Bforartists - Forking for a custom GUI 

🍴😉

But the question is why you needing that tutorials? I have experience from other software and blender was for me counter-intuitive. I needed tutorials only for recognize every hot-key and place where some function is defined

Yeah, I was just thinking I want to recommend this version to people who want to learn 3D modeling, since the more artist focus seems ideal, but without dedicated tutorials, I worry trying to learn it might cause as much confusion as it would alleviate. ​@@7wojtekan

It was super exciting to present, a big highlight of the year! My palms were so sweaty.

1. We have something cooking from Spa Studio from work from Falk David and Znight to make the sequencer drive scenes in the 3D View, so it will be a lot like the UE sequencer. That will help alot. Concerning minimism, you can load up the Video Editing template, and you'd have it minimal per that way to some degree. Though also having the compositor there would be nice, though there is no way to loop it around just yet. A color balancing workspace might be a good idea too! Thanks for that. 2. Re: text fonts, any font file can be loaded in Blender/Bforaritsts. So the fonts that come with your OS could be used. I think the font folder is also included in the file browser. 3. At the moment the documentation is baked into PDF files, so we can't link to them, but maybe we will work an online database with time, then we could make a opt-in method to load up the documentation from the GUI. It's in my mind, but I have a few other milestones to hit first. But good ideas! Thanks!!!!

Thank you!!! I made a quick addon to do the slides, I'll try make a tutorial and/or include the addon with Bforartists if you'd like.

@trinumedia Oh yes!! Thank you so much! That addon will start off a whole new style of presentations that are way ahead of Prezi and PowerPoint! If BFA layout has to be changed for making such presentations, the addon should take care of that too. BTW, I just loved your style of presentation. Your fluid gestures remind me of Capt Jack Sparrow! 🤩

As @trinumedia said, it's an addon. I will remind him to finish the tutorial and / or include the addon to Bforartists :)

Muchas gracias!!!!@@bforartists

🥰

We would wish that too. But it's not us who draws the line at this point. And of course we tried. That's why the fork exists.

In an ideal world it would be nice, but seeing the tracker at 5500 backlogged tasks with 250+ pull requests per week on Blender, adding another 50 micro pull requests per week might be overloading the Blender devs. So being independent fast tracks working ideas. Anyone can take the commits Bforartists has and try to commit upstream though, but in this case that would need another volunteer. The line is to know when to stop ovwrworking and focus on the end goal, or when to know when we want a feature creep out of scope of our standing work availability.. 😅

Thank you for the replies!

I think it's great that they are taking some of the same philosophy of the Blender Foundation and putting it back on the Blender Foundation's shoulders. We need to remember this is a really small team and the Blender Foundation doesn't offer them any support. If the Blender Foundation wants to use these changes they know where the code lives and can adopt them. Their, BForArtist commit amount is nearly the same amount of the Blender Foundation. Super impressive.

I think a lot of artists are not use to so many icons. Personally, I would love to see someone tackle the icon issues that seem to be talked about a lot and offer a solution.The BForArtist team being that size is doing a pretty remarkable job.

You get it. Thank you. 😊

There are other great RU-vidrs who can help you with that, blender doesn’t exactly make proper tutorials for it although they have hired some other RU-vidrs to make tuts for them

@@dynstinn can you please share that yt channel name with me??

@@syedarmaan9038 we have grant avbir, he madea tutorial for blemder beginers and ha has a ln amazing way of explaining things in an understandable manner. Then we have blendee guru who made a great begginers guide to blender. And then we have markim3d who makes great tuts and reviews other adons so tou dont have to. There is also blender bros ponti rrui. Dont know spelling properly. They made an entire hard surface nodeling tutorial at their wensite. This is kusf a small list as there are other great tutorials and youtubers for blender

Thanks for the suggestion, but rebranding is a tough one and will most probably never happen. Bforartists is now known as a brand. You don't build up a brand in a few days. And finding a new brand that is not already occupied is also very difficult nowadays. But when we talk internally about it then we call it bfa if that's of help :)

Thanks for your input, but you don't have to use all the confetti. When it's too much for you personally, turn it off. And the Blender way is still there. That's the idea of our customizable elements :) The presentation might have looked a bit messy in this regards. And 45 minutes is simply not enough to present every detail of eight years of work. But Andres did also show that you can hide parts away if you don't need them. To let the user decide what he needs for his personal workflow. Not a developer or somebody in the internet who tells you that you have to work this and that way. There are a few hardcoded improvements that cannot be turned off. Like left aligned text, the improved orders in the menus or the better understandable tooltips and of course the icons. But you could use the Blender keymap and the Blender theme, hide away the toolbar at the top, hide away the resurrected toolshelf again, turn off two or three addons, and it would immediately look and feel like Vanilla Blender again after five minutes. Except the colored icons of course. So the possible customizable span goes from "like in Blender" up to a crazy UI where really nearly everything is exposed at the top level. The user decides. Bforartists stands for customizability and that you can use our alternative way of using it if you want to, that you can customize your workflow for your own personal needs. That's why i personally always poke to make a new feature an addon if possible. Addons can be turned off. The extra brushes is for example such an addon. Or implement it in a way that you can hide it away. This is as told the case with the resurrected tool shelf tabs or the toolbar at the top.

I am curious to know what and how you might change things to make it a better experience. There are some huge capability improvements here. I think until you give yourself some time to play with BForArtist you won't be able to fully grasp the work that's being done. I am genuinely super curious as to how you would improve on the work that they are doing?

Some people don't prioritize a small bit of screen space over every other damn thing...

There's a reason Blender's icons are mostly monochrome, and in all of his inane rambling, I can't believe he missed it. It's partly accessibility (colorblindness), and partly because the user is _never looking at all 2,500 of them at the same time!_ Do they all need to be distinct? No, because most of them never show up in the same context or next to each other. You shouldn't depend on color to convey meaning. This is basic iconography and UI design, and a team that puts "for artists" in the title of their program should know better. Also this all just makes it look more obtuse than Blender arguably ever has since 2.7.

Glad you like the fork!!! It was stuck between a rock and a hard place with this talk. If we were to talk of the 3000+ little adjustments for the QOL improvements added, I wouldn't be able to do it in 50 minutes. The talk is focused on forking in general, and how and why we did it - and that was the talk that got accepted for the conference. If I go next time and get a chance to present again on the solutions it is trying to solve, I'll be a lot more granular on the nitty gritty - though in all fairness, I did touch a little on some features on the "show, don't tell" section of the video! This was our first symbolic representation in the Blender community, a huge step we all are thankful for - we needed to show an overview of the what and the why with a touch of how. Next time there may be more granular what's, why's and how's!

@@trinumedia wait it's you?! I really admire and respect your work ethic! I followed you online for a while and the amount of productivity you have is beyond human lol

@@KEI-um1kc Oh thank you! My workaholicism isn't so bad after all!