I have a major Issue !

First of all I want to say Blender Is simply amazing and realy getting in the way on Autodesk Bigtime.

We at our studio are starting to think about Using it as our main 3D Editor.

The Issue is the workflow! everyting is better than any other tool or getting better, But ! the Snaping and Radial menu and shortcuts are completly unfriendly. I am 4x slower in blender compare to maya and I am working very hard to master it.

my Big recommendation make a good radial menu keyboard shortcus with CTRL+Alt+Shift is a Big No
Maya does something great and it is the flow of work. Do something like this. Blender will become king.

no worries I still like the tool in fact i love it
Cheers.

If there are to be any significant changes to Blender it will most likely happen with version 2.8. If there are no changes then, well I wouldn’t hold your breath for a while after that.

Speaking as a fellow user I understand how you feel about the current interface. For the time being, I do recommend adding a reprogrammable pad, such as the Belkin Nostromo. It won’t completely solve the issue, but as a basic example I hate having to press Ctrl+Alt+Q just to switch between single and quad view, and I really do not want the hassle of remapping Blenders shortcuts. On a pad you simply assign Ctrl+Alt+Q to a single button. It certainly helped when switching over from Max to Blender…

Pie Menu? . Or are you saying you have the Pie Menu and you don’t like it?

Yes, Pie Menu workflow is really really slow, i disabled it when it was first introduced

I faced this when coming from Maya, but then realized I was not supposed to expect that in pie menus, but instead in keyboard shortcuts. Once I moved from Maya’s way of pie menus(I really liked this in Maya to be honest) to keyboard shortcuts, everything improved dramatically for me. Having said that, yes, the default keymaps and pie menus do not seem sufficient for me as well. I have a custom origins menu, and really want to make something more logical for snapping, proportional editing, pivot point and transform orientations and Add menu - these features should be reachable from pie menus in my opinion. But I am not sure what you mean to say about snapping. After spending some time to familiarize myself with the features and Blender’s way of snapping I was really impressed coming from Maya. I would even say that I find Blender’s snapping functionality more advanced and more complete than Maya’s.

Use my pie menus guys, not the officials.

It’s indeed very efficient!

For anyone coming from other DCC apps, I would recommend to first understand preferences, learn how to customize hotkeys and make menus(pies, popups, panels etc), then make a common workflow for yourself or your collective. Python operators would be good next step - just take simpleOperator Template and copy few things from info tab in there to create macros. You’re guaranteed to be several times faster than any software you are used to as Blender’s extremely flexible and will compliment you in any way you prefer to work.

I can recommend the Pie Menu Editor it’s not free but it’s amazing.

Don’t like the current menus? create your own! Nothing has improved my speed as this add-on. Nowdays it’s super easy to get any UI element into a pie menu or just a regular menu.

If you are working in a studio and are 3-5 artist, you could export and share the menu. You should have a streamlined workflow for your tasks in days. less than a week. 1-2 days to learn how to make custom menus, then 2-3 days to test out in every aspect.

Then maybe some weeks to tweak and trim.

Also you can set any shortcuts you want, and nest menus within menus. There really is no excuse to not use it, in my opinion.

Maya user myself. Yes Mayas marking menu is great.
Not missing it much in Blender because of the key shortcuts you can use instead.

Both do the same and I am equally fast in both apps.

I think you might just have to make that switch to not expect Blender work like Maya but understand how Blender works.

Blender pie menus are not great, but if you use only hotkeys, with a few changes in the base shortcuts you have a better workflow than in any other software.

As someone using Blender pie menus and not having used Maya, could someone explain to me what’s so great about Maya and what’s not so great about Blender pies? Thanks.

I think the only difference is the way they are set up. In Maya you can reach a lot of stuff with gestures because the menus branch out and are context sensitive. A lot of tasks can become muscle memory which is just awesome because it feels then as if you were just staring at the screen and wishing something to appear there and your hands just do the stuff without you thinking about it. If we talk about functionality I think absolutely everything is already there in Blender’s pie menus if not even more. It’s just that you cannot do much with them by default. Maya has a lot more of them set up, that’s it. Of course you can set them up for yourself in Blender, but then when you sit in front of another machine without your preferences you just loose all of your superpowers. Pitiwazou's menus look awesome, I think it would be nice, if Blender came with them by default. I think there is still loads of stuff that could be added to defaults. No one can know what you need in your menus better than you yourself, but at the moment I would say Blender’s pie menus lack stronger defaults for people to be able to build their customization on top. I imagine it would not be an easy task to make strong defaults, but in my opinion they should contain all the functionality for the main usages of the program. That’s a ridiculous amount of work. But that’s what they attempted to do with Maya. Well there is just way too much stuff in Maya for it work. But it feels to me as if they went a bit further. I think it’s a lot easier for mouse gestures to become muscle memory as opposed to keyboard shortcuts. I think pie menus in combination with keyboard shortcuts can be an amazing thing. It just needs to be developed a bit more. That’s what everybody is doing for themselves at the moment.

as said before…every software nehaves differently and to expect one to react quickly in a way that another software does is impractical…in blender hotkeys are king…not trying to troll or be difficult, but it is true…and hotkey are generally faster than a pie menu any way…gestures are also good…maybe this is one area blender needs improvement in, but I am not big on gestures.

but for hotkeys the learning curve is steeper and the payoff greater.

Hey Guys!

Wow I haven’t expected that of my thread. I am Happy to see that I am not the only one.
Grosso modo, Indeed maya understood how to became muscle memory which is best It become so natural that sometimes when I try to show something to someone, I just can’t tell him/her, I just show.

1st of all Snapping in maya, moving orientation to edge to vertice to face workflow, is simply easy and efficient . I belive blender Is better overall, but so much coplex to use.

3D cursor !! Great but we need to fix it… mabe integrating it with the Gizmo 3D so you could give it orientation and snapping it the same time…I know Grab x y or z etc but it is slow and havig to push the right axis 2 ou 3 time to switch in Local Global or normal is good but confusing.

contextual Pie menu need to be reworked or just copy it. But How I See blender right now the comunity can do better, it does allready better in mostly everything. (except Zbrush but it is comming i am pretty sure)

Look also the knive tool very good mix it with maya Cut tool it is perfect.

Maya made the QUAD Draw… witch is an amasing tool for modeling I use it a LOT but here i feel only the way of welding extruding and creating polys would be an interesting place to start… i havent been looking for such a tool in Blender Yet, I am still working the basic flow.

I belive these are my main concern for the basic flow in Blender to feel natural and less engeneered or technical(WICH IS GREAT DONT LOOSE IT)

Cheers

Ill try those Pie menu script Thanks a lot!

I don’t care about Maya a single bit any more. Blender suits my purpose way better than Maya. And I use all the keyboard shortcuts with no problems at all and I use pie menus in Blender as well. I am just saying I think its easier for gestures following pie menus to become muscle memory and it just so happens I realized this using Maya. You can have modifier keys, context sensitive stuff and two mouse motions following a pie menu and then sub menu. This way there is a lot of combinations for a lot of functions. It makes sense that it’s easier to remember the movements automatically than keyboard shortcuts alone if you work with one hand on the mouse and another on the keyboard. If I need to press . or , with my left hand while I have my right hand on the mouse I need to look at the keyboard and I cannot make this process a habit that easily. I still need to look at the keyboard if I want to set a different pivot point type.

I think left click pie menus are a great idea. You can have 448 functions with modifier keys and left-click if you use pie menus with 8 sub-menus that have 8 items each. And that is without different menus in different contexts. There can be menus depending on what is selected say face edge or vertex and so on. Pitiwazou's menus have one example with tab where there is a sub pie menu: https://i.giphy.com/media/kwu4fgVpF1LDegmTW5/source.gif

I wish to make a convenient system for myself where this way using only something like modifier keys, selection context and left click I would have access to all the modelling tools in w, ctrl+e, ctrl+f, ctrl+v menu functions as well as pivot point control, snapping, origin point control, transform orientations, selection tools and modifiers. Wouldn’t that be just awesome? I think it would for me. If I ever find the time.

I think I will attempt that in 2.8 when it comes out. Now it doesn’t make much sense to invest so much time to it for it to break in a few months.

Hummmm I believe my last post has been lost… It never showed…

Made a video about this.

Is there any problem with my posts?? They are not showing

Wow Merci pour la Vidéo :slight_smile: je crois que je comprends bien la base de Blender un peu de pratique ca devrais bien aller :slight_smile:
Personnellement il y aura toujours de l’amélioration a apporter au logiciel. So far so good !
je regarde tout ca .