I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.
But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten.
It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.
In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."
Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it.
Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
For the same reason Maya & friends offer heavily discounted (or even free) educational licenses: people tend to stick with what they initially learned.
That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either!
So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free?
The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.
>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict.
It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors.
Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.
> the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that
I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.
The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.
While this is definitely true, for a long time FreeCAD hasn't exactly made it a high priority to properly work around that.
For example, the Topological Naming Problem (as I understand it) is made quite bad due to OpenCASCADE design - but as we've seen with 0.19 and later it is possible in a lot of cases to work around that. But that's a lot of really hard work with relatively little reward, so for years it languished on the backlog, and users had to deal with even trivial designs randomly blowing up in their face for no clear reason.
The result is a CAD program filled with footguns. Nobody wants to address structural issues, so you just pretend they don't exist, hide a half-baked tutorial on a Wiki on how to work around the worst of them, and blame the user for holding it wrong.
Commercial applications can solve this by shoveling copious amounts of cash at any skilled developer who is able to make any real-world improvement - even when it's not a perfect solution yet. FLOSS applications have to wait for a developer to come around who is masochistic enough to tackle it for free.
Question for someone who is very far away from this kind of development - why does CAD software need a kernel that’s wholly separate from the UI? Why aren’t they the same thing? I just don’t understand the abstraction that necessitates writing the software this way.
It is much like a game might use a physics engine, or a new language might use the LLVM backend. To overly simplify, a CAD kernel will keep a list of operations (make a cube of this size here, drill a hole of this depth here, round these edges but not those). And combine that into a final volume. These responsibilities only get more and more complex as a part gets more complex - so using a pre-built engine allows CAD software to focus on tools and workflows to translate human instructions into lower-layer kernel geometry: the UI/UX.
It also crosses into compatibility, if you use the same Kernel as another CAD it is much simpler to export/import from them. Otherwise you would have to reimplement their kernel (or enough of it), or be stuck exporting triangulated versions of the final volume - sort of like converting an image from vector to raster.
Same reason a browser uses a separate library for image decoding, or font rendering. A CAD kernel is a very complicated piece of heavily specialized math. The UI itself is there to let the user construct the input data for the CAD kernel and to display the resulting output. Doing that translation in a user-friendly way is already hard enough without having the kernel smeared out all over the rest of the application.
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
True, but PLM is an area where the bar for UX is very low indeed. I think the main barrier to an OSS one is the will to make one and the large list of checkbox features they're often selected by.
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed.
On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple
The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools).
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.
Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero.
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps became designers and settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead discipline except for very large products.
The number of job reqs I've seen posted for a dedicated position in the last ten years could be counted on one hand with several fingers left over. I'm interested in the subject so pay attention.
As mentioned the responsibility tends to have been subsumed by designers, but believe few designers study HCI. Part of the reason interfaces get harder to use every year.
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
There's also the 2024 film Flow. Really delightful movie, and is impressively rendered using Eevee (Blender's real-time renderer) and not Cycles (Blender's path-traced renderer).
I loved Coffee Run and the BCON24 Identity. Brilliant stuff. When it comes to Blender itself the only regret I have is that they ended support for Intel Macs but I understand it's a burden to support older platforms.
For anyone who happens to have an Intel Mac and is discouraged, Blender 4.5 is the LTS version and is still supported until at least 2027, and Blender is accepting patches that improve support.
Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.
Yes I think there's still a lot of potential upside.
But check out this collaboration between Blender and Godot https://godotengine.org/showcase/dogwalk/ I could imagine that in the not too distant future we might really have a completely open tools stack for making up to AA games (minus console SDKs which always are under NDA I guess).
Anyone know why Netflix doesn’t respond to their job site? I applied to several positions where I’m an exact match, with a decade of VFX and another decade of internet company experience in LA. Never heard a single word in response from them, for years. Reqs stay open a long time as well. What are they doing? Are they ghost jobs? They don’t even respond with a “no” form letter. (Lately their site is broken at the verify email stage, pin post returns 403.)
Companies don't take down listings for many reasons: make it look like they have more money to expand than they actually have, slow down the job seeker so their competition moves just slightly slower, there's no benefit in taking it down, if someone is actually reading the applications maybe an exceptional applicant will come that fits for another role in the company, drive up costs for the competition (hey boss everyone is hiring for my role so give me a raise), etc. [edit: gram mer and spolling]
I really like Blender and it's an amazing product, but I can't get over the standard Blender keymap. The "industry compatible" workflow is more sane, but then I have to translate tutorials from the Blender keymap to the industry compatible controls, and they're not always 1:1
Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.
But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
This is such a weird trope.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Good to hear. I use GIMP pretty seldomly and that was always the first menu option I had to hunt down.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.
I know this is controversial but I prefer teams to zoom and slack.
Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.
It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.
In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."
Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either!
So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free?
The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming infrastructure. People come to depend on tools made by people without the resources, interest, or personality to run an infrastructure project, or who won't budge on their vision to allow contributions outside of it that might help get the project to a point where it can attract enough vision-aligned contributors.
Forking potentially shifts the problem to a new triad, so it's not an obvious solution in all cases.
I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.
For example, the Topological Naming Problem (as I understand it) is made quite bad due to OpenCASCADE design - but as we've seen with 0.19 and later it is possible in a lot of cases to work around that. But that's a lot of really hard work with relatively little reward, so for years it languished on the backlog, and users had to deal with even trivial designs randomly blowing up in their face for no clear reason.
The result is a CAD program filled with footguns. Nobody wants to address structural issues, so you just pretend they don't exist, hide a half-baked tutorial on a Wiki on how to work around the worst of them, and blame the user for holding it wrong.
Commercial applications can solve this by shoveling copious amounts of cash at any skilled developer who is able to make any real-world improvement - even when it's not a perfect solution yet. FLOSS applications have to wait for a developer to come around who is masochistic enough to tackle it for free.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
As mentioned the responsibility tends to have been subsumed by designers, but believe few designers study HCI. Part of the reason interfaces get harder to use every year.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
particularly is my all time favorite.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/deprecation-and-removal-of-mac...
Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.
But check out this collaboration between Blender and Godot https://godotengine.org/showcase/dogwalk/ I could imagine that in the not too distant future we might really have a completely open tools stack for making up to AA games (minus console SDKs which always are under NDA I guess).
It's the lowest priority of job for the hiring team and the role is normally forgotten about once the hire has been onboarded.
I worked for an animation studio and they didn't take down roles.
Maya is frozen in time, and that is not necessarily a bad thing...
Great video on getting 3D render preview speeds up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0GW8Na5CIE
Geometry nodes tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
Blender still needs plugins to be functional for content:
https://tinynocky.gumroad.com/l/tinyeye
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
https://flipfluids.gumroad.com/l/flipfluids
https://artell.gumroad.com/l/auto-rig-pro
https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/ahwvli
https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender
https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/
Recommended training (Some artists like it, and some don't ymmv):
1. (A) Complete Blender Creator: Learn 3D Modelling for Beginners
https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/
* Basics of low-poly design in blender
2. (B+) Blender Animation & Rigging: Bring Your Creations To Life
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-animation-rigging/
* Some more practice rigging
* Export to game engine teaser
3. (B) The Ultimate Blender 3D Sculpting Course
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-3d-sculpting-course/
* Sculpting, Retopology, and VDM brushes
* a few outdated examples, and annoying instruction style
* basic anatomy
* covers several workflows
* Instructor is inexperienced
4. (A+) The Ultimate Blender 3D Simulations, Physics & Particles
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-simulations-physics-par...
* Shader/Texture basics
* Geometry node basics
* Boid sprites
* Hair and physics simulation
* Camera FX, and post-render filters
* Focused on Blender v4.3
* Instructions on how to export your assets to Unity 3D and Unreal game engines
$240k "Press release, tech blogpost, dedicated product manager for your area" https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.