Yeah, their sizzle reel is pretty incredible. I wish they had a hyperlinked version of the credits, so many clips I would want to see the whole source for.
Nice. I'm currently slowly studying how Godot works and I'll next try to see if there is a usable workflow for designing assets in blender and using them in Godot.
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly.
That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.
Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.
There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.
A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:
a) Having lots of options
b) Making those options discoverable for beginners
is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.
As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.
So it’s
1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.
2) where that tool is and how it works
Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.
Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.
Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.
> almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.
Then, in the next release, they move.
Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.
Blender - or any super successful FOSS - feels to me like stumbling upon amazing vehicles and technology left behind in the fields in a post-war environment.
Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.
You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.
Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.
But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines
I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.
I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.
I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.
i mean blender has to support a lot more than a mapping tool for a game. it seems pretty expected to me that it would be more complicated to have complete freedom to do whatever you want vs the strict limits that such a tool imposes on you.
> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.
I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.
It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.
Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?
One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.
It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.
My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.
That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.
I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?
If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.
What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.
> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.
I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.
And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.
It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.
Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.
that feels like the opposite analogy though - filleting a fish to the precision of a Michelin starred kitchen might be hard, but knives in general are easy to use, even for a beginner.
Why does it take a year for the cow to produce a calf?
Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?
Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?
Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. After using visual studio all day, it's like a breath of fresh air to click through a scene and have the tool respond like it actually cares about UX.
And that's when you learn Houdini and open up a workflow from 2008 and it still works the same, despite SideFX pushing out an insane amount of features every release (look at their SneakPeaks).
I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).
Fore More recent numbers:
In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].
I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.
> but imagine what they could do with even more money.
Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.
I’ve got to imagine there’s examples of orgs stopping donation intake when they get into the “money is nice but we cannot in good faith utilize all this without scaling into something we don’t want to be.”
A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was.
It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel.
It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.
Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.
The audience may be larger, but I don't feel like it's anywhere near "everyone". Personally, I don't know anyone who still uses a dedicated email client except in specific institutional settings. I haven't touched one outside of a corporate office myself in 20 years. Webmail has been good enough for longer than many people have been using computers.
I started pre-1.8, in the C-key era. Haven't used it in many years so looking at it every now and then is genuinely shocking to me how much it's progressed. I remember a family member who worked at a triple A game dev studio giving me a tour and when I talked to the 3D modeler guys there and told them I used Blender they stifled a chuckle. To be fair, it was a very rudimentary tool back with UI flows invented by and for aliens. And now it's used all over the place in both amateur and professional settings.
Yes, I remember fumblefutzign around in 2000 or 2001, and I can't believe its current state. I'm a writer, not an artist, so I doubt I'll ever get back into it, but I'm so happy to see where it's at.
As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.
They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.
The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.
I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed.
That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.
The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now)
It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.
IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.
As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).
The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.
I spent a lot of time in a… legally questionable version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.
And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.
Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender
CAD Sketcher for blender is definitely not ready to be used in a real capacity and it's been almost 5 years I think, so I don't have high hopes. I will keep trying it every now and then, however, because I really want this product.
> Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
Because Fusion 360 is that much better than even the latest Freecad? Just because Freecad sucks less nowadays doesn't mean that Fusion 360 isn't simply a better product... Freecad 1.0 was too little too late. The only way it could gain traction in the hobby market is if Fusion 360 pulls the plug on its free version (again). And I say all this as a Freecad user.
Not saying that Fusion 360 isn't a better product. But being at the mercy of autodesk to even be able to open old projects just sounds asinine to me.
And also such a deliberate ploy to try and undercut competition, which sadly has been working unreasonable well. Even after onshape shafted everyone which should have highlighted the obvious risks.
I have played with CAD Sketcher, it's usable, but yes, not really good enough for serious use. Doesn't quite match up to FreeCAD after the significant improvements that has had over the past couple of years.
Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common.
Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.
As a tangent, the single greatest thing about my Lenovo laptop that I was not looking for when I bought it was that it has three physical buttons for the touchpad(or that pointer thing if you use it). I love X11 style middle click paste. So that middle button elevates it to the best feeling laptop I have ever used.
A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.
I prefer larger screens on laptops, so every laptop I've ever owned has had a numpad. Naturally you can't fit a numpad onto a 12" laptop, but USB (or Bluetooth) numpads are available; a quick Amazon search says $10-20 for most of them.
Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).
They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.
What do you want them to do about it, exactly? 3D artwork is a complex activity that requires a lot of keys to have a useful keybinding setup. Some of those keys are going to be the numpad
Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.
They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that.
Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.
Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.
Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums?
I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.
The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.
But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!
To answer the question at the top, yes there are countless suites that are instantly resumable even after months away. I used to teach Blender (v3) and I think I could find my way around but the overhead isn’t worth it. I’m also though in a privileged position to be able to afford more, smaller commercial tools.
CAD: MoI (cool kids nowadays use Plasticity, but that is taking on similar feature creep - in any case I own and use both)
SubD modelling: nothing has ever beat Silo. And silo still gets updates, but the workflow is the same. Cheetah3D is also in the same boat.
Rendering (I do products, not character/CGI): Maverick. Fastest path tracer in the world, perpetual license, rivals Vray for product viz. if you’re currently using Keyshot - switch now.
Texturing: 3Dcoat or Marmoset Toolbag 5
What most of these have in common is either the workflow is super intuitive, or you have at least 15 years of training material readily accessible that still applies to the software today as it did back then.
Overall it’s a choice between a kitchen sink pipeline (Blender, Rhino) vs a specialised one. If I were to teach again, I would still use Blender in the classroom, and I fully support the project. My brain just works better with smaller, focussed tools.
One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly.
A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
> A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
Thats exactly what they do. They dont charge at all even if they do make loads of money.
Are you confusing Blender with some other software? Blender is free and open source software. People donate to it because they 1) want to support the project and 2) have the money. If you don't have the money you just don't donate.
This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.
I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels.
That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.
I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya?
I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.
Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting.
The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.
Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.
Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.
And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.
For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.
I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.
Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.
I have not tried building custom solutions in Blender, but Maya is built for custom solutions. The entire thing is a C++ engine and then the UI you see is built from scripts, scripts you can fork and edit. (or it was as I haven't actually used Maya in a while). And of course they there are plenty of examples of customizations or custom UIs included to help get started.
Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.
oh yeah i remember how maya was architectured so well, and from the start indeed. i don't know the innards of blender but the python layer seems powerful.. yet afaik there's no derived computed attributes like $ball.x = $feet.x / 2 or that would require using some 2nd class objects (transformators or something like this), quite un-ergonomic.
It’s stuff like “we enforce a naming convention for all bones”, or “we do a coordinate flip” or “limit number of material references”. It’s all bespoke custom stuff that exists in every studio but is slightly different, and project specific.
I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
> Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day
Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you).
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
> I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry.
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D
Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
For the DAW tool, just run Blender on top of JACK/Pipewire and use Ardour to get sample-accurate synchronization between the two, and all the features of both, without compromise.
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.
I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)
The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html
Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.
My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.
It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.
Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.
It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).
The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.
When I started on 3.2 there was a series of 3-5 minute videos covering the absolute basics of the interface, voice by some european (nordic?) guy.(Maybe CGboost 2.8 series?)
Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.
THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.
After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.
I think you need to start learning a lot of things from scratch. They are just very different programs with different concepts and layouts. You can sure transfer some things over but I think it might be best to just start from scratch, skip through the parts you feel familiar with. Try some beginner tutorials like the donut to get some overview and then learn how you learn new stuff. Just maybe try to not to think of it as 3ds Max but different. Blender is a very different experience and not looking it as a migration but a new tool might ease the frustrations.
I wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes.
By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.
I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.
Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today.
Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
The problem is you will develop an incomplete understanding, using a ton of weird workflows, and missing tools that are super useful that you didn't know existed.
Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.
Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way.
After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
I used to use 3ds Max and I find the Blender's UI really terrible after years of occasional use. It's very unintuitive and you'll have to learn everything from tutorials / reading Blender forums. It seems to have many annoying quirks, which make me angry every time I use it.
I read tutorials, but the UI was also more intuitive / discoverable than Blender. It's been over 20 years since I last used it though, but I remember it being much easier to use than Blender today. I could model, texture and animate a full game character from scratch by just learning the basic UI.
Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos.
Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :)
Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.
Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)
I’ve been learning houdini recently, and I have to agree.
In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is.
With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.
Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I
Yeah, their sizzle reel is pretty incredible. I wish they had a hyperlinked version of the credits, so many clips I would want to see the whole source for.
Thanks for that link, I really enjoyed that. I had no idea quite how varied the work people were creating with Blender was these days.
holy. this is a pretty cool video. I am learning how to use AI to vibe coding blender videos and this is like very good!
How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?
There is a popular mcp interface but having them write blender scripts is also pretty usable.
Nice. I'm currently slowly studying how Godot works and I'll next try to see if there is a usable workflow for designing assets in blender and using them in Godot.
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly.
That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.
Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.
There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.
I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.
A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:
a) Having lots of options
b) Making those options discoverable for beginners
is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.
As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.
So it’s
1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.
2) where that tool is and how it works
Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.
Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.
Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.
> almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.
Then, in the next release, they move.
Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.
Blender - or any super successful FOSS - feels to me like stumbling upon amazing vehicles and technology left behind in the fields in a post-war environment.
Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.
You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.
Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.
But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines
> not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.
The problem is it's someone else's very messy kitchen where nothing is where you expect it to be.
It matters where things are. Photoshop vs Fireworks, CAD vs Sketch-Up.
The problem with this software is that you can't make it yours when you enter it.
I think AI will solve this, by searching where the utensils are and putting them where it is convenient for you specifically.
I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.
I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.
I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.
I created a whole Counterstrike map back in the day in a few days.
Meanwhile, I can't get anything substantially done in Blender in a week. I just gave up.
i mean blender has to support a lot more than a mapping tool for a game. it seems pretty expected to me that it would be more complicated to have complete freedom to do whatever you want vs the strict limits that such a tool imposes on you.
> If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable.
Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.
> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.
I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.
It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.
Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?
One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.
It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.
There's already ai models that create 3d assets
My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.
That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.
I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?
If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.
What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.
> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.
I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.
And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.
It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.
Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.
Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.
that feels like the opposite analogy though - filleting a fish to the precision of a Michelin starred kitchen might be hard, but knives in general are easy to use, even for a beginner.
A future where everything is very easy to learn is kind of dystopian
I think it is more an attempt at a difficult task. Easy to pickup the basics but having lots of room to grow.
Why does it take a year for the cow to produce a calf?
Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?
Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?
Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. After using visual studio all day, it's like a breath of fresh air to click through a scene and have the tool respond like it actually cares about UX.
> Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender.
But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.
And that's when you learn Houdini and open up a workflow from 2008 and it still works the same, despite SideFX pushing out an insane amount of features every release (look at their SneakPeaks).
I've always been confused how all the CGI world is helping you get into flow with complex data while IDEs felt so heavy and glitchy.
I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).
Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender?
I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.
At one of last Blender conferences, the founder (and at that time CEO) gave some insights about funding and compared it to Thunderbird. https://youtu.be/VZ5022VaMmA?si=m1hD9wEQ16s8Zu3b&t=1297 ;
Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].
I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.
[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates
> Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird
Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.
There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.
Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:
Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/
Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...
Mozilla invests more time in being a foundation than software so makes sense their donations are higher.
> but imagine what they could do with even more money.
Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.
wow thunderbird gets so much and achieves so little? amazing in a terrible way
I’ve got to imagine there’s examples of orgs stopping donation intake when they get into the “money is nice but we cannot in good faith utilize all this without scaling into something we don’t want to be.”
A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was.
It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
It couldn't possibly be that Blender simply has much more volunteer contributions?
Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client?
I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.
Or Thunderbird is much older and has a lot more users
Blender is actually much, much older than Thunderbird.
wow, did not expect blender to be 32 years old, thanks for correcting me.
but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference
That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel.
It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.
Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.
UI standardization, CUA, X11, Motif date from the late 80s.
Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.
Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.
Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.
Market size is different: everyone needs a mail client, but not everyone needs 3d modelling.
The audience may be larger, but I don't feel like it's anywhere near "everyone". Personally, I don't know anyone who still uses a dedicated email client except in specific institutional settings. I haven't touched one outside of a corporate office myself in 20 years. Webmail has been good enough for longer than many people have been using computers.
I started pre-1.8, in the C-key era. Haven't used it in many years so looking at it every now and then is genuinely shocking to me how much it's progressed. I remember a family member who worked at a triple A game dev studio giving me a tour and when I talked to the 3D modeler guys there and told them I used Blender they stifled a chuckle. To be fair, it was a very rudimentary tool back with UI flows invented by and for aliens. And now it's used all over the place in both amateur and professional settings.
Yes, I remember fumblefutzign around in 2000 or 2001, and I can't believe its current state. I'm a writer, not an artist, so I doubt I'll ever get back into it, but I'm so happy to see where it's at.
As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.
They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.
The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.
The thing is, Cycles is fully open sourced... so there is no real secret behind it!
Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.
Interesting, maybe major customers are insisting on other features ?
I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed.
That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.
The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now)
It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.
IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.
As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).
The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.
I spent a lot of time in a… legally questionable version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.
And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.
Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender
CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/
Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
CAD Sketcher for blender is definitely not ready to be used in a real capacity and it's been almost 5 years I think, so I don't have high hopes. I will keep trying it every now and then, however, because I really want this product.
> Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
Because Fusion 360 is that much better than even the latest Freecad? Just because Freecad sucks less nowadays doesn't mean that Fusion 360 isn't simply a better product... Freecad 1.0 was too little too late. The only way it could gain traction in the hobby market is if Fusion 360 pulls the plug on its free version (again). And I say all this as a Freecad user.
Not saying that Fusion 360 isn't a better product. But being at the mercy of autodesk to even be able to open old projects just sounds asinine to me.
And also such a deliberate ploy to try and undercut competition, which sadly has been working unreasonable well. Even after onshape shafted everyone which should have highlighted the obvious risks.
I have played with CAD Sketcher, it's usable, but yes, not really good enough for serious use. Doesn't quite match up to FreeCAD after the significant improvements that has had over the past couple of years.
Replicating Parasolid in OSS is hard
I have an older version of affinity photo that feels like this, but the new ones use cloud features I don't want so I don't upgrade
It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.
I wouldn’t call Blender’s UI particularly great either. The assumption that you have three mouse buttons and a separate number pad is pretty crazy.
Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common.
Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.
As a tangent, the single greatest thing about my Lenovo laptop that I was not looking for when I bought it was that it has three physical buttons for the touchpad(or that pointer thing if you use it). I love X11 style middle click paste. So that middle button elevates it to the best feeling laptop I have ever used.
A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.
Laptops have been outselling desktops for decades, and the idea that Apple users are some quirky tiny minority has been false for just as long.
Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.
I prefer larger screens on laptops, so every laptop I've ever owned has had a numpad. Naturally you can't fit a numpad onto a 12" laptop, but USB (or Bluetooth) numpads are available; a quick Amazon search says $10-20 for most of them.
Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).
They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.
It makes assumptions that people doing serious 3D work are not on a laptop and can afford a keyboard with a numpad.
Those aren't really bad assumptions.
They are silly assumptions, especially for an open-source project trying to gain mindshare.
What do you want them to do about it, exactly? 3D artwork is a complex activity that requires a lot of keys to have a useful keybinding setup. Some of those keys are going to be the numpad
Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.
Blender has multiple options for emulating a middle mouse button. I can use blender just fine on my laptop with a touchpad.
As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.
Blender is certainly a great software, but there are still remains of bad UI choices, for example how zooming works
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the...
They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that.
Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.
Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.
Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums?
I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.
The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.
But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!
To answer the question at the top, yes there are countless suites that are instantly resumable even after months away. I used to teach Blender (v3) and I think I could find my way around but the overhead isn’t worth it. I’m also though in a privileged position to be able to afford more, smaller commercial tools.
CAD: MoI (cool kids nowadays use Plasticity, but that is taking on similar feature creep - in any case I own and use both)
SubD modelling: nothing has ever beat Silo. And silo still gets updates, but the workflow is the same. Cheetah3D is also in the same boat.
Rendering (I do products, not character/CGI): Maverick. Fastest path tracer in the world, perpetual license, rivals Vray for product viz. if you’re currently using Keyshot - switch now.
Texturing: 3Dcoat or Marmoset Toolbag 5
What most of these have in common is either the workflow is super intuitive, or you have at least 15 years of training material readily accessible that still applies to the software today as it did back then.
Overall it’s a choice between a kitchen sink pipeline (Blender, Rhino) vs a specialised one. If I were to teach again, I would still use Blender in the classroom, and I fully support the project. My brain just works better with smaller, focussed tools.
For those of you who get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/ :)
It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!
Done. I was feeling bad for saying how often I used blender without paying a cent not 20 seconds earlier in this very thread. Then I saw your message.
The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.
Thanks for the Apple pay hint. That was just what I needed to get me over the mental threshold. It's been literally two clicks.
Same here. I don’t use blender very often. But it’s in my regular toolbox. Hopefully my $25 will help.
One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly.
A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
>borrowed the software
>it was a friend's license
>didn't pay for a copy of Blender
just for the record, everyone can download, for free, Blender from https://www.blender.org/download/ for Win, MacOS or Linux
> A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
Thats exactly what they do. They dont charge at all even if they do make loads of money.
Are you confusing Blender with some other software? Blender is free and open source software. People donate to it because they 1) want to support the project and 2) have the money. If you don't have the money you just don't donate.
You must be thinking of some other software, Blender is free, and has been for a long time.
You must be thinking about a different software.
Donated. Never used Blender and most likely never will, but to see such professional software going on and facing the big corporations gives me faith.
This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.
I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels.
That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.
I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
Can’t render a scene from a command line? Should be doable for anything running on Unix. Need to have the assets available however.
There's got to be a profile tool somewhere right?
Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya?
I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.
Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting.
The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.
Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.
Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.
And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.
For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.
I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.
Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.
was this all builtin maya features or a lot of commercial extensions for game artists ?
I have not tried building custom solutions in Blender, but Maya is built for custom solutions. The entire thing is a C++ engine and then the UI you see is built from scripts, scripts you can fork and edit. (or it was as I haven't actually used Maya in a while). And of course they there are plenty of examples of customizations or custom UIs included to help get started.
Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.
oh yeah i remember how maya was architectured so well, and from the start indeed. i don't know the innards of blender but the python layer seems powerful.. yet afaik there's no derived computed attributes like $ball.x = $feet.x / 2 or that would require using some 2nd class objects (transformators or something like this), quite un-ergonomic.
It’s stuff like “we enforce a naming convention for all bones”, or “we do a coordinate flip” or “limit number of material references”. It’s all bespoke custom stuff that exists in every studio but is slightly different, and project specific.
I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.
So you're on the engineering side of the animation pipeline ?
Im on the engineering side of everything! But yep.
I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles.
That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
Nuke, Fusion and Houdini are the de-facto for animation and still very heavily used.
I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.
It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
> Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day
Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
The Oscar-winning animated feature movie “Flow” was made with Blender.
It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you).
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
Role model FOSS project for sure.
> I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry.
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
For the DAW tool, just run Blender on top of JACK/Pipewire and use Ardour to get sample-accurate synchronization between the two, and all the features of both, without compromise.
Yes, but open source will never work!!!
That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.
Yes, it's had a lot of money put through it since its early days, with quirky shortcuts and quirky features.
Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D.
They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives.
Open source; can win!
https://krita.org/en/
It is also free. =3
> Imagine if they made Gimp good,
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
For minimal edits, Pinta does the job IMO: https://www.pinta-project.com/
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
As a Python fan, the mention of a node-based physics engine was a jumpscare.
What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.
I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.
I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)
I also spent a while looking for non-video resources recently. This one is a couple of versions behind but I don't think it's outdated: https://studio.blender.org/training/blender-fundamentals-45-...
The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html
Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.
My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.
It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.
I'm the same. What helps me is Blender MCP. Then you can ask it how to do things and it will either do it or explain how to do it.
https://www.blender.org/lab/mcp-server/
Maybe you're biased by children's ease of learning - neural plasticity?
No. C4D was magic and very intuitive. The UI was very good and made it easy to safely explore without causing damage.
I don't remember the last time I used a software package as smooth and clean and tidy as C4D.
I started with blender and then tried C4D. Never got the hang of it. Familiarity is really a strong factor.
You probably used the newer UI which is almost nothing like the old, pre-Blender UI. The newer UI sucks.
Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.
It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).
The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.
When I started on 3.2 there was a series of 3-5 minute videos covering the absolute basics of the interface, voice by some european (nordic?) guy.(Maybe CGboost 2.8 series?)
Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.
THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.
After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.
(edit: stick to points rather than rave on)
I think you need to start learning a lot of things from scratch. They are just very different programs with different concepts and layouts. You can sure transfer some things over but I think it might be best to just start from scratch, skip through the parts you feel familiar with. Try some beginner tutorials like the donut to get some overview and then learn how you learn new stuff. Just maybe try to not to think of it as 3ds Max but different. Blender is a very different experience and not looking it as a migration but a new tool might ease the frustrations.
I wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes.
By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.
Do people use autodesks products like that?
I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.
Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today.
Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.
Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
The problem is you will develop an incomplete understanding, using a ton of weird workflows, and missing tools that are super useful that you didn't know existed.
Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.
Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way.
After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
I used to use 3ds Max and I find the Blender's UI really terrible after years of occasional use. It's very unintuitive and you'll have to learn everything from tutorials / reading Blender forums. It seems to have many annoying quirks, which make me angry every time I use it.
how did you learn 3ds Max?
I read tutorials, but the UI was also more intuitive / discoverable than Blender. It's been over 20 years since I last used it though, but I remember it being much easier to use than Blender today. I could model, texture and animate a full game character from scratch by just learning the basic UI.
> Node-powered physics
Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos.
Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :)
Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.
>Blender inches closer to Houdini
Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit.
Damn that's a cool program.
> Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic
Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)
I’ve been learning houdini recently, and I have to agree.
In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is.
With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.
An Animusic revival? :)
404 link ?
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
The demo reel for this release is seriously impressive. The video editor is also starting to get good. Still pretty buggy though.
Even if you never use Blender, I highly recommend you to donate to the organization if you happen to donate to non-profit tech organizations/projects.
URL is now https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
If you’re getting a 404 from OP’s link, the URL was updated on their site:
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
Hopefully a mod sees this.
Changed from https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ above. Thanks!