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.

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.

Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.

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.

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.

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.

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?

That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.

But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.

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.

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.

There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.

Role model FOSS project for sure.

Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D.

They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives.

Open source; can win!

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.

I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.

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.

Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.

THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.

After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.

(edit: stick to points rather than rave on)

It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).

The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.

Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.

Tiny Eye: Free Procedural eyes

Sanctus Library: Procedural Materials

Auto-Rig Pro: UE asset export

Blob Fusion: similar to zbrush

Flip Fluids: Better fluid sim

Scribble Gen: cobwebs, wires, fire, and cables

FaceIt: iPhone Pro Lidar camera used with UE5 face motion capture (works better than most industry products.)

Also, there are many great courses that save the pain of learning the goofy workflows on your own. =3

I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)

By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.

Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)

Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit.

Damn that's a cool program.

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.

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 is also free. =3

I remember people saying this in 2004.

Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)

There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".

I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.

I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.

As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.

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!

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.

The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html

In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is.

With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.

I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.

https://www.blender.org/lab/mcp-server/

My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.

It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.

Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)

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

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.

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

Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.

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.

So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.

>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

Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.

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.

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.

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.

I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.

I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.

I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.

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.

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.

Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.

> 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.

We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.

Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3

https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender

OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3

I don't remember the last time I used a software package as smooth and clean and tidy as C4D.

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.

After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)

The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3

Those aren't really bad assumptions.

I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.

Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.

https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/

LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3

https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos

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.

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.