I picked up UE4 a few years ago and couldn’t make any progress with it due to the (imo) clunky UI and my inability to patiently import models from blender (into substance painter, into ue4… not even mentioning all the pain that involves). I reinstalled it since I thought maybe I had matured with my workflow a bit. I still haven’t made any progress. Should I just give up?
Yep, just look how bad dev are looking, do you really wan’t to become a fat nerd, siting at a desk for the whole day, having only virtual friends, and when you die just thinking how much time you lost on virtual and sensless things.
If you think, UE4 is bad you should see CryEngine. It makes me cry. LOL
Seriously, though, look through the documentation, and tutorials.
If this engine is still too much to navigate through, look at Unity3D. It has a much simpler UI, but in the end, I find it more difficult to make a game with.
So let me get this straight, you are able to tolerate Blender’s UI but have trouble in UE4?
To be fair, Blender 2.8 UI is waaaaay better than <=2.7
Yea tried it, its better but they have to do much more if they are willing to attract long time Max Maya users.
When you need to stick two softwares together, you really ought to just toss together the most simple assets so you can nail down any compatibility issues. Substance Painter and UE4 really want your meshes to have pre-existing materials with names so they can divide up material IDs. UE4 really wants your skeletal meshes to have all bone hierarchies to be parented to one master bone. Substance painter really wants your collection of meshes to be laid out in a line (this is meant for mesh kits rather than multi-material meshes), UE4 wants all objects at the origin. etc.
What specific issues are you having?
There is a Blender UI plugin to mimic Maya UI…
This is a completely subjective opinion. I love Blender 2.7s UI and cannot stand Maya / Maxs UIs.
And i love how Max / Maya users love to hate on Blender, as if their opinion is fact. Pretty bigoted to be honest.
Can’t we just accept that some people like Tea and some people like Coffee. - That doesn’t mean that Coffee is bad, it just means that different people have different preferences.
Sorry but up until Blender 2.79b the UI was a really huge mess. Now with 2.80 the UI got much better although still not perfect at least it is user friendly. Now the expensive commercial ZBrush UI is pretty weird and outdated more than really bad BUT it has so advanced algorithms that make it better than other software for sculpting and that is the reason why it became used professionally everywhere.
Blender is free but many of its algorithms are not that advanced compared to commercial software and that is the reason why buying plugins for Blender makes sense, there are many pretty cheap that can improve the Blender workflow a lot and not just for sculpting.
Blender UI plugins allow to avoid making use of complex shortcuts no one really can memorize and that have always been a huge waste of time for doing basic stuff. Bforartists 2 plugin for Blender 2.80 or the Maya UI mimic plugin can ease things to anyone serious about using Blender in a professional way.
It’s just your opinion mate. 
Not fact.
I love Blenders UI - been a Blender user for 12 years - and use pretty much all the Keyboard Shortcuts, which I have memorised and massively speed up my workflow.
I’m not saying you’re not entitled to your opinion. If you don’t like Blenders UI - no probs. But it’s not cool to talk about it as if that opinion of yours is fact inside the Max / Maya user Echo Chamber.
Why not say “Hey - I don’t personally like Blender’s Shortcut Key system - I prefer a GUI. But hey maybe some people like it and find it good”
But instead you say “Blender’s Shortcut Key system is a mess and a waste of time.”
As if this was a world wide accepted fact among all 3D Artists.
That’s your opinion. Not fact. 
It is a fact for anyone that is serious on his/her job and doesn’t like wasting time with messed up UI and mechanics that oblige to waste a lot of time.
The Autodesk UIs are not excellent, far from that..and their expensive software is full of bugs too but do know why they became used by most professionals for movies CGI and games worldwide? Ease of use and powerful scripting. In fact commercial scripts for Autodesk products are more useful than the sofware alone itself and are used to both solve limitations of the software and to speed things up a lot at creating anything.
The same goes for Blender and commercial plugins. Not using useful cheap commercial plugins for Blender is not wise. Wasting time with its limitations is nothing good for any serious use.
Then relying on a single software to do everything is not smart anyway. Models can be imported/exported without much trouble between most software packages, sometimes there are issues but still it is worth doing that to achieve creating models quicker.
I get were you are coming from, But this is not a subjective matter. It is a hard established factual mistake clearly made and later somewhat admitted by the blender lead decision makers themselves.
Max and Maya and before them Softimage, (hell even that monster ) all came first and established the rules and the basic navigation and control schemes, in doing so an entire generation (the same generation that created and established not only these tools but the industry itself) used these tools and made them the standard for all to follow.
In comes in Blender in early 2000’s, with the only opensource software to have the potential to really make a difference! Takes one good look at the established norm and decides to go full 180 against the tide for no reason I could think of other than autism, in doing so it alienates most established professionals to even consider it.
Come 2019 and they sort of finally realize that after nearly 20 years of serious development on the software that they now must consider improving navigation and UI in order to attract the established crowd! But now it is this big conundrum, because by trying to fix this one thing it runs to break another, hence alienate the established Blender crowd who are used to the current UI.
The future is yet to be seen. And this is coming from someone who hates with a passion Autodesk’s handling and acquisition of these great trio of software Godfathers (Max, Maya and Softimage)
The only reason Zbrush gets away with its clunky interface is by being a sculpting software as a primary function which limits its learning curve to one thing only. It is manageable, coming from Mudbox it took me a few days to get used to doing that one required aspect of the process to a level were it became second nature. Not a deal breaker but then again Zbrush is another software designed by autistic developers, it was never meant to be a 3d sculpting tool either, it started off as some weird 2d splash gadget that looked like a freeware from the late 90’s:
https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/11/power-goo-primary-100628634-large.jpg
So what you’re saying is is I’ve been wasting my time using Blender, and I should really be using Max or Maya - cos yeah they are just better…
Are you aware that there are 3D Professionals working all over the world using Blender - And yes even 2.79 - so its not like its just become a thing since 2.8. Even some of the guys at Epic are using Blender- and I know plenty of 3D Artists at game companies who use Blender. So yeah all these guys were just wasting their time.
Some people like Blenders UI and find it faster, more intuitive and easier to use than Max / Maya. - I happen to be one of these people.
Your opinion that Blender’s UI is messy and a waste time is just wrong - in my opinion! 
Please don’t confuse opinion with facts. Not everyone has the same workflow as you.
Nobody at the Blender foundation has ever said or even suggested that their decision to do things differently was a mistake. Their decision to change the UI in 2.8 is an act of friendliness and inclusiveness to try to make the software appeal to more people - not an admission of a prior mistake.
I flat out disagree with that opinion.
The Blender devs decided to go a different route with their UI, because they didn’t want to be sheep, and felt they could do it better a different way. All power to them. I’m so glad they did, and showed the world that the traditional Maya / Max GUI is not the only way to make a 3D Software UI.
Gee dude, calling developers Autistic cos they don’t do things the way you like / want / or think they should…
Look. Personally i don’t like Maya or Max for a ton of reasons - far too many for me to list here.
And I especially dislike their UIs - probably because they are totally different from Blender, and I’m a Blender user for a long time.
But at least I have the humility and respect to recognise - that my preference for Blenders UI is just that - a User Preference.
Its not a Fact, that Blender’s UI is better than Max or Mayas - or vice versa.
A lot of it has to do with habit, and what we are used to. I’m used to Blender so i like that. You guys are used to Maya / Max - so you like that.
Why can’t you see that it’s just an opinion / a User Preference - and not a fact at all.
And going around saying that another software is ****, or talking about it in a negative and derogatory tone - because you don’t personally like it, is bigoted. Can’t you see that?
Some people like Coffee, some people like Tea. They are both good - they both have their flaws - but they are both good in their own way.
Why does it have to be that one is better than the other - can’t they just be different?
It is not a personal opinion. It is a fact.
It is like saying that you are using a tv set that has a clunky messed up beyond weird and almost unusable UI and remote control completely different to the standard ones and that along with a bunch of other customers that got those products you think to be right and that the manufacturer is better than anyone else and that must be the real standard because you get so passionate thinking that that is better and that’s it. While 99.99% of the population wouldn’t get it and they aren’t faster at changing channels so you think.
Or .. a manufacturer started giving away for free thousands if not millions of really weird looking mouses with such an odd shape that even with two hands it would be really hard to move and press its hundreds of tiny buttons and to even draw a single straight line with it on screen pressing eight buttons was required along with moving the mouse both horizontally and vertically because the manufacturer thought it was smart to add full gyro sensors and programmed the input device like no one else… So 99.99% of the population would keep using a usual mouse input device even with some small changes in shape so all using the same workflow but you and few others would think that that is not the correct way to do it… But unless humans turned into some sort of squids with dozens of hands and fingers and so on … the mouse was designed with humans in mind and for humans. That can’t be changed. And designing a better input device would require some smart thinking and analysis of how the human body works. You can’t just design whatever input device no matter the shape and expect humans to be able to use it properly and with the same ease as that.
I can only see a childish attitude here instead.
You are trying to negate basic facts about how the human brain works and reacts to UIs.
Did you know that UIs are designed following some standard guidelines? OR at least that is what developers should always think about when designing any UI for any software. UNFORTUNATELY there are many cases in the industry of developers not following standards properly and/or doing some terrible mistakes damaging products quality and usability in the process no matter how good then the underlying algorithms making the software would really be.
You can design the best software in any field… being it a professional engineering software or the best game ever made technically wise with outstanding features BUT if the UI is a huge mess and make the product almost unusable or requiring a very long time to memorize and become productive with it (or being able to play a game without getting stuck and unable to go any further) THEN you would be in big trouble. Your business would easily collapse because the few customers you might manage to get would not be really happy and you being in need to expand the user base to get money or funding would end up having to re-work everything UI related and maybe even forced to discontinue the product, change the name and re-sell it as another product to make people forget about the previous failure and accept a re-designed UI still with the same algorithms as before.
DarkS474 - While I agree with some of the things you’ve said about a UI needing to work and be functional. Sadly, I still don’t agree over all.
Why don’t we simplify things with a thought experiment to get to the crux of the matter.
You think the Max / Maya UI is the better designed.
I think the Blender UI is better designed.
Which one of us right?