Two basic things missing, from my notes at the time (1 year ago, don't remember which version, think it was the latest non-beta at the time):
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- Texture display in the viewport. Somewhat amazingly, Blender doesn't seem to support this. When you're doing UV editing, you can see the polygons that use the UVs you're editing mapped with the texture you've selected as being visible in the UV editor, but that's about it. The sort of textured display that I'd expect, where all polygons are displayed textured with the texture(s) from their material, doesn't seem to exist.
- No N-sided polygon support. Yes, seriously. Quads or tris or nothing! So I think there's a mode where it works like MAX, where it works in tris but hides some of the edges to fool you (N-gons I think they call it), but I couldn't work out how to make this happen. (And there's some guy rewriting the mesh editing core to support N-sided polygons, but it's not done yet.) This caused me a big problem: Blender kept getting in my way! No way to create a rectangle with 6 verts, that's going to get an edge in the next step that splits it into two, because Blender will turn the intermediate result into triangles, forcing me to clean things up -- an extra step, that I didn't want, nor did I need. Now, maybe there is some special tool that I should be using, that does this in a Blender fashion -- but, seriously, I don't care. I can do things my way in every other package.
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Blender is one of the very few programs that has successfully moved me to tears of sheer frustration (funnily enough, I am very unlikely ever to try using it again), but plenty of people get on with it fine so it could just be me.
Regardless of my own inability to get to grips with it, I did think that the two limitations I describe above are kind of ridiculous for a 3D modelling package in 2010 - and I still think that. Every other package I've used just lets you jump in and create polygons with as many edges as you like, and shows you each material's texture in the viewport as you do it. Even if you can jump through some hoops to ge blender to do that too, that's too much - these things are basic features...
<<< - Texture display in the viewport. Somewhat amazingly, Blender doesn't seem to support this. When you're doing UV editing, you can see the polygons that use the UVs you're editing mapped with the texture you've selected as being visible in the UV editor, but that's about it. The sort of textured display that I'd expect, where all polygons are displayed textured with the texture(s) from their material, doesn't seem to exist.
- No N-sided polygon support. Yes, seriously. Quads or tris or nothing! So I think there's a mode where it works like MAX, where it works in tris but hides some of the edges to fool you (N-gons I think they call it), but I couldn't work out how to make this happen. (And there's some guy rewriting the mesh editing core to support N-sided polygons, but it's not done yet.) This caused me a big problem: Blender kept getting in my way! No way to create a rectangle with 6 verts, that's going to get an edge in the next step that splits it into two, because Blender will turn the intermediate result into triangles, forcing me to clean things up -- an extra step, that I didn't want, nor did I need. Now, maybe there is some special tool that I should be using, that does this in a Blender fashion -- but, seriously, I don't care. I can do things my way in every other package. >>>
Blender is one of the very few programs that has successfully moved me to tears of sheer frustration (funnily enough, I am very unlikely ever to try using it again), but plenty of people get on with it fine so it could just be me.
Regardless of my own inability to get to grips with it, I did think that the two limitations I describe above are kind of ridiculous for a 3D modelling package in 2010 - and I still think that. Every other package I've used just lets you jump in and create polygons with as many edges as you like, and shows you each material's texture in the viewport as you do it. Even if you can jump through some hoops to ge blender to do that too, that's too much - these things are basic features...