Putting myself though a Blender

[Steel General]

@Redrobes - You are a braver man than I.

I tried Carrara years ago, and like a lot of things I simply ran out of patience with it.

[Ascension]

I've tried just about every 3D app out there that has one of those free 30 day trials 'cuz I've always wanted to create virtual worlds. Blender, IMO was neither easier nor harder than the others...it just takes getting used to like everything else. I would like to get back to it so I am really looking forward to how you progress. Good luck and kudos for bravery.

[Redrobes]

Cheers guys. Well, for a while I made some objects and started on my snowman. Got a body and head + top hat and then went into the materials and texture editor and got real stuck there for ages. I mean, could they make this UI any harder ? But there are some shortcuts when only once you accidentally come across them make life incredibly easier.

Firstly, I found that LMB on the main window once gave me a context menu but for the life of me I could not get it back and wondered what I did ? Well if you hold the LMB down and keep it down for about a second then it appears and allows you to place down new objects on the screen like spheres and cubes etc.

Another handy thing to know is that whilst they whitter about the one hand on keyboard.... the key stroke to move an object is Ctrl + Alt + G and to rotate is Ctrl + Alt + R etc. ONE HAND ???? Are you kidding ? Only if your Vulcan I think. Well, it turns out that it has gestures built in. So if you select an object by RMB over it you can use LMB near to it and drag a line away from the object and after a short while it picks up the object and drags with it. Also, if you make a mouse LMB arc around an object then it picks up and starts rotating it. No more Mr CTRL + ALT + Key. Dont know as yet what the one for scaling is so I have to resort to Ctrl + Alt + S for a mo.

So adding, scaling, moving and rotating objects is not so bad. Making half a snowman was not all that difficult if you dont mind it looking a bit naff. The spheres come in all blocky. To smooth them out there is an object editing mode on F9 where there is the options to make the object smooth or hard. This fixes up the normals.

I tried the light-wave import and that worked well too. So no prob. It also has a wavefront text file .OBJ import which will be excellent for my scanner.

Right - now materials. These hurt bad. It took me ages to get to grips with even the basics of what it was asking for. I think I have some semblance of it now. Normally in 3D apps you create a material and then apply it to an object. This is no different except that the bit to create a link for a meterial to the object which is the first thing you need to do is in the middle of the UI. Thats under the Link to Object on the materials editor F5.

Then you can set the base col (diffuse to old timers like me) and also the specular color. There is also a mirror color for reflective stuff. Whats obviously missing as far as I can see is that there ought to be an ambient and a luminosity colors in there too. Not exactly sure whats going on there. I think the base color can be applied to the ambient so you can have specular ambient color I think ???? I dont quite get that at this stage.

Then you can set the shader. Theres a good selection. Given I had Lambert diffuse and Phong specular only, having a pull down for each is sheer luxury. Would be good to have a custom option tho. Maybe that will be later. So I kept with lambert and phong for a while as they are nice n easy stuff. Nothings gonna go spectacularly odd with them.

The texture bit threw me for a bit. I thought texture meant what they call material. What texture is for them is some image mapping. You can use built in procedural or image based mapping and whilst I had sphere, plane, cube, blender also has some extra ones which I am gasping for like U/V.

I got stuck for a while but when I read up a bit there is a hidden F6 required to take you to the texture editor. From there you can select the type of texture to use like cloud effect that we all love on this site. All sorts of marble, wood grain etc. Havent loaded an image yet tho.

Finally played about with the mirror and refractive index effects. They were pretty straight forward but you must remember to use F10 for the scene editor and switch on mirror and refractive effects in the renderer or else they just dont come out. Thats similar to LW so I was not caught out there.

Whooping it all up together I made this and it rendered it with 4 threads for 4 cores in a short amount of time. My old LW is just treacle compared to this and I like the mirror and refraction better in this too. There were always bugs in the version of LW I had.

So its kickin ass right now. Got loads more to discover. Its still a bit painful but not as bad as I first imagined. Parts of the UI still suck tho.

[jfrazierjr]

Great job. I am waiting for some nice top down minis to be rendered... heh...

[torstan]

Looking good so far. How long did it take you to model that quiff?

[Redrobes]

Top down minis with quiffs huh ? That might take a while...

Dont know if you missed this post while you were away Torstan but if you think my 3D modeling skillz are right leet then I had better fess up.
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2938

I have been in close combat with it again tonight and I am beginning to see that there is a principle at work with blender. In general software there is some pretty standard UI principles and one of them is "There is more than one way to do it" thing. What I think is missing from that short sentence should read "There is more than one equally easy way to do it". Thats something I think completely lost of the UI dev of blender.

The UI is at the same time both brilliant and really really sucky. There are things so bad with it that you want to stop right now and put it in the bin and other times you think wow thats actually really clever.

If you look at the #1 top post pic 2 that is the cube in normal camera view. Look at render pic 4. Notice that the light is from a different direction. Now in LW the preview makes a half hearted attempt to get that about right and leaves it for the renderer to get it exact. So you move a light around and the screen does not update with good shading. Bad.

Also something must have possessed the chap who thought that having all the items like buttons on would be good gray and all the off buttons are light. Its like waiting at the curb for the walk sign to go out and then its safe. Or being in an elevator with all the floors lit up except the one your on. You cast your eye over these buttons and you have to double check your thoughts EVERY time just to make sure its really on or off.

Heres another. If you make an object show its points then they start highlighted if the object was highlighted. If you then use a selection then nothing happens. Its as though you didnt select them. Its not obvious that they are already selected. In LW they deselect / toggle. When you save a file you double click on the file to overwrite and nothing happens. When you hit the save button then still nothing happens. The save dialog does not go away, no wait cursor, so confirmation. Only when you click it again does it save it because its changed the focus with that last click but no screen update to tell you thats what happened and no press the button AND change focus at the same time like in normal windows.

Another dialog crazy thing is by default all the dialogs are in a bar on the bottom. Each sub panel has a close arrow which shrinks them in the X direction so that only a thin character width bar is present. But then instead of writing the name of the dialog vertically down the bar you just get the first character which is no use to anybody. Really dumb.

And yet, the dialog docking on the panels is superb. You can drag a dialog over the top of another and it automatically makes it into a property sheet with two pages. Also you can dock these dialog panels anywhere and it really looks as though they should be in a vertical drop so when closed the thin bar is now horizontal with the name across it. Great ! So why boot the app in the default mode which is where its so bad ?

You can hide these dialog panels but to bring them back is neigh on impossible without google. The one thing you can say is that everybody and their dog has seen these issues so theres plenty of blogs with the exact issue you have to get the answer. You have to put your cursor just over the scroll window slider and right click to get a menu to put them back up again. Why not have that menu for clicking anywhere inside a blank dialog space then ?

Its almost like this program was designed to keep noobs out. Once you know its fine but you cant know without asking. Oh and dont try the help that gives you an index of A-Z of what the keys do. I know what the key does because I can press it. What I need is a specific function and want to know what key does it. Its like having a one way foreign language dictionary. Its no good telling me what the foreign word is if you need to look it up in the index to get to it.

I could go on...

So what can I say that I have learned today ? Well you can use the Alt key and LMB to move the view so I think that cuts down on using the middle mouse so much. The gesture for scale is a kind of S shape so that is good too. No more Mr Spock neck pinches required any more.

If you press B then you get the start of a selection box which is pretty useful. You can also use ctrl + LMB to trace out a bounding lasso too. Also pretty useful.

I have been playing with the layers too. Luckily these are just like LW and I thought that these were one of the best bits of that app so I am well pleased here. You get a number of boxes which represent layers and you can select any box and it goes gray to show that its active (Real Dumb that) but you can shift and select as many of these boxes as you like and they become the active layers. You can move an object from one layer to another by highlighting it and pressing M for move and you get a neat little set of boxes come up - just pick one. Good.

In edit mode you can create new vertices by just using ctrl and LMB and it puts them down - it seems to know whether you are dragging out a lasso by the timing. You can select two points and press F to make an edge and three points to make a face.

You can add two objects in like a cube and a sphere and select both and press W and get the boolean menu and once finished it seems to work just fine. Though the new boolean object is separate from the original objects and the original objects are still there so to see an intersection for example, you need to get rid of the original objects or move them to a new layer. I tried it once tho and it crashed the app and it just bailed out and died leaving no trace. When I restarted it has an option to recover last session but it didnt give me the point where I was at. Very scary ! I didn't like that at all. My LW does not crash if you dont push it to its limits. A small cube and sphere should not crash the app. We will see how bad this actually is. I bet they didnt check for a div by zero and didn't catch the exception though it never told me anything.

So to round up. The UI still sucks but theres more than one way to do things except that everyone who must use this darn thing must be using the way that does not appear to be the default way your expected to do it as a nooby. Only then does it make itself humble to your requests. You get the inkling that if you use it the way the pro's and the developers use it then it could be alright. Nothing is going to make me think that dark gray is on tho. Does this app have UI skins ?

[Redrobes]

I have found a few more good things about the UI.

If you have a totally bizarre and unnatural urge to drag down the main menu at the top of the page, then quite extraordinarily there are more buttons and stuff above it hidden from the user. One of these is themes and it comes with the default and one more. It appears as though the default is fixed but the other one can be changed and I presume saved. Well, for each type of window you can change stuff and there is a button style. I cant figure out how to change the color of a button so that when pushed in its lighter but I can get it rendered so that when pushed it it has a 3D pushed in look to it which helps me immensely.

If you select the "Specify Theme for..." panel and put in "UI and buttons" and then hit the minimal style then you get this.

I have also found that this main menu is actually the Preferences window type in case you lose it like I did. Thats not obvious and its also half way down the list of window types...

There is another that appears to be essential and that is the Outliner. Its basically the scene graph and lists all of your objects, lights and camers etc. The beauty is tho that you can click on any of these and it selects it right away. So now if you name your objects then its easy to find. This should have been on the default start window structure IMO. Selecting stuff is a bit of a pain. Attaching objects together has been a bit of a PITA so far so this ought to help immensely. Obviously the... "Theres only one proper way to do it." way here.

Mine now looks like this...