The "joys" of working with Blender

Amidst all the madness of E3 I found some time to start official work on the games. Most of the 'planning' stuff is already done, I have a decent idea of where I want to go and how to get there, I can sort of the details later when I get to it. The first step I took today was making the models. I gotta say though, it's a very slow start.

Given 2 programs, Blender and Unity, I know (roughly) what each one is capable of, but not their full potential. The original plan was to make all of the models in Blender, import it to Unity, and finish everything there. My first impressions of Blender aren't entirely positive. I'm familiar with Photoshop and Illustrator and the like, but Blender has billions of options and nearly all of them are unlabeled. Options disappear, reappear, and change dependent on which mode you're in and with which type of object you have selected. Most of the basic/common actions are bound to the keyboard but there's no real mention of this anywhere. The fact that I have to use a tutorial to figure out how to do the most basic things isn't a great start. It took me nearly half an hour to figure out how to move the camera, which is ANOTHER dumb thing. It's mapped to the middle-mouse button of all things, which means I can't use it at all on my laptop, and I had to manually remap my mouse to make it work.

GAZE UPON MY INFINITE COMPLEXITIES

BUT! After all that, if you can look away from the labyrinthine layout, it's actually pretty nice. I haven't figured out how to apply textures (even though I see options for it all over the place none of them have actually done anything yet) but I feel like I'm getting close. By the end of the day, I hope to have that sorted out and have a fully functional model.

In the interest of experimenting, the next logical step was to move to Unity and see what I could do. Importing Blender files was surprisingly easy, which is promising for later. The overall layout is a lot cleaner, but therein lies a new problem. It's intuitive in exactly the opposite direction from Blender. It's easier to choose objects, but harder to manipulate them. It's easier to move the camera, but I can't figure out how to re-position it to point a different direction. It's easier to fine-tune the exact coordinates and sizes or objects, but they can ONLY be changed by manually typing out exact decimal numbers for each individual object.

Less is More is Less.

To be fair though, just because I don't know how to do it (I only looked at it for about 30 minutes with no tutorials or background) doesn't mean it can't be done. It may ultimately be easier than Blender for all I know. Personally, I'd prefer to do it all under 1 roof instead of shuttling files around between multiple programs, but I suppose a single one-way transfer isn't too bad. That was the original plan after all, who am I to stray from it?