Blender UI is great, but Cinema4D UI is arguably better. I've used both for 10 years.
I think most engineers and designers forget that they're just tools. Vim or emacs? PyCharm. Whatever works for you. Stop letting tools define your craftsmanship. This comment reminds me of pixel peeping that most enthusiast photographers do...comparing MTF curves for days. How about going out and taking pictures, learning composition and narrative, story telling and photographic experimentation? But they're too enslaved to their tools.
I guess that too can be a hobby?
But I found this horn-tooting about Blender and saying that its superior to every 3D software out there is a stretch if not flatout wrong.
Ever used Houdini? Yeah, it's not totally free but it's free for non-commercial use. It will blow your mind what it can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIcUW9QFMLE
The Houdini UI is nothing short of absolute genius.
I don't see Blender ever competing with Houdini. Like...ever. Because, it is fundamentally a different take on 3D content. It does the same thing at the end (3D content), but the way it does it is different (procedural). Better IMHO, but I could be biased.
Does that mean Blender has no place in the sofware ecosystem? No. Can we me a bit more pragmatic, stop horn-tooting and objectively look at the 3D software landscape as a whole? Yes.
Moreso - the tool tip for each button / text box lists the python code needed to call that function / edit that value - so it’s not just “anything that can be done manually can hypothetically be scripted”, but “if you can do it manually, then you just need to look at the tooltips and write them down into a text file, and you’ve just written a script to automate your workflow”
Some highlights:
- Any panel can be positioned/sized however you like
- You can create custom named layouts for your own common workflows
- Fully extensible via Python plugins (create new UI panels, menu items, hotkeys, etc.)
- Anything you can do manually can be scripted with python
- By default, (although this has changed some) the more-frequently-used hotkeys are single-key. And of course it's all configurable and (if I remember correctly) they have presets for matching other apps like 3ds max / maya.
- searchable commands palette (press [space], start typing command name, press [enter] to execute command)
- on load / "new file": it loads [something like] "default.blend" instead of a hard-coded set of defaults, so that you can configure its definition of an empty file (which IIRC also includes the default layout configuration). To make it quick+easy to change, you can set with menu option [File]+[Save Startup File].
- Windows can be broken out and dragged to a separate monitor
- Lots of highly-specialized UI widgets. e.g. inline ranged slider that captures the mouse on click and adjusts the value as you move the cursor, has a "progress bar" to visualize the percentage, allows keyboard entry if you single-click instead of click+drag, has arrows on left and right that can be clicked to step forward/backward, has label inline with widget, and has description on mouseover
- Generalized interactive timeline for animation and sequencing
- Powerful node-based editors for shaders, textures, etc., with nodes for each stage of the pipeline and utility nodes to apply transformations (e.g. add a node for a source image, draw a line from the image's color output to the input of a "brightness" node, etc.)
And not only can you use it for the obvious 3D tasks, but it can be used as a non-linear video editor (including things like cross-fade of audio and/or video, video superimposition, textual overlaying, cropping, stretching, mirroring, color manipulation, option to use 3D scene output as video input, etc.), shadeless 2D raster/vector animator, 3D printing, and probably other things I don't know about.