If you have used Blender some time in the past but you did not like it, you really should give it another chance. Blender has improved a lot and keeps on improving very quickly.
The biggest change is the completely new UI in Blender 2.5. It's very nice and my favorite feature is the good keyboard accessibility. All actions in the editor should now be available through the UI and the keyboard, with helpful tooltips and all.
That being said, I think it's time for me to go and grab a fresh blender source from their repos and take it out for a spin.
Back in the day most people said they thought Blender seemed great and powerful but they just couldn't grok the interface. Now they've tried to fix that and still people complain about the interface, now saying they preferred the old one.
I'm not saying you are wrong, just that from the Blender devs perspective it must seem hopeless.
In the old UI there were many functions that were only accessible by knowing the keyboard command; they were not represented in the buttons or context menus at all.
The change is awkward for old users, but definitely more accessible for new users.
Yeah, me too. But I still like the new one better than the old one. I would complain more if the awesome keyboard quick menu wasn't there. That helps me find the stuff I need.
But it still takes a long time to re-program muscle memory.
I know that feeling. Just watch one or two tutorial movies, and then it'll easily come together. The new UI is not that different, but in general much more logical than in the 2.4.x tree.
Blender becomes more and more impressive with each release. The lack of Ngons was, especially for architects using the software, always a bit of an annoyance. Now with BMesh, it should be a lot easier to create solid models.
Sidenote, the featureset, UI, and Python-API of blender are so impressive that we decided to write the level-editor for our upcoming (non 3D) game as a blender plugin instead of going all the way and writing our own editor. This saved us a tremendous amount of time, and the editor is really good.
That's great to hear, I've always wondered about using API for custom editors. Are there any particular packages or Python files in the distribution that you'd recommend reading through as get a good introduction to the necessary parts of the API?
Most of the Blender UI is actually generated through Python files that are part of the distribution. So after reading the API docs I found it most helpful to just dive into the accompanying Python files in the blender.app package.
Edit:
There's also a ton of plugins for Blender that are all written in Python. Our map exporter actually started as a fork of a simple exporter plugin for another format (I forgot what it was initially).
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts
Just start from the official Blender python api docs [1]. It's very well documented and easy to get started if you got some Python background.
We're building Blender scripts for character editors instead of map editors. For our game engine. It's just so easy to get some cool looking 3d models built programmaticly with the Blender API ^^
A bit, but we used blender before, so we already knew the ins and outs of it's interface, and we're using Macs and I don't like running apps in X. It's kinda sad that there's still no production native Inkscape. I know that people were working on that years ago, but somehow it never went anywhere (or I'm not smart enough to find it).
Is Inkscape also easily extendable?
Agreed, Inkscape UX on Mac is really bad. The Windows version is much better in comparison. In my opinion, FWIW, a custom UI toolkit like Blender uses gives a much better UX cross platform and presumably a lot less maintenance too.
Yeah, or even Qt, since their UI toolkit is also highly optimized for all kinds of plattforms. The advantage of the blender approach, of course, is that the app feels the same on every platform, since it is not bound to platform-specific UI requirements. So it doesn't end up in an uncanny valley, where it is kinda like the native UI, but not quite like it.
Don’t forget that Blender’s UI toolkit is extremely well designed. Consistent user experience doesn’t matter when that experience is consistently poor.
@ibisum if you read this: I am sorry to see that your account has been hellbanned; you should probably create another, as your comments are hidden to most users.
BMesh sounds pretty cool. It is a feature which Wings3d (my go-to modelling package) embraced from the get go, and it sounds like Blender has added many of the same tools which were fantastic in Wings. Unfortunately Wings has fallen a little by the way-side so it is great to see Blender pick up this idea! Perhaps it is about time I had another shot at learning Blender because it is looking more and more powerful.
On this note does anyone have any recommendations to awesome intro to blender guides for a non-3D trained person? I've reviewed a few before just wondering if anyone has suggestions.
There's also Blender Noob to Pro (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro) I can't really say how good it is, since I started with Blender in 1999/2000 and back then everything was different and there was only sparse documentation :)
Why O why is there no obvious download link from the release notes! I had to hover on the top left link, follow blender.org, to find it: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
The biggest change is the completely new UI in Blender 2.5. It's very nice and my favorite feature is the good keyboard accessibility. All actions in the editor should now be available through the UI and the keyboard, with helpful tooltips and all.
That being said, I think it's time for me to go and grab a fresh blender source from their repos and take it out for a spin.