For those of you that work with Maya, I have created the Blender Monkey plug-in for Maya. Read about it here:
www.maartengribnau.com/BlenderMonkey.html
You can download it from my home page:
www.maartengribnau.com
Hopefully this plug-in will make you feel at home.
Have fun with it, Maarten
So, is it not possible to model a monkey with Maya? 
Hans Petter
o sure, but not as easy as in Blender :o
who could beat Add>Mesh>Monkey, ooh ooh ooh?
Hi maarten,
Thanks for sharing this great plug_in with us 
(while me ponders that this monkey on a maya screen can only
forbode the fear that the boys over at aliase/wavefront feel
that as free blender steps on its rivals as stairs on its way
to join (or conquer) maya at the top on the CG mountain
good to see your a member,and hope to see many more of your
posts.
daleDon’t worry, if they find out what the plug-in is really about, they will find it’s just a joke. The other plug-in on my home page is much more useful.
I hope Ton’s Blender Free software plans will succeed and that there will be a useful 3D tool from the people for the people. It would be a real challenge to bundle the talents of many developers and artists into a focussed effort to match the quality of tools like Maya. But it is worth to give it a try.
You know what really cracked me up about this post!? The thought of importing blender models into maya. Any experianced maya user would laugh at the thought. ahh maya’s manipulators are so much easier to use then blenders goofy way of moving verts on an xyz axis.
What are you trying to say?
A Blender importer for Maya is hilarious?
I think that some people moving from Blender to Maya would be very happy to read in their own Blender models.
Maya is better than Blender?
Well sure, but some aspects of Blender are unbeatable, the price for instance. Plus, I don’t think people need another “this 3D program is better than that one” thread.
I’m not a Maya user (and I bet others aren’t too), so, could someone elaborate about those “manipulators”?
thanks
Martin
I have sick nature that loves to see the blender zealots go crazy when thier program is belittled. Manipulaters-- they are what you use for rotatioin, scaling, and translation. Each axis is a different color and can easily be grabed. For translation when a vert, face, object, or anything is selected threre arrows appear each going in x,y, or z direction and you just click and drag on the arrow with the axis you want to move it on. Or the center if you just wan to freely move without a axis constraint. For rotating circles show up around what you have selected and all you have to do is click the axis you want to rotate or just free rotate. Scaling is the same as translation but a small box shows up for each axis. Just download the evaluation version of maya and try it. You can set all your hotkeys to correspond with your blender hotkeys. Maya manipulators are similars to hash’s and in my oppinion are the most intuitive way to move, scale, and size the fastest. Wings3d has ausome modelling tools but is a disaster when it comes to manipulators becuase it doesn’t have any you have to guess and know your orientation all the time to move stuff where you want it. Its a real pain in the ass or I would use that program for all modelling.
ah yes, but blender will have a nice advantage over maya. it is going to be open source! hence someone can program in a similar functionality of maya manipulators into blender! sorry for yelling!
well, maybe that’s just me, but even if there were graphical gizmos like this, I’d probably rely more on the hotkeys anyway. Not that having a graphical counterpart is a bad idea.
Martin
The graphical manipulators in Maya are a nice feature, but after trying them, I go back to Blenders hot key’s, and don’t give the Maya way a second thought (you don’t access them from hot keys, but from a drag and drool menu, shuddddder if they were accessed from the hot keys, it would be a very fast way to transform (doesn’t matter how the object is orientated (which view) you can stil transform on any axis)
Dude they are accessed from hotkeys. You can hotkey almost anything. Don’t talk about a program you don’t know crap about. Sheesh bigots! I like blender I like maya.
I used blender for 2 and half years, started around 1.7ish. I modelled and animated with it constantly, I know it like that back of my hand. I am now a sophmore animation student using maya. These people think I don’t know crap about blender. You really can’t understand how much nicer mayas manipulators are until you use the program for a good period of time. If you just try it one day and decide blenders goofy way is better then it is just your old set ways that are making the choice for you. If you really like hot keys then use wings, you have to hot key every axis with a seperate key combination for scaling, rotation, and translation. It isn’t faster then maya. In maya you don’t have to use orthographic vies to move stuff becues it is so easy to move rotate and scale on certain accesses. I wonder how many of these blender users remember the old website and my blender idol “iceman” the man who told it like it is. Man I miss his comments.
Realsoft3D has 3d manipulators that are pretty cool to use, too. they’re ‘automatic’ so no hotkeys, no menu. just there when you edit a mesh. depending where on the manipulator/object you click you can constrain to various types of operations- even beveling.
It seems like it would be cool to use. haven’t used realsoft too much, tho’ (waiting for 4.5 when/if it comes out)
Don’t forget the ‘normal’ manipulator when extruding and such! Lovely feature!
I am too a fan of the manipulators, they make work much easier. In XSI they are even mapped to mouse buttons, so after a while, if you use a three button mouse you get really fast using them. I dunno if its possible to map the manipulator axises in Maya to the mouse buttons, never gave much thought to it really…
Hey dud, I’ve been learning Maya since the learning edition came out, it’s a nice program. I haven’t had much luck getting some of the features working on my PowerBook though (some features work, but only with an external keyboard, and some only on the built in keyboard) I suppose it would work with out the problems I’ve had, if I was using a desk top machine, I bought a 3 button mouse to use with it because the standard Mac 1 button didn’t work at all. I too like both programs, I just don’t bother doing much in the way of rendering (with Maya), the watermark is a real stopper for that (for me personally) and purchasing the program just to get rid of the watermark isn’t going to happen any time soon. It is a really nice program with lots of features though.
Sheesh children
I like the manipulators. They are in LW as well. They are probably pretty standard in 3D.
Ya, they probably are pretty standard. Haven’t used Light Wave or xsi.
Every progam has it’s streanths and weekness. Just don’t like very uninformed comments like velik’s.
Heres what a few have to say about mister monkey Plugin
^v^