This is a little bit folly IMO. A mouse and keyboard provide a less fatiguing and more precise mechanism for the type of 3D that Blender can do. What I imagine they will find is that the act of "tabletizing" Blender will force it to simplify its workflows. You can already see it in the screens. This will downgrade the power that Blender has, confuse the existing users, and generally serve nobody best.
If they insist on doing it, it would be a good idea to rebrand it so expectations are in line with what a tablet interface enables/prevents.
It's like saying "People with their mouths full of food couldn't perform Shakespeare so we translated Hamlet to a maximum of 2 syllable words. Now everyone can perform Shakespeare."
> To support Blender’s mission of making 3D technology accessible to everyone
If accessibility is a priority for Blender, then they should absolutely be trying this. This isn’t going to be taking away the keyboard/mouse control that currently exists. The point is to give people, who (for whatever reason) can’t use a keyboard and mouse, a tool that they don’t currently have access to. There is also a large segment of the younger user base whose primary interface to computing is a tablet. This has the potential to open a whole new market of users for Blender.
Give them a little credit… I don’t think Blender is going to “downgrade” their existing workflows. For this tablet/pen project, who knows what kind of UI/UX they will have - it could be great. Plus, it is important for a project like Blender to have the freedom to experiment, otherwise you end up with a static ecosystem.
But, honestly, why wouldn’t you want Blender to make 3D work available to others who prefer to work with a different set of input devices? If that tool ends up as a “Blender Lite”, who cares? It may not be useful to you, but it will be useful to someone else. And maybe they find a new feature that will be useful to you in the process.
Removing/degrading the UX for keyboard and mouse users would be (professional) suicide for Blender, I'm 99% confident Ton would never do something like that, unless most of the user base suddenly find themselves using tablets exclusively. And even then I'd doubt he'd leave us desktop users behind.
I don't know about this. Compare Blender 2.8 to 2.7. A big part of the ui revamp was exposing formally menu/hotkey only stuff into the viewport UI. Things like selecting which orthographic view angle needed the numpad before, you can still do that but they added a nice minimal GUI for doing it too. Things in general got easier with the mouse, but it didn't take away from the powerful vim-like keyboard controls.
I'm not sure exactly what that means, intuitively I agree with your comment, but I guess the ZBrush port acts as a data point that's at least a partial counterargument (only partial because, e.g., Maxon hasn't ported Cinema 4D, which is more directly analogous to Blender).
I'm really curious about the ZBrush port, e.g., is that really because customers were asking for it (or usage data from Maxon's own iPad-only [acquired] app Forger indicated there was interest)? Or is it a defensive move trying prevent an Innovator's Dilemma-style disruption from the bottom from an app like Nomad Sculpt https://nomadsculpt.com?
If they insist on doing it, it would be a good idea to rebrand it so expectations are in line with what a tablet interface enables/prevents.
It's like saying "People with their mouths full of food couldn't perform Shakespeare so we translated Hamlet to a maximum of 2 syllable words. Now everyone can perform Shakespeare."