconsistent makes this worse; undo in object mode conflicts with undo in edit mode and is imply appalling, I want to undo the last thing I DID, not the last state something was in before I do the serious work in edit mode. This is totally fixable and if it isn't there is something profoundly wrong, but I think its fixable, it has to be. I switch to object mode to see how something looks, and sometimes move it or something, I do not always remember to NOT EVEN THINK of using undo, this is user hostility at its most violent.
Now...
Since you brought it up:
My driving; we use MPH here so I will translate, 50 km is NOTHING, its only 31 miles per hour. The first time I drove (on the street) I was in an VW bug and I was caught doing 156km (or 97 mph) on a little squiggly road near where I grew up, I was 12 years old and that is the only thing that saved me from going to jail I had to tape blocks of wood onto the pedals to reach them). By the time I was old enough to drive legally I realized that I considered the gas pedal to be an ON switch and that the horn was better than the breaks. I stopped driving by choice and never got a licence, I am a maniac pure and simple and the world is a better place with out me driving around in it. Besides, I get road rage riding my bicycle, people in cars drive like idiots!
One last thing about Blender, or more to the point MakeHuman and Blender; you guys have done a stunning job on the rigging! I cant figure out which type of rigging I like best, its all so much fun!! AND its teaching me a LOT!
Ok too much typing!
Cheers!
Mealea
Cheers