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About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

17 Comments

  1. Super disappointed the left-click-select has STILL not been implemented. All the other changes are great and all, but Blender will never get much traction until this change has been made. Everything else is pretty much a waste of time until that change is made.
    I Just don't get what the motivation could be to drive ALL new users away.

    • You can change that yourself. The mouse interaction in blender makes it superior. I come from decades of use of Adobe products, and I hated the mouse in blender originally, but after using it for like 2 weeks I liked it and realized how much better it is.

    • @MIKE DALTON, the default behaviour of Blender is Right Click to Select an object, I am used to and I am comfortable with it.

      I am curious to know on which facts you base this statement "but Blender will never get much traction until this change has been made", because just to say the Left Click is "natural" only for right handed people, and since they are more common than left handed people, this is the default behaviour in most softwares, this does not means it is the right choice for left handed people, just think about it, there is no default behaviour that fits everybody needs.

      And lastly this is completely false : "left-click-select has STILL not been implemented"
      If you had gone to File > User preferences... Input tab, then you would have seen "Select with: Left or Right" option, it's in blender since ages... if that is what you want just change it.

      • Yes, of course I'm aware it's changeable. The massive problem is that it's staggeringly poor decision from a UI perspective, regardless of your dominant hand.
        One of the key, inarguable laws of design is consistency. Don't make your user struggle to overcome standards. Accept the standards because that's what they expect and are going to try first. Right click to select? Of the thousands of UI designers on the planet, you will probably struggle to find a single one (outside the Blender community) who would think right click to select is a good idea. Most would probably laugh out loud at this idea. I've used the analogy before of a new game which has right-click to fire your weapon. It's a recipe for failure.
        Obviously there are people in the community who have successfully overcome muscle memory to accept right click to select. That was a huge waste of time due to a tragic mistake by the original design team who knew coding and not UI design.
        Let's not get mired in the wrong way, but change it to be the right way.
        It's what every UI designer would do if they created Blender from scratch. Literally every one. Without exception. I think we can all agree on that.

        • I think that you are right and wrong at the same time :)

          Left-click is the standard.

          Others argue we can very simply change the right-click to left-click in the option. If that's so simple for them, so let us make the left-click the default, and advanced user of blender will "just have to change it to right-click" in the option. Why not?

    • Whilst I agree with the sentiment that left-click select *should* be the default in Blender (in line with every OS and every other content creation app, ever), to assert that everything else is a "waste of time" is patently absurd, and a bit of a ridiculous overstatement.
      You and I are presumably both seasoned Blender users, who both prefer left-click select as the default selection paradigm in our software, and yet here we are, still using Blender.
      It's at worst a minor annoyance that's rectified by 5 seconds of preference changing - I wouldn't waste too much energy worrying about users ability to discover things ;-)

    • Trolling aside because the original comment its obviously for that,
      There should be no motivation at all for new users because new users shouldn't be using an alpha version of a software that its new to them.
      We have at least until March or April next year for a proper stable release (being realistic), lot of time to refine things.

  2. Blender 2.8 should have the option of what they call industry standard key maps. See https://developer.blender.org/T54963.

    As stated above, Blender has long had the option to select the left click option.

    Blender is already gaining traction through schools because it is free and open source and very capable. It also means the students aren't burdened with the cost of that software if they want to maintain their skills after completing their classes.

    The OP's comment is false, misleading, and disingenuous.

  3. Multires and Subdivision modifiers still don't work in sculpt mode yet. Can't wait for them to return. It'll be like Christmas morning when they do. ^_^

  4. As a long time Blender user, I fully understand the Alpha and Beta stages. But in 2.8 Alpha 2, there is still one fundamental thing that I would expect to work at this stage, but doesn't. When I open a file, anything with a UV-based texture does not display correctly after switching to Eevee mode. I have to select each object, press tab twice to enter/exit edit mode, and then the object's texture is displayed as it should be. Is this happening for everyone else?

    • In part, yes. Some textures for UV'd objects load, some don't. What I noticed is that objects that include an image map doesn't load by default, but UV'd procedurals that don't have image maps load fine.

  5. The problem with changing to left click select now is that the devs are tailoring the new active tools for right click.
    It’s an overcomplicated mess even with right click select (I wouldn’t call active tools more than a proof of concept for now). With left click it’s simply unusable.

    I’m hoping for a left click default too and that they get rid of the overcomplication present in 2.8 just because they force right click select even for completely new tool paradigms.

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