Maya to Blender

First Steps

Because Blender just went to a radical new version, a lot of the docs are out of date, here's some hints

• Go to Blender.org and download blender for your platform
• Click here for the in progress 2.5 wiki manual.
• CgCookie has great video tutorials, mostly introductory, mostly free.
• Blender for Dummies 2nd Edition is 2.5 based.

Keymaps

Blender has customizable keymaps, you can change them in user preferences: File->User Preferences-> Input, but you can also download and install pre-made keymaps. Here's a good one, that modifies the keys for viewport controls and transformations (and keying):

Linky it has the download and also a table to show you what he changed.

• After downloading it you need to save it to your scripts folder.
  • Launch Blender
  • do help-> system info
  • Open a blender text editor, and click on the little text icon next to the 'New' Button in the header, and open system-info.txt
  • you should see the file path for your scripts folder, among other things.
• In Explorer/Finder/Nautilus/Dolphin/a terminal/whatever, save the keymap file to that folder.
• relaunch Blender
• File->User Preferences->Input
• click on the middle button that should say Blender by default, and switch it to the new Blender to Maya preset (not the blender default Maya one)
• click on all the buttons that say 'Edit' that are visible underneath
• click on Save User Preferences

FAQ

General

Q How do I find out hotkeys A Your best bet is to look in the menus/buttons. the hotkeys are displayed in the menus, or in tooltips on some buttons (if they have hotkeys). When asked, I'll probably resort to pointing you to the menu, since keymap changes may change the actual key for each user.