Did they make it any easier to use? Artists want to create, not learn some unnecessarily complicated UI. I remember reading somewhere that the community of hardcore Blender users actually like that it's difficult to use for some asinine reason, and making the tool more user-friendly would go against that stupid culture. Sure, licenses for other tools like 3DS Max and Maya are crazy expensive, but are probably cheaper in the long run given the reduced productivity using such a wonky tool like Blender (as of the last time I looked at it which was about a year ago).

Dunno. Last time I used it was maybe 10 years ago and it wasn't terribly complicated to figure out back then. It had some elements of cryptic UI design and terminology, but it came off more as a way to get you to buy the manual (IIRC that was how the project was being funded).

LJ: I went to school with a lot of computer artists that thought program knowledge = being a good artist. It was typically compensation for lacking in another area. Shockingly, it was usually to compensate for not having any very original or creative ideas (Not that I am King of Creativity, but a large amount of art students would ctrl-c other people's ideas, the worst being someone else's ideas in the same classroom...not counting those that would straight up claim someone else's work as their own)

Maybe some of that is going on in the hardcore circles of Blender? Fear of competition? Compensating knowledge for something else? I dunno.

My original comment was meant to swing both ways (while complimenting the video). 3DS/Maya/Z-Brush/Mudbox doesn't have a secret "make look good" button that will make your stuff cool, creative and interesting...and neither does Blender. Tools are tools.

I don't know, I do know that it's been used as an adjunct to stuff like Maya on major productions for years specifically because of the efficiency of its interface paradigm once you learn it.

Blender is on 2.63 now, I have been using it since 2.43...

There is absolutely no way in fucking hell this was made solely with Blender and not a half dozen other programs making up for Blender's lack of overall quality.

Here is Blender in a nutshell, across all versions...

Modeler : Well made, solid, gets shit done. Love the hot keys, hate the weird Z-up bastard axis.

Video Sequence Editor : Should have been its own program, it's outstanding. If it had better drag and drop style positioning and scaling, After Effects would have free competition. 2.49 has ten times the video output options as later versions, seek it for video editing.

Node Editor chroma keying : Worthless beyond belief. You can drop out the chroma background frame by frame in Photoshop faster with macros than you will set this sucker up.

Game Engine : File corrupting (with backup file corrupting) horror that has been systemically awful since 2.43 and still corrupts files as of 2.59 (last time I checked). To do this, hide game objects on hidden layers, file corruption guaranteed. Sucks too, because when it works Blender renders game objects ten times sharper and more detailed than other dogshit free alternatives like Unity.

Rigging and animation is okay until you see how other programs do it.

In closing, it's free, it's "usable," but the MOMENT you can afford to buy a piece of software that does the same thing, burn the hard drive you installed Blender on and never look back.

I find it easier to believe that a lot of artists and programmers with thousands of dollars were able to achieve results that memedumpster can't account for than to believe that the Blender foundation isn't using Blender.on a project whose purpose is to spur development for Blender.

Part of the point of Blender, I'm guessing, is that a real movie production can go beyond the interface to change the source code, and this can allow filmmakers and artists to carry their imaginations farther with less resources.