Back in 2011 if you googled "blender is ", you get these autocompleted options:

blender is slow

blender is too hard

blender is hard to use

I know this because I was so frustrated as a newcomer and took a screenshot that I still have today.

Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these:

blender is hard

blender is damaged

blender is confusing

blender is free

blender is slow

In 2013 Andrew Price led an effort to work with the Blender community to point out why so many people have difficulty with Blender's UI. Check out the video & transcript here: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/fixing-blender-part-1-wh...

Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).

Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.

Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more "standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.

But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.

Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?

Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.

First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender. It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying. A bit like Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some people love it, Lots don't.

Andrew price went on to say that his proposed UI was wrong -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw

Since then there has been a UI team, which has tackled the low hanging fruit... the bigger design changes probably will come over the next year or so during their 2.8 revamp... where they tackle the bigger issues with blender.

They should fork into multiple products:

BlenderCore -> BlenderCAD -> BlenderEnginer -> Blender3D -> BlenderVideo etc.

... but if Andrew met resistance before, that's probably a non-starter. :(

>Now if you google "blender is " today, you get these

Sorry, that's not what I'm getting, I'm getting

Blender is free

Blender is slow

Blender is better than maya

In my case, it's a "misconception" based on being the guy who has to orchestrate a production pipeline from start to finish and pay the bills for everyone along the way.

Blender's UI may be many things, but like any tool in this field, simple is hardly one of them. In any case, a significant problem in practice is that Blender's natural ways of working don't always match what is used by just about everyone else. Sometimes it's got just the right feature to model something in a certain way, but you then incur a disproportionate cost to adjust that asset so it's useful as part of your overall pipeline, and while the UI for the handy feature might be decent, the overall process is glitchy and error-prone.

Here is the Blender hotkey chart.[1] All 9 pages. With the different hotkeys for each of 12 modes. Any questions?

[1] http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyRefer...

Sure, and here's a 13 page list of AutoCAD command shortcuts:

https://d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront.net/files/17331/AutoCAD_Sh...

This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that.

If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.

Addendum having just looked at the blender "hotkey chart" you linked: That's not a hotkey chart. That's a detailed description of every command with a hotkey.

If you added similar descriptions in the AutoCAD commands list it could probably hit 100 pages.

Besides, if your finger memory hasn't picked up all of blender yet, tap spacebar for command search. As long as you remember vaguely what something's called you'll find it in there.

3d modeling is not a consumer activity. You can start a Blender tutorial and start putting cubes or spheres together in an hour, or you could make 3d animated movies of the same quality as any major animation studio.

The complexity involved is not a mistake, it is inherent to the artform. Blender does a fine job of layering the tools and UI so that as you need more complicated features they are there for you.

I'm not so very sure about that; before TrueSpace (or Caligari going back to the Amiga) was mangled to look and act like everything else on the market (the move that killed it, as far as I can tell, since it coincided with its decline), it was both immensely more intuitive and more dimensionally accurate when necessary than anything I've used since. No, it wasn't Crayola simple, but it doesn't have to be nearly as hard as Blender either.

> Blender 2.36

One needed all that to learn to use the old Blender. Since the 2.5x version, it got much better. UI got reorganized, keys are remapeable, and most important of all, you can search for any operator by pressing the space bar.

Blender's UI is like Vim. If you don't put the time in to learn it, it makes no sense, but if you do it's the most efficient thing ever.

It is not like vim at all. Vim is predictable and has consistency in the way keybindings work. Once you understand that escape mode exists, you 're already there. Blender is a chaos of multiple window panes, buttons and options in unpredictable places, UI messages all over, inconsistent behavior of tools, and an ever-confusing window splitting mechanism.

I write faster with vim. I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.

For box modelling and poly by poly modelling, Blender is the fastest of all applications I've tried.

Blender is weird but predictable too. For example the keys GRS (grab, rotate, scale) works in different areas (3D, UV, animation, NLA, video editor) where it makes sense (in some there's no rotation). The UI overhaul of 2.5x moved stuff in a more logical order. If you understand the concept of "data blocks" and "users", you'll understand most of Blender.

> I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.

I've spend a healthy amount of time in 3ds Max, AutoCAD, and blender. In my opinion:

• 3ds is most discoverable / easiest to learn

• AutoCAD is most precise (owing to its object snaps and UCS controls)

• blender is the fastest to build in

I have a hard time believing that. Literally every time i had to do something i had to search google for it. Blender buttons are all over the place with no rhyme or reason about how they 're grouped. There are very few menus and in general no way to find what you re thinking about. If anything it's the definition of counterintuitive.

If you 're not working with it every single day , it's quite impossible to grasp the interface, because you simply forget where everything is hidden. It's really really bad.