Blender

In my search for a good 3D Modelling program that won't break the bank, I finally decided to try out Blender. Gmax, while functional with .3ds files, had terrible performance, input lag, and I could just feel the limitations of the program taunting me.

For a test run, I grabbed the 64bit version of Blender (32bit version appears to be required if I want to use NIF tools). Download, extract, run. Pretty simple. I changed the color scheme to this nice Black and Blue theme and thought "Sweet. Let's get started." That's when it all went downhill.

First, my AV software was blocking keyboard input to Blender. Apparently, it's hard to use without a keyboard. With that fixed, I moved on to importing the Sentinel Armor mesh. Aside from warping a mesh I wasn't using, the entire scene loaded without a hitch. Well, everything I had hidden was visible, but I could hide it all later (right?).

Navigation in the viewport was weird. Middle-click was orbit and Shift-Middle click, pan. Okay. Go to the User Preferences, take a gander at the input tab and, what do you know? 3ds Max, Blender, and Maya presets. Sweet. I selected the 3ds Max input preset, hit save, went back into the viewport and...nothing. Still using Blender's inputs. Keyboard shortcuts I'm used to didn't work. Fine. I'll just edit the WHY ARE THERE 10 SHORTCUT ENTRIES FOR EACH ACTION?!

Simple input snafus remedied, I turned my attention back to interacting with my meshes. Left clicking on the Sentinel Armor's translation axis helpers parented it to my cursor's movement until I left clicked again instead of moving along the axis I wanted. Weird, but okay. Right clicking on it, instead of opening a menu like in Maya, 3ds Max, XSI, XSI Mod Tool, and Gmax, placed this weird little circle wherever I clicked. I still have no idea what it is.

Okay, back to basics. Single left-click selected the mesh. Awesome! Now, how do I select a bone component to see if skin weights carried over? Ah, scene tree. I drilled down to a thigh bone and upon clicking it...nothing happened. I still had the entire skeleton selected. Clicking and dragging on it only parented the skeleton to my mouse. But, moving the bones around moved the mesh, so mission accomplished. Hitting ctrl+z placed the bones back, but then parented them to my mouse only on the Z-axis. I had to hit Escape a few times before it let go.

Things I stumbled across afterward:

• Hovering over menu items produces a tooltip with the python function called and obscures other items. Not a big issue. Just move the mouse and it'll go away, right? Wrong. Also, moving the mouse too far from a context menu closes it. Great.
• Every window and panel can become any other window or panel.
• Dragging resize handles on panels creates a duplicate of the panel with no apparent way to undo or delete it. 
• Any clicks on the name of the viewport you are in don't do anything (like, say, opening a menu to change the view or display options like wireframe mode).
• The program doesn't remember it's "restored" window size if you close it full screen. Instead, it opens "almost" fullscreen. So, a bordered fullscreen window.

How in the world is allowing this okay?

It's a pretty program, but the interface is all wrong.

I've seen what people have done in Blender, so there's no doubt in my mind that it is a powerful program. But presenting a user with every option upfront without giving them a chance to adjust or figure out the basics seems wrong to me. Especially with such a flexible interface. I screwed up the UI by accident and had no idea how to fix it (duplicated panels left and right). Hence the image above.

I looked into making Blender behave more like 3ds Max, but most of what I found consisted of "Why would you want to do that? Just get used to it." So, I'm going to have to make every tweak needed to create a facsimile of a familiar 3d modelling environment. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Getting into the guts of the UI will probably help me understand it.

I came in expecting a fairly simple interface that, with some minor adjustments to my flow, would behave similarly enough to what I'd used before so I could at least continue with a project (like when I moved from the XSI Mod Tool to 3ds Max). I was incorrect.

Since there doesn't appear to be any other free, fully featured, 3D Modelling programs, I'm left with a couple choices. Save up for 3ds Max (and hope my plugins work) or start from scratch in Blender. Lovely.