this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
1392 points (99.4% liked)

Games

32368 readers
1986 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Secret300@sh.itjust.works 176 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really hope Godot will become as good for games like blender is for 3D modeling

[–] Hazdaz@lemmy.world -5 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Oh god. Please aim higher than that. Not saying that Blender ain't powerful, because it clearly is, but it's UI is just plain shit. (Unless there have been some massive improvements over the last few years.)

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 62 points 1 year ago

They massively changed the UI in 2019, in version 2.8. Hasn't changed much since then though.

If you remember Blender having a bad-looking light grey UI and no support for multiple workspaces, that's the old version.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean I'm coming from maya and Max, I taught myself blender last year, UI seemed pretty nice.

I remember messing with it 10 years ago, and really hating it. Nothing like that now.

[–] RockHornet@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It WAS shit. Now it's the best UI (and UX) of all 3D software.

[–] EddyNottingham@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know right! I keep wishing all software would adopt some of it's amazing features, like hover copy-pasting, being able to right-click any button/option to set a custom keyboard shortcut for it, being able to type maths into any numerical field, etc.

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I keep going into Google slides and being annoyed I can’t just use G R and S to manipulate objects

Edit: And I love how in Blender, ctrl-z will undo/redo selection. I hate spending so much time selecting things just to misclick in other programs.

[–] Koordinator_O@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Selection beeing part of the undo/redo is sooo good. One of the best things in Blender.

[–] ilmagico@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I tried learning it some time ago (months, not years) and I never cussed so much in my life... maybe I'll just get the hang of it eventually, but let's just say, first impression on the UI is not good.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there's probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender's features.

Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set -- because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob's your uncle.

Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can't be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it's also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn't exactly awkward). There's also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.

All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can't possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can't pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it's professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn't "intuitive" (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender's defaults aren't bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that's not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you'll get fifteen answers.

[–] ilmagico@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the pointers!

[–] whereisk@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most certainly have been. Worth another look.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 30 points 1 year ago

There have in fact been massive improvements over the last few years

[–] jackalope@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They updated it to really good stuff with 2.8 like 3 or so years ago.

[–] kadu@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I wish GIMP had a full UI redesign like Blender, it could work as a Photoshop replacement for many use cases but... Jesus it's non intuitive, flawed and it mixes opposing design principles all the time.

There was a project that renamed it to a less controversial name and updated the UI to more closely resemble modern photo manipulation tools, but they've stopped working on it before a major release.

EDIT: There's PhotoGIMP by Diolinux, a Brazilian Linux YouTube channel with a really nice host. This is a set of plugins and configuration files that try to ease the transition from Photoshop to GIMP for newcomers. It's certainly good, but as an add-on, it can't actually fix all issues with GIMP.

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

Gimp's problem is not so much the UI, but that it has fallen way behind Photoshop in terms of features. Fixing up the UI wouldn't hurt, but you'd still be stuck with a graphics app that's 20 years behind the competition. It would need a heck of a lot more work to catch up.

[–] jackalope@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

You're thinking of Glimpse o believe. And yes gimp really needs a change. Krita isn't bad but not good for more graphic design oriented tasks. It's type tools are awful.

[–] okamiueru@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

The... UI in blender is really good. Have you used any other equivalent software or know how complicated it is?

It's not "good but it's a hard problem to solve". It is more "great and it's a hard problem to solve"

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Blender 2.79 and earlier was super-unintuitive. 2.8 gave it a fresh coat of paint it's easier and more featureful with each version (Now 3.6, 2.8 was years ago!)

[–] OtakuAltair@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The intuitive UI is the best part of Blender for me so that's weird

[–] sergih@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

it is, I think he's talking about the old ui

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

That was Blender 2.9, and we're on 3.6! It has gotten fairly good, I love it.