If you scroll down a bit you will see an image with teapots on it, click on it, it is a UI setup that is more appealing to max/maya users I guess.
dunno if it’s been mentioned, but: change the mouse selection from right to left, and change the rotation style from trackball to turntable; these give you more comfortable behaviors (from maya users perspective)
you can find all those in the user-preferences area.
The main thing you will find annoying with Blender is the renderer. Modelling is great and fast (though no NGons yet). And for free it has physics, particles and fluids built in.
Great effects can be had if you search around for decent tuts. Also you can always use an external renderer such as Indigo or LuxRender or even Yafaray.
It should also be possible to use Colada or even FBX to import your Blender meshes back into Maya and feed your model into Mental Ray.
Thanks for all the replies guys. I’ve just downloaded 2.47 (what good timing with the improved snapping tools 
) and will give it a run tonight or tomorrow.
If your having a hard time zooming in ( sometimes it just slows down ) select whatever your working on, and hit the period (.) key on the numpad.
Hi guys back again, I’ve imported a really old lightwave project of mine and am starting to convert it over (impressed the subsurf modifiers automatically add themselves).
Thing is that I’ve noticed an object can have an object name but it also has a data block name. Should the object and datablock have the same name? Can I ignore the default (mesh:001) data block name for now?
They can if you want, but there is no reason to. The nice thing is that you can model a chair and name its datablock Chair, and then you can make a linked duplicate (Alt D), and name the objects Chair_1, Chair_2, Chair_3; they all use the same datablock, Chair.
Ah right I see - Thanks!
I’m at work at the moment so can’t scour the manual, my LW object came in as a different mesh per original surface. How do I merge all the separate meshes into one mesh?
I didn’t double check but it should be ctrl + j. Select the objects you want to join then hit ctrl + j. I may be mistaken but all the objects inherent the attributes of the most recently select object when joining.
Cheers linuxpimp21 - that’s the ticket
and after that joining, the parts are all in one object, but still separate, so in edit mode,
push W-Key >> Remove Doubles while everything in the object’s selected.