Today we are revisiting Bforartist, a project we first featured all the way back in 2018 when the 1.0 version was released. Bforartists is a fork of the popular open source 3D application Blender with a focus on making the user experience more artist friendly.
The primary differences between Blender and Bforartists are:
- An new default keymap, reduced to a minimal and necessary hotkey layout with 3D navigation that can be exclusively done by mouse.
- Cleaned up User Interface. Lots of unnecessary double, triple or even more identical menu entries are combined, removed and/or exposed.
- Extended User Interface. Many tools that were formerly hotkey only have a menu entry now.
- Rearranged User Interface. Some things are better accessible now, some less frequent operators are no-longer in the way anymore.
- Improved default settings.
- Colored Iconography with silhuette, color coding, form and detail consistently placed everywhere.
- A configurable toolbar with icon buttons.
- A pinnable tool shelf with the header based tools, exposed at a top-level in panels.
- Tabs in the toolshelf.
- A node add toolshelf for quick point and click
- Improved default workspace layouts.
- Left aligned checkboxes and text where possible.
- Indented titles for properties.
- Better and more tooltips.
- Better contrast on a readable standard theme.
- Some extra add-ons to improve usability, like the reset 3D View add-on, Brush Panels or the Set Dimensions add-on with which you can scale in world coordinates in edit mode.
- And lots of extra small details: like not so many delete confirm dialogs, quick editor toggles, scene management in the outliner, and more.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Bforartists project and see the application in action in the video below. The creation of this video was sponsored by (and created using) Camtasia. Use code GAMEFROMSCRATCH at checkout for 15% off.