Glad to be free of Blender
Having spent last weekend on the Zero cockpit with AC3D, it was a reminder of how nice it is not to have the specter of learning Blender hanging over my head any more.
When Simulab was aiming squarely at JSBsim as its graphic engine, the plan was to leverage Blender and its Collada-friendly system for import. So, it was quickly becoming necessary to come to grips with this overwrought, incredibly confusing leviathan of a modeling/animation software.
I spent quite a bit of time giving Blender 2.5x the old college try. Really I did. But… even the new 2.5 versions are such bloated, over-designed messes…. how can anyone expect to be productive with this?
You have to know a keyboard command or enter a keyword for the most basic simple types of operations, like resizing, repositioning… stuff that, in AC3D you can do by selecting the object and just using the mouse.
Once you get into all the side menus, you soon find yourself lost. You can spend half an hour trying to find some specific bit of info about an object, or to find a submenu you were *sure* you’d seen before… but now that you need it, it’s buried somewhere in the interface.
Yes, Blender is fully featured… but what good is that if you can never find what you’re looking for?
One fine point I never could figure out (and yes, I admit it might be a case of “user error”)… how do materials and textures become so inextricably intertwined? From what I could figure out, if you set up a material, then later assign a texture to a part, you have to re-install the material for a new part if that new part uses a different texture. Can’t tell you how many times I set up a texture, something ubiquitous, like aluminum… and then when I assigned it to objects that did not share the same texture… total confusion ensued. I’d have to install (and keep straight in my head) an instance of the material for each texture I might use in the model’s parts. I just don’t understand why the two have anything to do with each other.
In fact, the only thing I did like about Blender is that the editing renders were, for the most part, pretty nice.
Provided you set up the right lights, you could get really nice effects, like sun off aluminum, the difference between metal wings and fabric-covered control surfaces…. all except for see-through glass, which for some reason didn’t show up. I never got into it far enough to learn how to get a good quality RENDER that would show off the same keen detail I got in the viewports.
Then, after all the pain I endured to learn the little I did learn, come to find that the animation tools wouldn’t export in the Collada files Blender 3.5 exports. Even worse, setting animated parts to adhere to Local positions didn’t export either So, when I exported a Collada file to Simulab, in the Simulab Viewer, all the moving objects would cluster at the 0,0,0 point… even though they were set up in Blender to hinge at their well-established hinge points.
Good riddance to this big piece of bloatware. FlightGear is happy to work with AC3D files, and I’m told the X-Plane animation plug-in will work a treat. Even better, I hear that setting up a “hinge” is no more difficult than to plug in the coordinates of two points at either end of the hinge line. Sounds simple enough to me.
