How to Improve Blender's UI - Andrew Price - Blender Conference 2024

[@unthinkabilities]

we absolutely, direly, need that "when in doubt, apply scale" shirt

[@trauma2980]

Where is this t shirt 😂😭😭

[@raulgalets]

true

[@manuel.7461]

Yupp

[@Sirbozo]

ae

[@FifthOfNovember_Original]

Same. I'm here ready to throw money at a general direction, but which, I dunno, because the rotation is not applied.

[@MikeComicBook]

The “history list” is an absolutely brilliant bit. All of these would be welcome.

[@lynrayy]

Also, imagine you found some action in this list, clicking on it and blender does UNDO until this action happend

[@ZtereoHYPE]

Honestly the info tab alone is such a great idea, it would've helped me so many times. However the other ideas are also pretty good

[@maxrinehart4177]

as a junior developer, I am used to look at [log info] window, which works as history window that register every activity done by me, good to remember what actions I have done in past sessions or even the current (long) session. if you are artist, it's like the history tab in photoshop.

[@thesral96]

I'd love have a text in the viewport that shows the actual action just performed when using a shortcut, similar to the Screencast-Keys add-on but for actions, with the text exponentially fading out and stacking for fast subsequent actions.

[@mangomastani9847]

Two words - YES PLEASE. Add these ideas

[@issonkiporto]

It's actually five words

[@twitte0king]

Would everyone stop regarding Andrew as some authority? The guy made some good free tutorials on KZbin like 12 years ago, they helped me a lot yes, buts it’s a lifetime ago. He has stop being an artist for a decade, he is just a washed up businessman who only wants to mutate blender into a easily teachable tool for his own profit to sell classes and addons. His UI ideas 11 years ago was full of shit too. He doesn’t care about blender being a faster better tool, he only want to make it more pimpable!

[@mangomastani9847]

@@twitte0king I don't get why you're so fired up by my comment but disregarding who was in the video (be it Andrew or someone else), as a blender professional I really consider these suggestions as "good enough to implemend". I never said I praised Andrew and you shouldn't just hate everything he says just because you hate him. Be rational.

[@isthatatree]

@@issonkiporto steve nash and chris paul must see tv

[@midorifox]

​​@@twitte0kingagreed. He's turned into a crypto bro now, his newsletters is now all crypto and ai slop rather than 3D and Blender. Also mango, if you were to read the other comments you'd see the amount of suckingoff that's incredible.

[@Achelon]

I have been teaching Blender for 5 years in a vocational school, that Diagnostic thing is absolutetly needed. One thing also is figuring out why a texture painted image suddenly is black

[@Achelon]

There has literally been many days where I just go from user to user and help them apply scale and find flipped normals

[@GadgetGearshift680]

If you delete texture image from folder it's going to be show black

[@Achelon]

@@GadgetGearshift680 nah, the problem is when you create a texture and start painting it and you don't save it and undo something else it might undo your whole painting progress from the image in memory

[@russianotter]

I think this really nails a specific problem Blender has - the "wtf is happening right now" moment. No matter how much Blender I learn, I inevitably click or hit something that lands me in no-man's land of "wtf is happening rn" and it takes half an hour to find the one odd button that does it.

[@ObscureHedgehog]

Andrew Price is always so entertaining to watch! Such an incredible talk! The shortcut list on the left, like how it is in Houdini, would be a great!

[@DimosasQuest]

I used to work as an UX designer, though not anymore, i 100% agree with this. Blenders UI has come a long way, but it could use a lot of QoL features to make it so much more approachable.

[@0CalAgricola]

Having a running log info of what keys were hit and did something, and the ability to find and delete that step sounds great!

[@RyanKingArt]

Great ideas!

[@spankler]

From a King to a king. Love both of these guys, helped me immensely in my Blender journey.

[@blenderguru]

Thanks :)

[@BoyFromNyYT]

@@blenderguruthanks for making the vids u guys make… I’m seventeen and idk why but making animations is just so fun… also I’m still new.. but as of now, what view transform should I be using… I use agx and open exr as of now

[@GreatFootage8]

Hey @RyanKingArt waiting for you to show up in the blender talk in the future 🔥

[@somensaikhom4088]

❤❤❤a lots of thanks our sir/teacher 🎉​@@blenderguru

[@notDreadful]

it's insane how amazingly simple these ideas are, and the difference in usage is gigantic! Sooo good

[@JaredOwen]

When Andrew Price suggestions for blender - we listen! Thank you for a great talk

[@pauljarvis5384]

The introduction of 2.8 from 2.79 was a real turning water to wine moment

[@evindrews]

'when in doubt, apply scale' is brilliant

[@banksy2100]

The BEST talk so far. UI/UX is the biggest headwind for new users. And biggest productivity killer for all. (Yes I donated, I can complain 😄)

[@MESAISTUDIO]

Good point. It’s no exaggeration to say that Blender starts and ends with shortcuts. Sometimes, it’s hard to even know where in the menu these shortcut commands are located. This is because most tutorials on KZbin only explain the shortcuts. For beginners starting with Blender, this is a real struggle, as it basically just emphasizes memorization.

[@jendabekCZ]

Hit F3 and type the action you want to perform, you will see the shortcut on the right side. In my opinion they should have kept Spacebar from Blender 2.79 keymap for this very basic feature ...

[@RomboutVersluijs]

What do you mean? If you open a menu, each operator shows a letter to use a shortcut. Then there are tons of shortcuts to opne menus in the viewport and all over the app. Each function is always highlighter by a character. What do you mean by "sometimes, it hard to even know where in the menu the shortcut command are located". Because that's what is highlighter, you see a letter having an underscore. That mean that command uses that character.

[@Owl_of_Whimsy]

one thing I would love to see ui wise is a little icon or some text on nodes that specifically states whether that node works in eevee, cycles or both, can even be a mouseover tooltip

[@TheBigNegative-PhotoChannel]

I bet the growth of Blender would explode overnight if there were a Max Vray/Corona to Blender converter that could natively translate the model and materials.

[@nathanphillips7787]

The feedback and indication of what key was just clicked would save sooo much time!

Just install the Screencast Keys extension, and you'll have it. No need to wait.

[@nathanphillips7787]

I must have done something wrong because I couldn't get it to work yet.

[@dwon7781]

For the face orientation issue. Under Preferences>themes>3D Viewport change the alpha setting for the Face Orientation Front(Blue) to 0. Then toggle on Face Orientation in the viewport all flipped normals will appear in red. It s a quick fix for now. Great presentation!

[@anonymousd5582]

This panel has been the most important one I've seen to date and it has so many future implications for the betterment of Blender as a whole, it could literally be its own topic to write a book about. Thank you Andrew for bringing it to the stage 👍

[@KevinCBurke]

This was a brave and important talk to give. Andrew explained the issues so clearly and proposed solutions. It's really hard to get Blender to change its user experience...I hope it works! Well done, Andrew, and kudos to Blender for encouraging him to express his concerns! (Didn't love the Ton impression. He can be difficult but I'm sure sensitive about that)

[@ExpensivePizza]

16:33 This talk, especially this slide, is a great lesson for developing any software (or any product at all). The little things matter a lot.

[@DrTheRich]

True, but also, you can't please everyone... That's great why there is multiple competing software's and people can find what works for them. The most comment I've heard from people who gave up is "there is too many options" Most people would rather have a single "make exactly what I want and make it look awesome, so I don't actually need patience and skill and learn to fail or waste any time and I can make lots of money" button. I guess what I'm saying is, don't use that slide as a guideline for developing software by thinking that whole red "people who gave up" part should be green. Always do a cost benefit analysis, does it make this better, but what does it make worse.

[@ExpensivePizza]

@@DrTheRich I see your point but that's not really what I'm saying at all. I would never expect to capture the entire market. My point simply that the little things often matter more than most people realize. As a software developer myself, I've seen first hand how making some small tweaks and adding a little polish is often more valuable to customers than creating another half baked feature they didn't ask for. To be fair, I'm not saying it should be entirely one way or the other. I'm just saying that the little things are often overlooked.

[@SkiBeeTeaTap]

On the other hand we dont need more people in 3d. its a oversaturated industry.

[@DrTheRich]

@@SkiBeeTeaTap well yeah, it allows people from places like India and China with more time than money to sell their work in the richer west without having to move there and increase living expenses. I think that trend will be growing regardless as remote technologie increases. I dont think its a good reason to stop developing and improving a software

[@DrTheRich]

@@ExpensivePizza Ah ok Yeah great point. Especially open source software has this issue of a lack of polish. Since most volunteer developers want the fun of creating new features, not the tedious task of refining and optimizing them. Blender having a big fund pool definitely helps with this. Commercial software has to sell, so it needs to look neat or work properly on some level to convince people to buy. (Unless your Adobe and you leave people with little choice)

[@MrMinh3D-v8n]

Loved this video, I was thinking I was the only one making mistakes and turning my cursor into a circle 😂

[@ninjadodovideos]

This would be much clearer if the circle cursor was visible constantly when in this mode even without manipulating anything, so you can immediately see you've switched modes when your press O. Proportional Editing should be treated like a brush tool with a simple slider at the top of the screen for changing the radius just like any paint mode. Imo it should also be renamed "Soft Selection" for clarity (Proportional Edit might be an _accurate_ name but it's not exactly self-explanatory).

[@PRINTORO]

Making blender more intuitive and convenient will make absolute wonders for ease of learning for beginners and speed up the development and process for all users

[@RolandJVyens]

The real problem with H, is the hide action is not reversible. You should press H to switch hide/show state for selected things, that's something much intuitive.

[@LMHPOLY]

CTRL+Z works to undo the action(unhide at this point), like for most of the actions in Blender. You pressed something, and something is gone, or happens what you don't want, press CTRL+Z to undo. Works for most of it, but not for all the things.

[@dynamic5109]

Use numpad / instead. This will isolate objects and pressing again un-isolate without unhiding other hidden objects

[@Sidiusz_]

@@dynamic5109 use numpad IF you have the numpad

[@True-VFX]

Alt+H is “unhide”

[@RolandJVyens]

@@True-VFX every other software uses toggle logic on the H button, alt+H will unhide all things in a scene though

[@Glowbox3D]

I just wanna say the UI change to 2.8 was really the reason I made the switch and never looked back.

[@ThePlacehole]

It's annoying, but a lot better than it used to be. What has not changed are all the insane workflows. Every step in getting a model animated and textured requires you to know some 20 step secret blender handshake.

[@thenodecamp]

The GOAT of shortcuts in blender is that you can add to quick favorites almost anything and you can just Q>Click option, and when pressing Q again it automatically hoovers the menu on the mouse cursor for the last selected option. I used this since the first day I launched blender.

[@ivan-_-8577]

How to improve the user interface? You have tabs on the right sidebar with VERTICAL labels. In version 1.6, these tabs were placed on a horizontal panel and were easy to read. You could add icons and tooltips for them. You could make them horizontal or allow users to position them horizontally. You could also stack them on top of each other - any option would be better than what we have now, especially when more than five add-ons are active, and the tabs compress to the point where it’s impossible to read them without twisting your neck. Also, we’d love to see some development of the particle system. Thank you. We love you very much. 😊

[@Swier3D]

I've been around long enough to remember Andrew getting grilled for suggesting UI changes back in the day. Ultimately he was right all along.

[@M_Lopez_3D_Artist]

i remember that conference too, he came off a bit arrogant back then, im sure he would admit that too.

[@blenderguru]

@@M_Lopez_3D_Artist Yup. And my proposal wasn't great then either 😅

[@lambiance3246]

​ @blenderguru if you only had worked in a studio or a team with other experienced blenderheads for a mid size project...you'll have real credibility. But you still roam in the small scale of things, the small user, and we don't see that changing? Your audience has been always the beginners. Blender aims to make people smarter and wiser, dumbifying blender for the sake of the beginner's ingenuity does not help anyone, it only makes people unaware of what they are making and how it works. Yes they need to know what vertices, edges, tris, faces, normals, and how 3D works. Masking core functionalities won't make Blender a better tool.

[@testacals]

@@lambiance3246 Blender's goal is always to make creative process easier to access. That's the point of these UI changes

[@lambiance3246]

@@testacals You arrived to Blender only in the last 5 years it seems, maybe? that goal you mention is the last of the priorities.... For the last 20 years, it's goal is to be a very capable 3-x-D software, on any hardware or OS possible. It was never intended to be a kinder. If there where stats about this video, I will be certain that none of the real users ever watched this video, only frustrated newbies 'that want to learn 3d' and think they know better than the people that made the software...

[@tectix0]

I use astute graphics for Adobe illustrator and they have one tool that cleans up the whole project for you. It does things like removing double vertices removes things that are out of bounds or are invisible. Blender needs something like that just one cleanup tool where you can check all the boxes that you wanted to clean up and it just cleans up double vertices flipped normals and etc. Like the tool Andrew showed, but with the button that fixes those issues All these ideas are great by the way! Excellent job as usual Andrew

[@Cassius1957]

Spot on, Andrew! As a beginner I messed up lots of times without knowing how. Applying scale is the first thing I check now😁.

[@BarrettSmithBB]

11:34 there is an add-on for it. It's called Screencast keys and it's built into default Blender. I use that not just when I am streaming but when I am working by myself, because it gives me a history of my button presses. For as much as I make a mistake hitting the wrong key, I do enjoy understanding the legacy of *why* it came to be that way. With that said, I do think it's important to look back on why hotkeys came to be the way they are, but understand if it still makes sense in the current workflow, or if it has become redundant.

[@pseudorealm]

Thanks so much Andrew! Your work is greatly appreciated.

[@CGObaid]

These are some really great points and suggestions I did not even think of. The amount of problems that occur in Blender because of not having applied the scale is just unbelievable :D

[@scottesplin4426]

Great ideas from Andrew. Remember Blender was an in house app, UI came after functionality. I struggled getting into it for years. V2.8 was soo needed. Now with its global success some areas maybe need to catch up. Blenders open endedness may have caused confusing nuances, but because it is versatile it can be changed, customised, fixed. Ive just started scratching the surface of scripts and addons and now realise how indebted we are to Team Blender 👍

[@generalfishcake]

3DSMax's material editor was essentially an asset browser with settings, but it was sure great for new users

[@michaelmarvin1354]

these are some good arguments, just hope the devs look into them and probably do something.

[@nosirve9458]

Didn't you listen to the talk? The devs are trying, but they lack more people. They know they need to improve some things, but 1 guy can't work as 5.

[@blenderguru]

They're really receptive to these ideas. We'll talk more post conference once I submit the design docs. But honestly they just need good people and more money to grow the team. Hopefully they can grow the devfund contributions.

[@Taumisch]

That impersonation of Ton was really on point, Kudos to Andrew !

[@mrdol]

thanks Andrew, this was really good. Even thought I find Blenders UI pretty good (especially when compared to an abomination of Zbrush for example), there's def. always room for improvement. I think Blenders UX/UI team deserves some recognition and praise for what they've done already! keep it up.

[@joos3D]

ZBrush has extremely powerful UI customization though. Once you have things set up the way you want you can have quick access to everything you could need for 99% of purposes, and you can make custom palettes that you can bind to hotkeys if you don’t want everything showing all the time, or prefer working in fullscreen. Blender has its strengths like hotkeys for everything and some features that I wish literally every application had (input fields are AMAZING), but it’s also annoying that you you constantly have to go back and forth between tabs in different palettes to do basic things. But I can admit that some parts of ZBrush I just refuse to learn because of the convolutedness and that’s rarely true for Blender.

[@StevenWhite-w6p]

I definitely agree that transform values should be placed near the object that's receiving the transforms rather than in the corner of the screen. I also am not opposed to having more diagnostic tools in the UI for the viewport.

[@JaridMitchell]

Every now & then I do some ui design for work & 9/10 my starting thought process is “okay lets make it look like blender” 😂. I love the way the ui has transformed over the years

[@lajawi.]

Absolutely! I'm using other software like Unity and Photoshop, and more often than I'd like to admit, I think to myself, this would be so much more userfriendly if it had Blender's UI.

[@brenny77]

The info tab reminds me of Photoshop’s history panel. When I was new to PS that panel was a lifesaver, and though I don’t use it anymore I would have it perma locked in on blender if it showed things like Andrew’s suggestions (action taken, keyboard shortcut for action, potential constraints imposed on the action). In my few years of using blender it would have saved me days and days of troubleshooting.

[@DJPastaYaY]

Amazing ideas. This would be super helpful and especially for beginners!

[@MAIRENASEV]

Thank you, Andrew. As always, a pleasure to attend your lectures

[@energiesgraphiques]

As a teacher, I confirm a lot of beginner issues come back to 'I pressed a key and something went wrong' and the 'apply scale' problem. A improved 'info/screencast' overlay would be great!

[@ninjadodovideos]

Also I think a lot of problems are down to some legacy defaults being very confusing like pivot being set to Median point instead of Individual Origins (so when you multi select a hierarchy and rotate, each part does not rotate individually as you would expect) or the fact that Only Show Selected Curve Keyframes is not on by default etc.

[@Clyman974]

On the topic, when you start to have lots objects in your scene that'd be great to have Blender tell you if what's in the viewport will be rendered or not. Maybe a color highlight in the Outliner for objects having a discrepancy between "Viewport Visible" and "Render Visible". I wish I could make the add-on if I knew how to code!

[@lajawi.]

There's the two buttons in the outliner telling you whether it will be visible in render/viewport.

[@Clyman974]

@@lajawi. I know, but when you've got hundreds of objects it's really easy to miss which one is checked or not

[@zeppie_]

Great point on the accidental shortcuts. I think that another method of 'obscuring' could be to hide it in a menu, like M for merge currently gives you a pop-up menu with three options, the same could be done for H, even if it's just one option (hide). Putting things in pop-ups also helps with learning shortcuts, if you see that shift+H is hide and alt+H is unhide you immediately know that. The info window being there by default instead of the timeline is definitely a good addition for new users

[@TheMetalFreshTiger]

EVERYTHING you proposed is GOLD!!! It would be a TRUE game changing for blender

[@cessers]

You got me, Andrew. I am now, finally, a contributor. Well done, sir.

[@MrMistArt]

The best moment of the show when Riddler cames out "What can it be?" I just LMO was very funny. I've started from 2.79 and yeah it often confusing especially for new users. but great talk! We will wait till Updates came out.

[@RenderingUser]

If i were to add one more suggestion.... pls make the theme editor easy to use so many repeated input of the exact same color even tho theres only a few main colors for most of the ui. changing every same color by hand took so long

[@DECODEDVFX]

Yes! Finding the right function to alter is a nightmare. It shouldn't be so hard to set a shortcut.

[@dokerb3d60]

"only location" feature is very useful. you can align object positions along axes or place them at the same place by scale 0, swap objects by scale -1, quickly disassemble a composite object to get a quick view of the parts, distribute objects along circle without affecting rotation like bolts around pipe or something else, and probably some other use cases that don’t come to mind at the moment.

[@Burrie81]

I have to say that I’ve tried to attempt to learn blender several times over the years and much of what Andrew talks about here is what has stopped any momentum I ever had and I’ve never got around to getting very far at all

[@Norman_Peterson]

LOL I've been following blender for 8 years. I go back to watch a video, and find Price talking about how to implement blender UI. EXACTLY like ages ago. Nothing changed.

[@ajtatosmano2]

Ask the question, why C4D crushes the UI category? It's because everything is accessible throught icons and menus. The toolbar. Honestly, I love blender's shortcuts, BUT: we should have a better mouse based experience. I would suggest multiple, reworked and extended toolbars, which could be enabled or disabled is the settings.

[@adamskiba5425]

It’s wonderful that someone finally addressed this topic. I think everyone intuitively feels that Blender’s interface is a real pain. At the beginning, Andrew beautifully illustrated the differences between various 3D programs, clearly showing that it all comes down to the learning curve. He even shows an infographic at the end with the number of people who drop out of the Blender learning process and ultimately don’t become its users. The problem is that in the middle part of the lecture, Andrew focuses on what personally bothers him rather than on the main issue - "Why is Blender so hard to learn?" And in my opinion, this is the fundamental question we should be asking before we take even the smallest next step. We need some qualitative research instead of quantitive first. I promise: I will contribute, but let UX'ers do their job, but dont push us to do it in the Developers manner ;)

[@djk1288]

I think showing us his personal projects that contained those problems was less of just showing "what bothers him specifically" and more-so providing concrete examples of problems that occur from the fundamental issues he was talking about - said issues then leading the many other users he's seen, surveyed and assisted to the specific problems _they_ run into down the line.

[@gabrielmoro3d]

It’s crazy the 1-9 for collection is still there. Changed mine to views ages ago

[@Sonario648]

Same. 1 - 9 for the views is so much better since I don't have a numpad.

[@visnevskiscom]

No, it's crazy it isn't adapted to what it used to do properly - quick layer/visibility juggling with keyboard was an amazing time and effort saver, well worth the accidental misuse. It still could return, just needs some usability overhaul.

[@Sonario648]

@@visnevskiscom Not when you don't have a numpad. The viewpoints are better suited for the standard number keys while collection visibility can get pushed off to a modifier key combo.

[@Psrj-ad]

the key-binds section was all too relatable. one thing to help with keybinds would be a better key-bind menu. For the first time, i'm gonna actually ask Blender to adopt something from Maya. And that's the Key-bind menu from Maya, along with its keyboard graphic highlighting the bound keys, including modified keybinds such as "Shift + Ctrl...etc"

[@Cosmic-books]

I like the info box concept, especially if you can modify (undo) specific actions without deleting everything leading up to the mistake.

[@agyab3d]

thanks Andrew for pointing out these issues / problems

[@Quantumspace23]

Just made a donation after this inspired talk to help improve the essential basics.

[@jeffdavies2824]

Briliant. I've been suffering these issues for years and it never occured to me that they could be addresseed in the UI!

[@CGObaid]

15:19 Andrew Price being kicked out right after the talk ends🤣 That's why he chose to give the presentation at the last day of BCON. I'm joking, don't get serious guys =D

[@AnthonyHortin]

Some really great ideas in this talk. That info box suggestion would be a game changer!

[@dexterdexter7923]

For anyone that doesn't know: You can turn on Opacity on Face Orientation(correct one) and you'll see in red only faces in the wrong direction without blue color on correct ones It's in Viewport color settings :)

[@Knyazev32]

There is a very simple solution - If the user does something "unusual", a window should appear confirming his action, for example "Press Enter if OK"

[@BobLoblawzha]

As a UX designer of 20 years I can say that Blender misses some basic UX principles that makes it really hard to learn.

[@human4566vv]

Help themi guess

[@jutube821]

Then you can contribute (as much or as little as you can). It's an open source project. I can make the same exact statement you did with 0 years of experience in UX design, it's pointless.

[@MichaelJosephGFX]

Great presentation! The auto-normals/overlapping faces/scale feature would be incredible

[@gondola9515]

It still pisses me off that we don't have stacked view for curves in the graph editor, only because some dude five years ago decided that animators could "just hide the curves they didn't want to see." This is such a must-have feature for animators...

[@lambiance3246]

What do you mean by stacked curves? Your curves viewport should be pretty flexible to show you exactly what you need, you only have to set up a tab with the interface you need. But 4.3 is bringing animation blocks changes if that is what you mean

[@tedzards509]

I didnt even know it but this was exactly my problem with Blender when I tried learning it. Great analysis and presentation.

[@wild1000022]

Yes, please! These features sound great. As a Blender noob, it really slows down the progress of learning.

[@mepi-pl-pf4cp]

Brilliant talk from Andrew !

[@BartMassee]

brilliant as always. (ps Rhinoceros has that info box, and I always check what happened in there, its handy!) Andrew, thanks for pushing this forward in briliant Blender !!

[@Ashandle]

This one is the best part of whole show that actually talk directly with Blender users. Im a newbie Blender user and im also complain about most of Andrew's suggestion every time when i launch Blender. In most case everybody wants apply scale to 1 it must be default action, if you dont want you need to press 'apply modified scale' kinda options. And rotate angles on UI god you know how many times my eyes keeps turns to left corner and middle of the screen. Even i tried to find most of my problems solutions with some plugins but thats not helped my problems. Even i tried to learn how to write plugin :D Dev's please listen all of Andrew's suggestions, you'll gonna agreed with him eventualy.

[@magma5267]

These proposals are extremely useful! They should defo implement them

[@RadRoachHD-wl5bc]

Probably Andrews best talk

[@BlenderFrenzy]

I remember back in the day before 2.8 came along, you did a few mockups I really enjoyed back then as well. I like the way you think. These are good ideas and I hope they influence the future of Blender's UI for the better. Cheers!

[@whothewho82]

These are really great solutions and a GREAT way to keep people working through their insecurities on the platform. I was able to work through it but i had a lot of false starts that im still ashamed of.

[@Skillnoob_]

I love these ideas. May need a bit of change to fit blender more, but in general they are awesome and I especially like the the shortcut tab. Maybe make it a smaller square-ish area at the bottom left/right so the timeline can still be the main thing there, but it just doesn't take up the entire bottom part anymore.

[@adamskiba5425]

Haha, That expression and Ton’s words : "Why does it matter"sound like a joke, but in fact, this way of thinking might be the main blocker for potential changes in UI. Lets make Blender for people who not necessarily understand what Python is talking to them.

[@TheFlyingEpergne]

I think the info tab along with a way to have the f3 command search bar visible at all times would be a good idea, so if someone is trying to do something, they can at least search for it there and contextually they may get there. This is present in Rhino, a CAD software, which in my opinion is very easy to learn as a result

[@pitched7401]

I use a modified version of the 2.7X keymap, so I'm fairly confident with what each shortcut does. However accidentally pressing the wrong combination and not knowing, if Ctrl + Z works on it, because there is no feedback has to be the most irritating thing. You know something may have been altered... Maybe it didn't and you just reverted an intended change with Ctrl + Z... Regardless, it's gonna bite you down the line xD Still Blender has the best approach to shortcuts I have ever seen, with an unmatched level of configuration. The way it's not just "hotkeys", but rather "which input links to which operator or context menu" makes awesome workflow optimization. Thanks for that Blender

[@TheVigore]

I honestly expected Andrew to propose something ridiculous, like let's copy the * software solutions. But surprisingly, I like his ideas this year

[@beachmobjellies]

Cinema4D has hands down the best shortcut system. The difference is that it has (and allows for custom) successive shortcut inputs. this allows to have a tree of possibilities to unfold after pressing one key. ie if you press "m" you enter the modelling tools and the next key specifies the tool. it also shows you all possible commands after the first key. it is very intuitive, you dont have to remember much and you can actively use more shortcuts without your brain memory running out. I so wish for blender to have this cause the current system makes me angy

[@paulchen9145]

6:00 great extension and easy fix to a significant problem! Looking forward to all the discussion and fundamental design descision surrounding these 4 simple checkboxes to take until summer 2025 and then the development timeline with 23 rounds of code review and the obligatory "lets wait for the complete overhaul of feature XYZ before we merge this in" will stretch this out so that we will finally be able to enjoy this awesome diagnostic shelf (that probably took the developer of this video a long afternoon to implement) in Blender 4.9 :)

[@anagoge]

Never used Blender, I'm just a graphic designer. From a UI perspective however, this was really interesting to watch. So many good points.

[@lambiance3246]

You are Andrew's audience. The ones that yet don't know why Blender is the way it is. Once you have worked in real projects, you realize that Blender's interface is phenomenal, considering the software's broad versatility. Of course it has to evolve and so it does, thanks to very wise and experienced coders. Mostly the ones that know why Blender is the way it is.

[@dzmigo2649]

i love Andrew ,I think his ideas for the info box 11:05 ! could greatly improve the Blender experience!

[@rocksquared]

What would truly help are tools that do not modify the geo when activated without asking me, just because I move my mouse. What I want is a tool that is in neutral gear when activated, then I chose what to do with it. We also would need a tool shelf like in Maya and Houdini to put our collection of favorite tools without having to remember the shortcuts. That also help for pipeline integration a lot! What would be great is an outliner that works like USD with xforms and scopes, with the root start at "/" and collections that should be primitives, matching geo through procedural patterns.

[@SSS333-AAA]

when in doubt apply scale, spoken like a person who has had blender ptsd. can relate. had a lighting issue i couldn't resolve in a scene, gave up on it. picked it up a week later to reuse a model and magically after doing some edits to it, the lighting stopped bugging. it turns out that due to my workflow, i managed to make everything scaled to like 20x20x0.001 or something like that, so when i fixed up the model and realized the scale it made me feel like an idiot. (mainly because i am, but you get my point.)

[@Benn25]

Those are extremely good ideas! and probably quite easy to implement. We need this!

[@breality7411]

Love all of this, great suggestions!

[@rededwards3479]

I was there at the 2.8 Change-over. Being new to Blender, It was a little confusing. I wasn't sure if the 2.8 "BUILD" was experimental or the new direction. Great software.

[@wheany]

One more thing I would like to add to "why is my shading wrong" checklist: clear custom split normals data. Spent a couple of hours pulling my hair out. Slept on it, then remembered that setting. Bam! Immediately my shading was fixed.

[@SonGoku-dm4gr]

I'm learning blender, and I'm surprised that these problems are so minor on DCC I'm coming from but seems to be a huge problem in blender. I've never heard double vertices/faces, flip normal in ages, only this time again. glad that Andrew had brought this up because I'm still learning blender and I have no idea that this is a problem in blender

[@jbdh6510]

Hotkeys in the sidebar are beautiful! Houdini also does it that way.

[@Purpial]

Really great ideas! I recently became the blender tutor at my school and there are viewport issues from students, some of which I can not solve... all the time.

[@annekedebruyn7797]

I actually agree with removing timeline on default workspace when there is a dedicated workspace for animation

[@midorifox]

Just edit it out and save it as a new default startup file then.

[@annekedebruyn7797]

@@midorifox It's not about advanced users, it's about the first thing new people see to help them.

[@midorifox]

@@annekedebruyn7797 if you think editing the ui is advanced, you've got another thing coming. Especially if you're new you should adapt to the tool, instead of it adapting to you when it already did.

[@annekedebruyn7797]

@@midorifox I am not saying it's an advanced feature. I am saying that the timeline in a lot of workspaces is useless (like the talk) and that it helps new people understanding their problems better in other workspaces when the console is default. No one on their first time opening blender is changing their default settings and making a save file. No one. Why clutter the UI with useless tools by default when it doesn't have to be like that? Blender was barely getting any traction until they started taking UI and usability seriously just as a reminder. Yes, users should learn a tool but that doesn't mean that as a developer, you should neglect usability. Especially if you want to grow in the professional world.

[@midorifox]

@@annekedebruyn7797 so, instead of having a good compromise between old and new users ui, you ask for just new ui that will eventually lead to more clutter and chaos than now. What a joke. it's useless to YOU, not to everyone. Once again, most of this speech is redundancy at best. Go look at 2.7 ui and see how much of a leap 2.8's ui is. I don't get where all of the "confusion" claims come from, I've tested it with people that never used blender before and they didn't really had much to say. All the "new users" claim are usually from disingenuous old users. You mention professionality, go check how terrible c4d and maya ui are.

[@SpencerMagnusson]

Info panel is a great idea. It also doesn't show everything that the user does; many non-Python operations aren't logged. Might be good to rename the Info panel to "Python log" or something like that, and have an Info area for non-Python stuff. But even if devs disagree or do something else, this is a perfect demonstration about the feedback issue. Beginners don't know what to look for, and advanced users don't get feedback of what they did wrong. Better UX leads to happier users.