Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding
Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding
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.
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”
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.
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.
Are there other open source projects near feature parity with GIMP, though?
There are certainly other commercial software, like Affinity, and certainly some shady Photoshop clones like Photopea (and it does work really well) but nothing like GIMP, as far as I’m aware.