Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/12/04/im-an-early-adopter-i-just-downloaded-blender-2-5-alpha/

Wow, it’s great to be an early adopter of a state-of-the-art 3D editing suite like Blender. I feel like I’m at the cutting edge, blazing a trail etc. Of course all I’m really doing is poking about with something I don’t completely understand and reporting back some first impressions.

First Impression 1. It’s as easy as pie to install, just do like it says on the download page…

unpack the compressed file to the location of your choice.  

Provided the Blender binary is in the original extracted directory, Blender will run straight out of the box. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

blender.org – Get 2.5 alpha.

First Impression 2. It looks good. The looks of the interface have always been a little functional and basic with Blender (some go as far as to say it isn’t intuitive), and an awful lot of people have listed this as their number one turn off when it comes to getting to grips with this complex and powerful 3D application.

But it actually starts with a 3D scene now! All the old tutorials always used to start explaining what you were looking at when you opened Blender – it was actually a 3D cube seen from above, but it looked more like a sheet of graph paper with a dark bit in the middle. Now that isn’t necessary, it’s obvious at first glance that this app is about 3D.

First Impression 3. The first thing I tried to do was select a face of the default mesh I was presented with at start up. As an experienced user I knew to hit the tab key and click with the wrong button on the face. I’m pretty sure that this idiosyncratic way of working is, as ever, going to be the biggest hurdle for new users. I couldn’t immediately see any new simpler-to-figure-out (i.e. intuitive) way of doing this. But I don’t want to sound too negative. This counterintuitive way of working is rally quick to learn, way less than a day, and most Blender users come to understand why it has to be this way and even like it.

First Impression 4. Next I deleted the face. Now here there has been a huge improvement in the interface. The tool I needed was right there on the screen, and it was very intuitive to use.

I’ve had the this great 3D editing, animation, rendering, you name it it does it suite on my hard drive for only a few minutes and it has already convinced me that great strides have been taken compared to the earlier versions.

More first impressions to come, I’m excited to get to grips with this new revamp of a classic elder statesman of CGI and I’ll probably be having fun and making discoveries long into the night.