why do we need to press 3 buttons to access the basic tool like rotation (Ctrl+Alt+R)
or scale (Ctrl+Alt+S) or translate/location/move (Ctrl+Alt+G). Shifting from these three tools might give you carpal tunnel syndrome.
while other application is just a single button like tanslate/location/move(w), rotation(e),scale(r).

ton : animator : nan
Saturday, January 10, 2009

blender is crap it cant perform as well as the others such as 3dmax or vue

It's like i read a discussion about Linux and Windows (i use 80% Linux, 20% W)….

Can you compare a motorcycle with a car?
NO
If you got the driving license for both it's YOUR choice which vehicle you take
So, back 2 topic: blender does not have to compete with majors like maya.
Anyone has the choice to take the tool he (or she) likes best to do the needed task.
So….
It's NOT feature-competition like UV-mapping, Nurbs, Ngons who has and who not.
It's about the task you have to do. We only need a little bit more popularity, which will come alone sooner or later
and then the Artists know which tool to take for each task. That's freedom.

(btw. i'd like to have a sneak preview in the source-code of maye et. al. i'm sure it's a bigger mess than blender's code ;)

'night

Blender's free and libre. How about Maya, etc.?

Who pays for advertising in 3D magazines? That might influence any article.

Much great 3D computer animation movies were made using far less than what we have today in any software, and technological features don't make a great movie. In fact, they might even hinder doing so.

Ever seen the original Solaris? I saw it for the first time only last fall, and enjoyed it as much as any good recent film.

However, and ironically perhaps, because of some other kinds of technological advances; The "film industry" has become us. :)

Don't quit your brick-and-mortar jobs! ;)

Moving buttons CAN make tutorials obsolete, depending on the user. A user that understands the underlying, universal concepts of 3d won't have much difficulty; whereas people that memorize, and get hung up on every last detail without seeing the concept will struggle. Of course many users are a blend of those two extreme types but it comes down to the way the user learns as well, not just the courseware.

The way I see it, it's free software. People can choose to learn with the versions for which stacks and stacks of training material exists, or they can learn from versions where less training material exists and read the release notes. Everybody's got their own style of learning, and their own level of self-motivation. Some people like books, but books are physical objects and have limitations.

"I wouldn't mind paying 100€ a year for access to such a thing."

Fair enough, but since nobody's offering such a service at present, perhaps a better question to ask yourself is how much you would ask to be paid to do the job yourself, then try to sell others on the idea. Don't forget the service will be competing with a huge free (albeit flawed) Wiki.

I know it must be a bit frustration to hear that statement all the tine. I was of course exaggerating a bit, but I still believe there is at least some truth in it.

It will not be that much of a problem to people who already know the basics of how blender works, or know an expert in person. If these people have the required time it will not be much of a problem.

But have you ever thought about why so many people buy training books and dvds, when most of the material is already scattered around the web? Many people (especially new users) see it as a shortcut. They will rather give away money than go hunting the web for info on why the h*** they can't find the UV mode anywhere. If they have to go hunting even with the boobs/dvds, then what's the point? I know this is very generalizing and simplified, but I hope you can see my point.

I would love to see a huge official blender knowledge base (not just a wiki) with videos/text/pictures/blend-files, something that is being kept up to date all the time. It might be necessary to hire a professional to maintain it, but so be it. I wouldn't mind paying 100€ a year for access to such a thing.

This is a common misconception, but it's wrong. Those resources won't be useless by a long shot. The changes for 2.5 will be obvious and significant, but will really only affect certain aspects of the interface. If you have real understanding of how Blender works, it will be very easy to get yourself up to speed with the new developments. The number of things about Blender that will stay the same vastly outnumber the number of things that will change. This is true of every version. A couple of moved buttons don't suddenly render thousands of pages of information useless.

When a person is completely new to Blender, obviously there are challenges in trying to learn on version Y by using materials written for version X. As you say, there will be buttons and interface elements that aren't where they are expected, etc. (Of course, this is usually pretty simple to find out about in a few minutes on blenderartists.org/forum). However, once they know how to work confidently with version Y, making the step to the next update won't be so difficult.

What total beginners should do, is to try to learn Blender, period. It doesn't matter which (reasonably recent) version they learn the basics on. Once they know what they are doing in a general sense, they can hunker down with the release notes and get themselves totally up to speed.

The simple fact is that documentation writers aren't clairvoyant. Documentation has to be written for software that already exists. In the open source world, everything that exists is also publicly available, which leads to the illusion that documentation is somehow "lagging behind". It's not. The only difference is the speed at which you have access to new, undocumented features. If it was proprietary software, it simply wouldn't be released and you wouldn't have the option to try to get ahead of the documentation.