A Brutally Honest Critique of Blender Thus Far

After learning Blender for a month I realized that basic 3D modeling isn't hard if you already know the basics of drawing. What makes Blender difficult is it's a hodge-podge of random features that some C++ programmers cooked up whenever they needed that feature for their wannabe "movie studio." It's chock full of random footguns and weird behavior.

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Example Blender Footguns

Here's just a few stupid things that I can remember off the top of my head:

• While you're in Layout mode you can randomly hit I (which is the inset command in Modeling) and then...start an animation frame? While I'm looking at Layout? Why have an Animation tab then? If you then move something that's considered part of the animation frame not a layout move so you'll think it's not saving right. How do you know you did this? Oh, you see there's color on random text fields.
• If you modify the file that a UV is using as a texture image the entire .blend file shits the bed. I got a file that I cannot bring back because the contents of an image changed. Mind you, not the dimensions, just the contents. Now I'm forced to remove the whole model, add them back, and redo the UVs.
• All selection is far too aggressive and also not able to select near things. If you lightly move the brush selector within 700 parsecs of a vertex then that whole face and all the faces behind it will be selected, BUT, if two vertices are within 0.01m of each other it'll take an act of Cthulhu to select them both.
• Whenever you do some important action like place an item, there's a little hidden modification pop-up in the bottom left of the window that's always collapsed and you have to remember to open it so you can change the thing you just did and if you don't change it before touching anything else then that pop-up disappears and you are screwed.
• A really good example of how bad the "after action collapsed yet very important menu" is comes when you try to merge all the seemingly randomly placed vertices by distance. If you do manage to select vertices that are accidentally doubled you'll then merge by distance BUT you have to quickly open the magic modal-not-modal menu and adjust the distance to make sure it actually does...merge by distance because the default MERGE BY DISTANCE is 0. Yes, the distance of a merge by distance feature is 0 so it does nothing by default.
• Did I mention that it just randomly creates vertices for no reason? I'll extrude the top of a cylinder, then grab it to bend and...wtf...wait there's a second top to the cylinder now? Yes, all the time an extrude or inset operation will leave behind doubled vertices that you have to either merge or loop select and delete...I mean...
• There's a context menu when you hit delete, and at the top of the context menu closest to the cursor is seemingly what you want for Delete Vertex, Delete Edge, Delete Face. However, if you use those then it totally obliterates all geometry connected to that because some programmer is thinking you want to modify the internal data structure of a GLB file not change what you see on the screen. The actual thing you want is Dissolve, not Delete, and those options are 6 levels down very far from your cursor and near a bunch of other footgun options just waiting for you to accidentally click it.
• Tons of settings are hidden under randomly designed icons with teeny tiny little arrows that explode into giant 20-30% screen sized menu option panels which contain nonsensical names for the options. For example, I was getting numbers on every single edge whenever I selected it because a plugin I installed turns it on all the time. There's no indicator what this is, where it is, how to turn it off but digging into the 15 different teeny tiny little drop downs lead me to "Edge Lengths."
• Many interactions desperately scream for a directional component. Loop selecting is a big one where Blender tries to guess which direction you want to select a loop based on camera position but it's so totally wrong most of the time as to be almost useless in many situations. If instead loop select just popped up the same directional arrow that Scale uses to let you pick the direction it'd know exactly and can show you exactly. This could also work for so many operations.

The Project Chasing Two Designs Catches None

The worst though is how the whole UI seems to be made by two different people. One person believes that modal interfaces are horrible at all times no matter what and the other really wants Blender to be a bunch of modes that are really just little apps. This leads to dumb things like the aforementioned teeny tiny ephemeral lower left collapsed menu after an action or the mystery meat drop downs full of options yet the different tabs of obvious modes but then Layout having animation in it while Animation has...animation in it?

Despite all that (and many more) there really isn't anything out there that does what Blender does. I don't think there's even a commercial product that has everything in one program like Blender (correct me if I'm wrong). Now we could debate if that's a good thing or not but I see Blender as a way for the average person to explore many artistic experiences in one place...after they suffer through learning the clearly undesigned near hostile UI.

Which brings me to why I find Blender's UI to be so frustrating. All of these things are clearly obvious if you just watch a single person try to use it, but the OG users are so far removed from the beginner experience that nobody ever mentions it. Or worse, they defend these design decisions. I really believe that if the Blender Project spent some time watch the potentially thousands and thousands of users working with Blender live they could walk away with great insights into its usability.

In summary, it's great that Blender exists but it's pretty obvious it's really not made for anyone who uses it. I'd say it's a very old advanced passion project by Blender Studio for Blender Studio. That's fine, it's their thing, but don't pretend that it's some great gift to the masses and instead think of it as borrowing someone else's car. It will get you from point A to point B but the seats are all wrong, it drives weird, and it kind of smells.

Then really ask yourself: Is Blender the right tool? I feel like Blender is the TypeScript of 3D modeling software. Everyone wants to learn it because they see everyone else saying to learn it, but really most people only need plain old JavaScript. You should really only learn Blender if you can't find another simpler tool for the kind of art you have in mind.

Blender Alternatives

Take a look at the kind of 3D art you enjoy and want to make. Do you like Minecraft and Voxel games? Are you into low-poly jank horror games? Do you have an artistic vision of pixelated dungeons and amazing simplified color palettes? Do you love Quake? All of these things are more difficult in Blender, but these alternatives will do them much better:

Blockbench

If you're just starting out then almost everything you're going to attempt in Blender is probably better done in Blockbench. Blockbench has nearly the same tools but a far simpler UI and more direct support for using images as UV textures. It originally started as something for Minecraft only but it can now be used to model most low to meidum poly models, which is mostly what you want to focus on.

Wings3D

Wings3D has been around forever and can model all the same things as Blender, but with a far simpler UI. It's is fairly obscure but has modeling, UV mapping, materials, but far simpler.

Nomad Sculpt

Blender's sculpting is weird. It's less of a "sculpting tool" and more of a "vertex modification tool." Nomad Sculpt has a similar model but it just seems to do it better in many ways.

Crocotile3D

If Low-Poly tiles is your thing, but you want to do 3D, then Crocotile3d is probably what you want. It has many very nice UI features like a little crocodile in the left corner that shows you the orientation of your camera. My only warning is if you go through the written tutorial then it has you doing triangle vertex manipulation which is not Crocotile's strength. Stick to blocky tiles only and it's great. I'd say Crocotile3D is very good at doing tile based 3D environments, and less better for making 3D models. For models look at Blockbench.

TrenchBroom

TrenchBroom is very specifically for the Quake, Half-Life, and Hexen genre of games, but if you want to play around with level design and environments then it's a very easy to use program.

Anvil

Anvil is an Add-On for Blender that gives TrenchBroom style level design tools. It's really easy to use compared to raw blender for level design.

FreeCAD

I won't say FreeCAD is "easy", but if what you need to do is hard surface technical modeling then Blender is really not good compared to FreeCAD.

When to Choose Blender

I'd say Blender is best if you see yourself doing a range of art styles and you need a variety of tools. For example, if you're doing low-poly work but you need to apply materials and shaders to get a specific look, then Blender is going to have the capabilities you'll need.

Another reason to start learning Blender is if you want a single place to explore 3D art. Blender does really have nearly everything you'd need to learn from modeling to compositing to animation to video. You could spend the next few years learning these with Blender and have a great time doing it.

Blender Videos

Here's my latest Blender video showing my progress. This is pretty old but you can see where I'm coming from:

Learning Blender: Day 2

This is Day 2, so I'm behind by 23 days in my editing schedule. This one I take an ambitious leap and model a Moka Pot in about 2 hours. By professional standards that's probably 1.8 hours too long.

Painting Videos

And some more Painting videos for you. I'm really behind getting these out so expect a bunch more emails while I try to get them into your inbox for later.

Drinks Bottle Series: 3 Drink Bottles

I started a series of pastel paintings of "drinks." This is the first one of four panels. What I did was take a failed pastel, melt out the paint to reuse the paper, then divided it into 4 so I can do small studies.

Drinks Bottle Series: 2 Sods Cans

Continuing the series, this is two fun to paint soda cans.

Drinks Bottle Series: Creme Soda

This one I try a different technique with the pastels that involves many crosshatches of colors to build up the pastel. It's a tricky technique that can have great results, but it's kind of something that works more with people's eye than with a camera.

Charcoal Drawing a Hat

I always have to work on my drawing, and when I feel like I need to work on my skill I do a charcoal drawing. I also talk about a terrible art teacher at the end.

Thanks Again

Thanks again for your time, and hopefully the email helps you out.

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