Help deciding on Blender

I figure I should post this up because the blenderartists community seems really friendly.

So Im a beginner at blender. I can work my way around it but everything still is in that uneasy-feeling territory.
As far as Ive seen, it can do essentially everything needed for a hobbyist. I just cant get myself to fully commit to blender, heres why.

Before trying blender, I used Maya. I like Maya’s simplicity. I like its simple UI. It was the first 3D package ive learned and stuck with for years. Back then when I first jumped into 3D, I trialed maya, max, and blender. Maya clicked with me. Clean UI was a big plus. Im comfortable in it, no threat of “oh god what do I do” or any googling.

Im considering Blender because of its amazing stability. Im used to Maya crashes but 2017 brought it to an all time high. To the point where Ive invested a few weeks in blender as a maybe-viable alternative. Im tired of losing work over the
crashing. The way things are going, it seems like it would only get worse.

In blender I actually like sculpting in it. I like messing with cycles and its material shader network. I really REALLY like modifiers. I just cant get over the UI and keybinds. Certain features are scattered everywhere buried in menus. In maya, I had a nice row of icons with everything I needed. Every operation was a click away and if it wasnt, I could set it up easily. Everything was well documented and categorized.

I know people say “blender is fast” but really moving the mouse a few pixels and clicking is just as fast as pressing two keys for me. So speed isnt a concern. Its just the UI. Being trained in Maya is making this a nightmare. I love and hate blender.

I just cant decide fully on what to do in this situation. Love blender except the UI. Love Maya for the simple UI but hate it for the crashing.

Has anyone gone through this? Any tips or advice? I keep telling myself “Just stick with it” but its like constant pain trying to ignore the security of Maya for the insecurity of blender. Sorry if I dont make sense, my english isnt so great.

If you like Maya the Maya gui/workflow I would say the battle is between Blender, Modo and C4D (*). All of them has their strengths and weaknesses and imo choosing between them is just a question of trial and error. I think the easiest way would be to create the same thing in all three apps and see the differences for yourself. What that thing is, well, you know what you usually do in Maya, so… :wink:

(* Personally I tried to get into all of them (more than once) over the years, but I just can’t, for some reason they just aren’t that compatible with how my mind works)

I mean. Blender workflow is faster than Maya if you learn the shortcuts. If you’re willing to learn that is. For a complex software as Blender where you can literally do anything on it of course the GUI is going to suffer. There is nothing on the market that can compete with Blender in that regard.

All I can recommend is that you make left mouse click instead of right click. And shift + middle mouse button to rotate.

You can edit pie menu and put there tools what you using more frequently
I personally used Lightwave 7.1 and 3D max but l must say Blender shortly is a GREAT!

Forget Maya for 6 weeks and don’t use it, instead use Blender and not only play around with it, use it for an project.
That is the best and fastest way to learn imho.
If you got fluent with Blender you can go back working with Blender and Maya.
It is possible to learn more than one 3d DCC (even simultaneously) and be happy with it, but it takes some more drive and enthusiasm.

Why not have the best of both worlds :slight_smile:

Custom Blender Setup | Silo/Maya- esque

There’s a demo vid in that thread. Although it’s quite outdated, it’s from the time of the 1st public incarnation of my setup, it can still give you an idea of what’s there. I did tweak it considerably since, and it does feel much better.

The setup is super easy to install/remove. Basically that’s what I use both at work and for personal projects. Everything except some paid addons that I have to rip out of the setup to share it.

This is another one, rSelection Addon by PLyczkowski.

Im kind of willing and kind of not. Some of the keybinds make you take your hand off the mouse if you cant reach them. Lots of “stop and google what the keybind is” gets frustrating when you’re used to having things organized in self explanatory menus. Ive switched the controls so thats helped a bit.

I dont buy the “it can do anything so the gui would suffer” problem. As far as ive seen, blender and maya do the same thing in terms of modeling except blender can sculpt and texture among other things. Maya can sculpt and texture to but it lacks dynatopo (I think 2018 may come with that though). Blender feels like a bunch of dudes using the same toolbox tossed in more tools but didnt bother organizing them. Modo solved it beautifully with rooms however.

Gonna try blender again for like the 5th time.

Good idea. Im just concerned with losing time but I waste more time wondering if Blender stability is worth getting familiar with a whole different beast. Gonna do it though, even gonna uninstall Maya and keep my scripts backed up to avoid the “F it, Ill just use Maya” mentality I keep falling into. Reinstalling Maya with all the updates takes forever so that should be a great deterrent.

Blender has a video editor, camera tracker, game engine, compositor and zbrusk like sculpter too. The feature set is huge compared to Maya. The GUI would suffer even more if everything was visible all the time.

Also the workflow in Blender is based on shortcut keys. The workflow is really fast once you get a hang of it.

One tip is to use the spacebar and type the function, it might have the hotkey listed beside the function you typed.

You have to be persistent, you won’t forget how to use other software once you learn Blender.

This is my first post here, so hi everyone. :slight_smile:

As for the topic, I’m in a simillar situation.
Many times I downloaded Blender, tried to get along, don’t get much done
and switched back to my other 3D software.

As for the advice,
please consider that I’m an hobbyist, not even an artist.
I just love to mess around with CG software and do some modeling
or what ever seems to be fun.
So take this rather as an opinion than an educated advice.

Blender has a ‘Maya UI setting’, have you tried this one?
I dont know Maya, so I don’t know how simmilar this UI is,
but I can get along much better with this UI setting .

There is a Bforartist branch of Blender with a lot of Icons, if that’s what you want.
I only had the time to play around with it for some hours, so all I can say is,
that it looks very promissing.

As for other Software,
if you want to spend a lot of money, Cinema 4d might be worth a look.
I’ts rock stable and very intuitive to operate.
Of course, this depends on what you want to accomplish.
C4D migth not have the newest and coolest feature set.

Sorry, but I have to ask:
If you were happy with an older version of Maya, but hate the update,
why don’t you stay with the older version?
Most updates these days don’t have ground breaking new features anyway?

hope that helps somehow and please excuse my spelling and the weird grammer. :wink:

Of course it’s gonna be daunting to learn a new software when you are used to another. It wouldn’t matter if you had tried to jump into Max, Modo or any other software you don’t know from Maya. I personally know how to use Max, Blender, C4D and Maya but if I tried to jump into Lightwave I would be having a hard time getting used to it.

I remember wanting to rip my hair out when I was learning Blender but now I can’t live without the hotkeys. Besides, Blender’s UI is not as unlike Maya’s as you might think. Try right-clicking on the header (the little menu on the bottom of the 3D view where you have the “View, Select, Add & Object” buttons) and select “Flip to top”. Already you will have a more Maya-like setup where you’ll have the ‘shelf’ and the tool menus.

Then you can also enable the pie menu addons that are included in Blender by default and you can customize the pie hotkeys to act more or less exactly like in Maya.

This guys video helped with a Maya navigation scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12fqTUyDts0 so it made blender feel at home. Im gonna try Bforartists, thanks for that suggestion.

I was happy with older versions of maya but there’s some plugins I use that work with 2016 and 2017 only. Theyre already part of my workflow. At this point I may as well try something else if I have to drop 2017. I never thought of C4D. Maybe I look into it if blender doesnt work out.

All I can recommend for training is CG Cookie and after that CG Masters.net

I have worked extensively in 3DS Max, Maya, Modo, and Blender. I can confidently say that the UI in Blender is the best and easiest to use in my honest opinion once you get it figured out. It’s really quite good. Also Blender is easier to model in because of this. Hard to describe why, it just is for me.

exact me, my background is Maya and I love it, but it’s super heavy and unreliable for now, and thanks to Autodesk it is going same way. my main workflow is Maya for Modeling, Cinema 4D for rendering…but after some mind blowing videos about GPU renderers I decide to experience it. as a hobby I find that buying Octane for 270$ would not be really funny and just about week ago I bought GTX1050Ti + Second Monitor(in price of octane license, and yes I did not have crazyass GPU), than downloaded Blender with its built in Physically correct unbiased GPU render engine for FREE. I watched tut that u mentioned to configure maya navigation, also some very cool “Black Hole” tut and wooow, this soft is very fast n powerful…I tried to remember about 10 hotkey and woala, its not that hard and it is very nice piece of soft to learn…I made goal to make one simple project fully in Blender, rendered with Cycles GPU…aaaand? and I love GPU realtime rendering and how stable Blender is even on my old 8GB ram pc when I subdividing 2+Million polygons…here is some results am working on now, at the end I am going to render 10 15 sec animation (kinda product shots)…

just check this unbelievably incredibly mind blowing tutorial for FREE again - Creative Shrimp - HDR IMAGE-BASED LIGHTING IN BLENDER

this is my first post and forum does not let me upload pictures, here is some imagehosts and hope moderators will understund
Image 1
[Image 2](https://ibb.co/kjjhca https://ibb.co/c00cAv)

hope u will find this as a motivator and will try to punch Autodesk in balls…cheers guys, love Blender

SeeTheSky

Dude are u here? or already decide to drop Blender…believe me its awesome soft, I posted pictures of bottle…here look this now: Bottle Animation

I made it all in blender after I first time opened it, all took me about 3 weeks, learning doing so on…and am very pumped to do another one, GPU rendering is very cool and this soft is lovely peace of cookie…also u should see whats will be added in this year, look very cool in perspective…

do not run away, Blender is cool