That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.
Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.
There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.
I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.
a) Having lots of options
b) Making those options discoverable for beginners
is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.
So it’s
1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.
2) where that tool is and how it works
Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.
Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.
Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.
Then, in the next release, they move.
Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.
Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.
You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.
Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.
But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines
The problem is it's someone else's very messy kitchen where nothing is where you expect it to be.
It matters where things are. Photoshop vs Fireworks, CAD vs Sketch-Up.
The problem with this software is that you can't make it yours when you enter it.
I think AI will solve this, by searching where the utensils are and putting them where it is convenient for you specifically.
I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.
I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.
Meanwhile, I can't get anything substantially done in Blender in a week. I just gave up.
Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.
I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.
It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.
Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?
It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.
That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.
I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?
If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.
What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.
I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.
And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.
It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.
Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?
Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?
But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.
I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.
Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].
I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.
[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates
Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.
There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.
Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:
Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/
Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...
Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.
It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client?
I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.
but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference
It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.
Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.
That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.
It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.
The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.
And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.
Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
> Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
Because Fusion 360 is that much better than even the latest Freecad? Just because Freecad sucks less nowadays doesn't mean that Fusion 360 isn't simply a better product... Freecad 1.0 was too little too late. The only way it could gain traction in the hobby market is if Fusion 360 pulls the plug on its free version (again). And I say all this as a Freecad user.
And also such a deliberate ploy to try and undercut competition, which sadly has been working unreasonable well. Even after onshape shafted everyone which should have highlighted the obvious risks.
Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.
A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.
Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.
Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).
They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.
Those aren't really bad assumptions.
Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.
As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the...
They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that.
Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.
I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.
The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.
But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!
CAD: MoI (cool kids nowadays use Plasticity, but that is taking on similar feature creep - in any case I own and use both)
SubD modelling: nothing has ever beat Silo. And silo still gets updates, but the workflow is the same. Cheetah3D is also in the same boat.
Rendering (I do products, not character/CGI): Maverick. Fastest path tracer in the world, perpetual license, rivals Vray for product viz. if you’re currently using Keyshot - switch now.
Texturing: 3Dcoat or Marmoset Toolbag 5
What most of these have in common is either the workflow is super intuitive, or you have at least 15 years of training material readily accessible that still applies to the software today as it did back then.
Overall it’s a choice between a kitchen sink pipeline (Blender, Rhino) vs a specialised one. If I were to teach again, I would still use Blender in the classroom, and I fully support the project. My brain just works better with smaller, focussed tools.
It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!
The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.
A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
>it was a friend's license
>didn't pay for a copy of Blender
just for the record, everyone can download, for free, Blender from https://www.blender.org/download/ for Win, MacOS or Linux
Thats exactly what they do. They dont charge at all even if they do make loads of money.
That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.
I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.
Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.
Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.
Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.
And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.
For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.
I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.
Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.
I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.
That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.