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HOLY FUCK SOMEONE FIXED BLENDERS SHIT UI AND MADE IT USABLE BY HUMANS WITHOUT INVESTING A SHIT TON OF TIME JUST KNOWING WHERE THE SINGLE OPTION YOU NEED IT FOR IS OR LEARN 300 GODSDAMNED SHORTCUTS RESKEETED TO THE MAX HOLY SHIT

A friend shared this with me, so now I'm sharing with you: This is a fork of Blender that has an overhaul of the interface that adds colored icons, verbose tooltips, and more industry-standard behavior across the board. www.bforartists.de Check out this before and after of the modifiers menu:

IM SORRY FOR GETTING ALL CAPS BUT YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH READABILITY AND BASIC USE OF BLENDER SUCKS AND HOW MANY PEOPLE JUST TELL YOU "USE THIS PLUGIN LOL IT FIXES EVERYTHING!" AND IT ONLY SOLVES LIKE 1 OF YOUR PROBLEMS THIS IS HUGE

Bless you for this omfg I've been screaming at blender all day over shit like this

Lol I was literally screaming from the rooftops in discord at blender last night and saw this this morning lmao

ok hold on this fucks actually i really like the direction of this, i can't believe i've been using the shit UI and thinking it's perfectly fine

They even went the extra mile and noted blenders notoriously awful documentation for basic features and tools and published an extensive manual for the fork to save people from the blender YouTube tutorial nightmare

They really should have named this Bforhumans. I'll never forget the day I was trying to find a basic ass setting in Blender and it was accessed by dragging the whole top menu bar down like a drawer to reveal a menu that was outside of the screen when closed. I table flipped and went back to Maya.

My first experience was 6 hours in blender just trying to find out how to extend snout on a model I was working on only to learn half the shit I was looking for was tied specifically to shortcuts it never told me existed and I could barely Google. My hatred has burned bright ever since.

Wait til you see Zbrush. I don't think they designed the Zbrush UI, I think they summoned it with a chalk sigil, candles, and a blood sacrifice.

Open Source/Free Software UX sacrificing pure white lambs on a blood altar with Eldritch sigils to make their programs function and then later an unrelated disgruntled team of users sacrificing their first born to unknowable beasts to make it usable by your average person

Zbrush doesn't even have the excuse of 'open source innovation' where they implement smell-navigated menus without questioning why. It's $40/mo. and it all goes to paying the 6 witches who channel their spirit energy to keep the portal open.

"Listen if we dont pay them the beasts stop working for us and they sic them on the users!"

sounds like early linux

Accurate. I remember the ancient threads in forums of Linux users having shit flinging fights with Windows peeps and Apple users just being in the corner with a glazed over vacant expression and a sticky note on their forehead saying "is simple looks nice in public tho!"

@fioko.tv Nah! That’s what I thought until I realised you can pull it all apart and redo it to match your workflow. My zB UI is brilliant…

I don't think having such a bizarre default layout and UI conventions, unnecessarily steepening the already steep learning curve, and giving users the privilege of (somewhat) fixing the UI after watching YT videos on how to even do it, is a point in Zbrush's favor

@fioko.tv Just say’n, unlike Blender, once you understand how you are going to use it, zB let’s you make it ‘yours’. And it’s very easy to do.

Would you believe it used to be even more terrible? A UI that only an engineer could love.

Ive heard horror stories from people. I have to use both Blender and Unity for projects and comms and between both I feel like pulling my hair out sometimes just trying to do simple stuff. No hate towards a more utilitarian design but cmon you gotta make it at least a little readable to peeps.

Certainly. And I know animators who have latched onto Blender through time and patience, but most people I see who use Maya or Cinema 4D usually have backgrounds in traditional animation or sculpting/stop motion, whereas a lot of Blender users tend to have backgrounds in coding and engineering.

One of my close friends is using Maya for his stuff and this tracks somewhat. Unfortunately some of the plugins I need for stuff are locked to Blender so I cant really make that switch so Ive had to teach myself to eat my art veggies and learn it. Hoping this fork makes things easier in future tho.

@funnypurpledeer.com @sussybnuuy.bsky.social @nekyua.bsky.social

Honestly this feels like the work of someone who heard "well blender's source code is so old with so many things integrated it would be impossible to redo the controls" and said, "Wanna bet?"

That or someone who got tired of hearing people already proficient in blender tell them to "just learn shortcuts" & made whole ass new user oriented overhaul outta spite. It's such a needed thing when users already terrified to touch modeling software are seeing people already proficient frustrated.

Eh was most likely just because Blender is so radically different from Maya and 3DS Max in it's UX philosophy (model only with the keyboard, abandon the mouse!) that someone thought it was better to just spend the time redoing the UX. Solid software otherwise.

I understand the mindset that led to this philosophy (peeps who know it well can make shit at blinding speed) but just having the option of using my mouse is so nice honestly. Wonder how much of a pain it was to dig in there and make that possible...?

I assume likely not as much as one might think. There are already multiple efforts out there to make Blender less....blender, so to speak build on top of that probably helped. However, I am seeing a future where Blender absorbs this eventually and make it an alternative input method.

It'd be nice. I personally just want them to release a proper manual for users to refer to. I know its a meme of sitting through 30 minutes of blender tutorials for very basic things but that's kinda the only good resource that's easily and readily available for most.

It's true. Blender has for the longest time been pretty bad at getting people into the fold so to speak. Given the keyboard-driven philosophy I think internally people just gave up eventually because people coming in didn't want to change. That's one way to turn people away from Blender :')

📌

holy hsit

I'm exploring it & so far it's fantastic. Its made all the shortcut only/reliant on shortcut tasks doable via mouse & the extensive manual on site has made previously confusing things easier to comprehend. It really puts into perspective just how bad blenders documentation issues are for new users.

(softly crying) To think I lived to see this day...

Behold: the power of UX

OMG I DESPERATELY NEED THIS IN MY LIFE

SO DID I

HOLY FU-

OMG

📌

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Holy God haha

@filthmutt.bsky.social What do you think of this? Blender that isn't basically "written in Abyssal" as far as being able to find the freaking button that does the thing you want!

This changes everything! I think it is much easier for artists of all kind!

Ok I gotta ask, does it have a multi cut tool now?

www.bforartists.de/bforartists-... havent been at pc to check but if it did itd be referenced in here

Bforartists Reference Manual - Bforartistswww.bforartists.de Bforartists Reference Manual This page contains the Bforartists manual. The current actual version is Bforartists 4 version 4.1.1 This manual is also available at github. The repository contains the e...

Thx I'll take a look over it to see. But I really hope someone does add it in at some point.

Like Ive mentioned in other parts of thread so far devs have been cooking with this so I hope thats one thing that was adressed

This is amazing news!

📌

I wanted to try my hand at 3D modeling but the UI/UX of that program is what made me give up on it. It’s such an awful experience to try to do anything. Maybe I’ll try playing with it again with this. Thank you for sharing!

Yw! I'm glad this dumb repost is reaching so many people who had similar struggles to me and might help people. I mentioned it several times in thread but so far just this things been a massive improvement.