Just ran into some video tuts this weekend for Blender Sensei format. Basically it's a Blender add-on that changes the program UI. Right now I can't say whether it's good or bad, just different. The bane of my Blender experience is trying to remember all of the hot keys I need to type in order to get it to do what I want so I'm all for anything that makes that easier.

Just want to know if anyone has a review of it if they've heard of it or used it.

If you have no idea what i'm talking about, here's a link to the Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/blendersensei

seen a similar thread lately, yes heard of it watched a few tuts !! it does look better for someone who cant/wont take to blender but for me blender shortcuts have stuck I don't even like the tabs and pie menus which seem to be all the rage (old dog new tricks rofl)

theres another "version" of blender ........ this maybe of interest to you as a vendor
 http://www.microvellum.com/products/fluid-designer/

damn I wish they'd fix this forum  

I gave the Sensei a whirl for about a week to follow their tutorials and it help follow their workflow but for other projects I just could not get my head around it perhaps if that was the first GUI I had experimented with when first starting with Blender maybe it might have taken better to it. I personally have become comfortable with the default GUI and have only made minor changes to it suit my work flow. Like right off the top since I am not at the moment doing animation and only mainly model I got rid of the timeline to get more screen space. I am not great with remembering shortcut keys but the more I see something I have not used before where shortcut keys are concerned then I just  go into Blender and not necessarily set out to model anything but I repeatedly use the a new shortcut key combo till it sort of sticks granted I might do this over a weeks time might sound silly but thats how I have learned most of the core shortcuts. Again the Sensei GUI is nice but not for me. Just my 2 cents. And thanks for that link heddheld that looked rather interesting bookmarked it for further investigation

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?324945-Latest-Development-for-Fluid-Designer

that's the full thread over at BA if you want to have a read  

I asked about Sensei in another thread, I guess you didn't see it, and got about the same replies.  I personally use it, and it's been the one thing that's really helped me get along well with Blender.  I don't know, I think the UI is just much cleaner, and the drag n drop ability it has makes it very cool.  I know people will say Blender standard already has everything that's in Sensei, but I think the way it's customized and laid out makes a big difference.  It does make it harder to follow standard Blender tutorials though, because of the hotkey differences, but once you get used to that part, it's cake.  I mean, it's hard following an older tutorial for Blender standard, because before 2.6, there were a lot of different hotkeys too.  So yeah, I like Sensei.

I came across this recently and it is current for most hotkeys for the 2.6 series of hotkeys and might come in useful as a print out to keep by your desk of the most common hotkeys within Blender  http://ocw.tufts.edu/data/71/1717950.pdf hope it helps as an addition to everyone tool box of useful Blender info 

This guy should be banned from the web. Basically he set up a custom theme for Blender which he uses as an entry point to a series of 3d beginner tutorials and some extremely over-priced model packs. Problem is that his custom theme installs a ton of new hot keys and completely switches the layout. So if you have been working with Blender and learned the keys, nothing works anymore. The kicker however is that the uninstall switch that he keeps mentioning does not work. The only way out is a complete reinstallation, which can be a pain if you have RenderMan and other things installed or don't know where all your prefs and scripts are. There are lots of forum posts of people trying to get rid of this stuff. It is OK to try to make a buck of free software and the "Sensei" thingy seems to resonate with 3D newbies, but this guy takes it to an extreme and unfortunately doesn't have the know-how to execute things well. So people are left frustrated and stranded. Avoid at all cost!!! There are no shortcuts and this "sensei" just wants to shill his warez.

I agree with some of your points xixacnorbert and I can understand someone wanting to profit from add-ons and or Themes but I would recommend to newbies if you are considering using the Senesi set up you should maybe set up more than one instance of Blender I run 5 different instances of Blender of varying version manly to follow different tutorials and I did try Sensei on one of my other instances and did not like it so removal was rather simple since I ran it from a Zip file and not my actual installed version of Blender. Also I highly recommend backing up your setting folder before making any major changes so if you do need to go back the transition is less of headache. One of the major advantages of Blender as a whole is that there are so many ways you can set up your work environment and customize it but there is usually very simple ways to come back to default and be back up and running quickly again.

heddheld posted at 2:52PM Sun, 06 November 2016 - #4205110

 

seen a similar thread lately, yes heard of it watched a few tuts !! it does look better for someone who cant/wont take to blender but for me blender shortcuts have stuck I don't even like the tabs and pie menus which seem to be all the rage (old dog new tricks rofl)

theres another "version" of blender ........ this maybe of interest to you as a vendor
 http://www.microvellum.com/products/fluid-designer</http:>

damn I wish they'd fix this forum  

 

Went to Microvellum and there is no longer an option to download Fluid Designer. They still have the pages of info on it, but again no option to download it. Tried a while back to purchase the cabinet add-on. But couldn't find it and no one there responded when I asked them where it was. Are they dropping this product? Making changes? Could't find out myself.

I think they are restricting the Fluid Designer access now. They have a form where you can request access to their trial software. So I assume Fluid Designer is going to be a pay app now.

I found some information on Fluid Designer. Microvellum has updated the webpage for Fluid Designer but no download link. Found that is it here and has been updated in the last 4 days. https://github.com/Microvellum

Learned about the Sensei addon in a comment section under a YouTube video. The person had responded to one of my comments about how Blender continues to update to new versions several times a year, making the learning curve a never ending story. He seems to like the Sensei plugin as he calls it, and judging from the oriental characters his username is in, I think he might just be the person that created it. So I did a search for info on it, as heddheld here knows I always do before committing to anything. (hello my friend). Found this forum, and read the comments to learn about what it does to Blender. Well from what I learned here, I don't think getting it will be an option for me. I prefer to stick with the default User Interface and hotkey arrangement. Good luck to those that like the Sensei plugin.

Thanks for the review to all commenting on it.

Caution always helps to prevent one from doing something that may return undesired results.

Not to take a stance in disagreement with anyone here, but I don't see what people hate so much about Sensei format. I've heard that it's impossible to uninstall, etc etc. But I don't see why you can't just make a copy of your current Blender version and rename it to something else (which would save your prefs and everything just as it was), then install Sensei over the original one or vice-versa. This way even if you decided you didn't like it and had trouble uninstalling it, you could always just delete that folder and bring back the other one by changing the name back to what it was. That's the one great thing about Blender is that it's such a compact application, it installs everything in just one folder, unlike some big-name software which pushes itself in 3 or 4 different locations on your hard drive when you install it. I did a trial of 3dsmax and Maya, and couldn't believe how large and messy those installations were. Talk about bloated software. Those things took up almost 20 gigs on my hard drive and had folders scattered in several locations besides the C drive.

Oh, and if you ever try to install a cad software called Revit you better have some free hd space because when I tried the trial, it was complaining I needed 75 gigs of free disk space! 75 gigs? That's more space than I need for my entire Poser runtime, and I have a pretty big runtime! Seems like all Autodesk products are like that. I'll stick with good ol Blender and have most of the same features but only need about 300 mb of space.