A new Version of the Blender Fork Bforartists is available.
Bforartists Version 0.9.2 is around cleaning up the menus and connecting some loose ends. It adds some more tools to the toolbar editor. We have over 50 new icons. Again quite a few double menu entries were catched and removed. Some more tools made it into the tool shelf. The Toolbar type View is gone, and replaced by the Toolbar Type Mesh Edit. It also brings a few important fixes. The Mac build now compiles. The Player and quite a few other missing things is now onboard too.
And we have again some vital changes at the keymap to remove some conflicts and inconsistencies. Most important one is that Move and Rotate in the Viewport is now switched to be consistent with the rest of the editors. Now the Middle Mouse button pans the view like in the Image Editor. And Right Mouse rotates the view.
Bfoartists has a different handling and a different user interface with a different useage philosophy. Which is not hotkey based. That’s why Blender tutorials does not translate well when you start from scratch. And most of them still doesn’t translate well at a later point neither. Lots of them want you to press hotkeys, and doesn’t mention the tool name or the tool location in the graphical menu.
You can watch Blender tutorials for specific issues at a later point when you know the basics. Means when there is no Bforartists tutorial for the issue available. At the moment the list of available Bforartists tutorials is a bit short. We still focus to get the code part finished first. But we will do our best to fill the tutorial gap as fast as possible
If you know basic 3D you won’t need tutorials for Bforartists. When you mouse over an icon in Bforartists it tells you immediately what the function does.
I learned the basics of Bforartists in under 1 hour. I created a cube, did some poly modeling on it, assigned a material, threw in some lights and started rendering with cycles.
When Bforartists starts up, set INTERACTION option to Maya. Now you have standard viewport navigation.
The most important menu to learn is bottom to mid left.
That’s where you find options to edit objects, rotate, translate, scale, set the active camera and so on.
Materials assignment and rendering options are on the pane on the right.
I’m very excited about this release. Its the first Blender that is usable for non-Blender users imo.
Andre Lauzon was so nice to build a Mac Binary of Bforartists 0.9.2. So we have now also a Mac Build available. It can be found in the Download section.
This seems perfect for me because it addresses many of the reasons I’ve never gotten comfortable with blender. I do have a few questions. Maybe the answers should be obvious, but these are the things that came to mind.
Will Bforartists always have its own version number distinct from the official blender release?
Will I be able to load and move projects between blender and Bforartists?
Will Bforartists allow me to use blender plug-ins like ManuelbastioniLAB Character Generator and SceneCity (on sale through the 23rd of April!)?
Is there a cube in the default scene? I’ve never understood its purpose.
Is there or will there be different types of onscreen navigation widgets? I really miss the type of floating widget used by Truespace, and being able to easily switch from free to restricted movement. I’ve also wondered why more programs don’t still provide arc-ball rotation…
Bfoartists will have its own version number.
You will be able to move projects between Blender and Bforartists.
There is no cube.
Bforartists uses the same widget types than Blender. Which are unfortunately not as comfortable as the trueSpace ones.
Now for the plugins. We have one special case so far where i was not able to fix the trouble maker. The Renderman addon crashes in Bforartists. And i haven’t found the cause yet. But the very most Blender plugins will also work in Bforartists. ManuelBastioniLab does for sure.
The main reason why the one or another addon may fail in Bforartists is that we have removed some not longer necessary menus. Like the add menu in the header. And some addons may throw an error here when they try to register to the not longer existing menus. Those addons are easy to fix when that’s the trouble maker. Hand me the addons over and i will try to fix them
Bforartists is very easy to learn if you already know 3D. Just make sure you set “Interaction” to “Maya” at startup - this will give you standard alt-mouse viewport navigation.
It took me less than 1 hour to learn:
Creating a cube and doing various polygon/box modeling on it
Creating a camera and setting viewport to look through it
Creating my first Cycles materials and assigning them to objects
Turning my “Cube” - now a spaceship-like 3D poly model - into a dynamics rigidbody and making it tumble onto a plane
Setting up emissive objects (via material assignment) so the scene has some cool lighting
Setting the viewport to Cycles realtime preview rendering - I love this option!
I’ve never been able to get into Blender at all. Bforartists works for me so far.
As I said previously, in just 1 hour or so of playing you’ll know roughly how Bforartists works.
When you mouse over icons in the UI Bforartists tells you what the function is.
So you are looking at a few minutes of mousing over various UI icons to find what you are looking for.
So, would you say plug-ins are for most intents and purposes compatible, those not working being exceptions? Sounds to be at least 90%, possibly as high as 95% or 99%? Blender’s wealth of plug-ins and expansions are of course one of its most attractive points.
A couple more questions…
Is there any recommendation or consideration to having blender and Bforartists installed together? I currently have blender installed, and even have some plug-ins configured. Any conflicts to expect?
Does Bforartists keep blender’s (less-common) world orientation?
Looking at the roadmap for blender, it appears heavily focused on UI. Do you expect the upcoming official changes to assist or complicate Bforartists development? One item I have seen mentioned is a new or improved widget object class. Might this allow a future Truespace-style navigation widget?
Blender recently added radial menus, but doesn’t seem to make extensive use of them. Are they used more effectively in Bforartists than in blender? They seemed to me more for the user to group tools together but did not appear to (yet?) be extensively pre-configured throughout as would be needed to make them a viable alternative to key-commands.
This one is trickier… Can Bforartists be compared to Blendersensei’s “Sensei Format”? Sensei Format also purports to make blender more intuitive/accessible. Unlike Bforartists, Sensei Format is a plug-in which can also be easily disabled/removed. Also unlike Bforartists it seems to add other tools to blender as well.
Are Bforartists and Sensei Format attempting similar things?
Would Sensei Format conflict or be redundant with Bforartists?
Was there ever any consideration to simply make Bforartists a plug-in?
Can’t think of anything else. I thought I should share any questions with you as the answers might be of interest to others just learning about Bforartists.
It is a HUGE mystery to me how the blender devs have been able to ignore the complaints about the UI so long. But I suspect that the blender development is ruled by non-communicable programmers that can’t understand why their absolutely logical implementation is totally confusing for everybody else.
So, now we are here. Bforartisit is a great idea, and I would be surprised if not a quite substantial part of the blender users would move over to Bforartist. What will that lead too? Two scenarios. 1. artists will be the ruling class in the development. 2. The blender community implodes if more starts to fork and make other Bforartists, not long until there are separate blender version with different functions then. Very bad scenario!
It is necessary now that the blender foundation once and for all realize that blender needs to have a complete UI overhaul or it will perish. Imagine if they had done it 10 years ago, they would have fucking ruled the low-mid 3d animation space. But no… UI’s are for suckers. Command line modeling is the new black!
I have long held that this is because blender gestated in the Linux ecosystem. I mean it makes sense to me that people who have to use command line regularly would implement a GUI like the blender people have given us. And there’s never been any arguing with them about it, either. Shortcuts aren’t shortcuts if that input isn’t otherwise available, they are key commands. And while key commands may be faster than mousing for some users they apparently aren’t for all users, and special sympathy for those who preferred key commands but had already committed those of another program to memory.
I’m not worried about a slew of forks just yet, given my bewilderment that Bforartists is only now happening.
Hopefully users will demand compatibility for projects across programs vying for widespread acceptance. It appears that Bforartists can load projects originating in blender and vice versa.
And likewise, users will expect plug-ins to work in their blender flavor of choice. Any truly disruptive change under the hood would have to have some pretty compelling argument in its favor. And unless some petty rift emerges there would simply be no reason to break something purely out of spite or ego.
Bforartists and blender are both open source, the two together should be stronger than the one alone. Bforartists will surely attract end users but may also appeal to those able to extend functionality through tools and plug-ins. I hope everyone who’s ever looked at blender but didn’t dive in takes a good look at it.
Well, obviously there was a reason to start the fork. But please understand that i can and will not comment Blender philosophy or development. I can only speak for Bforartists. And so i cannot say what the Blender future really brings. Means i have for example no idea how the still to develop widgets will turn out. And this means we will cross the Blender 2.8 bridge when we arrive at it. It’s simply too early to say anything here.
The goal of Bforartists is to improve the usability, and make the software out of the box more user friendly. The improvements are mainly done in the interaction area, in the graphical UI, and in the documentation and tutorials. The parts that makes the useage easier.
What we don’t want to change is core functionality. Means we will try to keep Blender and Bforartists as compatible as possible. This includes to have a new Bforartists version ready when a new Blender version appears. This also includes fundamental things like world orientation. There is no way to change this without to rewrite the software in big parts anyways. That said, a patch that brings improvements is always welcome
I haven’t had a closer look at the radial menus yet. They are surely a good addition here and there. It is there, optional. So when you have a need in your personal workflow, use it
Blendersensei is a Blender addon. And should work in Bforartists too.
Bforartists works fine besides Blender. There is no conflict. It is a completely separate installation. The settings and addons are not shared. The Bforartists settings have its own folder.
Fjuhec was so nice to build a Linux Binary of Bforartists 0.9.2. So we have now also a Linux Build available too. It can be found in the Download section.
I’ve finally gotten around to taking a look at bforartists. I certainly find it far more inviting at start-up than the current official blender release. I am also surprised at the number of blender forks, whether they are trying to change the user experience or simply offer a stripped down tool focused on specific use. Of the ones I’ve looked at bforartists still seems the one I’d be most likely to use regularly.
However, I’ve already run into one plug-in that doesn’t seem to work in bforartists (shows as installed but cannot be configured). This adds to my concern about plug-in compatibility. You say you are able to modify each plug-in to work, and I do indeed see at startup some plug-ins are identified as being bforartists versions. But even if the majority of plug-ins do work without a hitch, the number that do not work could still be quite high. Wouldn’t it be better to simply hide menus/menu items from the user while allowing them to still be called within blender by plug-ins? Have you documented the process by which plug-ins might be modified, to make it easier for plug-in authors to support bforartists? I would hate to see program development slowed by the need to convert incompatible plug-ins as they are identified and brought to your attention, and wonder how the authors of commercial plug-ins are likely to view their product (possibly) needing being modified specifically for bforartists compatibility.
Thanks for your feedback. Would you mind to name the one addon that doesn’t work for you?
We share your concerns about the plugins, and are still at investigating into this issue.
First, the very most addons works flawless with Bforartists. A few have an issue with the structure of the available menus though. Mainly one. The add menu in the header of the 3D view. We have removed it since it is one big double menu entry. And there was simply no place to add it elsewhere. It is obsolete. And why should we display an empty and obsolete menu in the UI?
The addons that comes with Bforartists are fixed to go around this issue already. Maybe we find a better solution here. We too want to be the plugins as compatible as possible. In best case to 100%. However, this is not always possible. The renderman addon for example has another issue, most probably a problem with the exe name. But i wasn’t able to nail this one down so far.
For fixing the commercial addons, well, the code of those addons is under GPL or a GPL compatible license in the very most cases. Means you are allowed to share and to modify it. Most of them are even available at Github for free, while they get sold at Gumroad or the Blender Market Place. And that’s the part that we would try to modify if necessary and possible then.
The main reason to include it would be for compatibility with plug-ins which refer to it. A possible solution would be to remove the redundant menu while redirecting interaction with it to the corresponding menu. Or, simply remove the menu from UI access to users, while keeping it exposed to plug-ins.
The main reason to include it would be for compatibility with plug-ins which refer to it. A possible solution would be to remove the redundant menu while redirecting interaction with it to the corresponding menu. Or, simply remove the menu from UI access to users, while keeping it exposed to plug-ins.
Yeah, now we know ^^
As told, we investigate at the moment what can be done here. The add menu will most probably be back in the next version. At another location then, in the tool shelf. Which reduces the number of addons with issues in Bforartists by a fair amount then.
