Hello there guys, i’m in the process of moving from max to blender, but having issues mainly dealing with modeling speed.
i made two videos, one where i model an object in max, the other in blender to showcase my workflow.
currently i work at half speed of what i do in max, trying to get to grips with the UI and tools.
any tips/tricks to help me speed up my workflow would be greatly appreciated.
in max:
in blender
One thing that will speed up your workflow drastically is to use some basic key shortcuts.
s to scale, sz scale on z axis, sy scale on y axis, sz scale on z axis. You can also use scale factor numbers, sz2 (scale on z axis by2) etc
g to move you can use the same extensions gz2 etc
r to rotate rz90 (rotate 90º on the z axis) etc
When you get used to them you will find them much faster than using the gizmo.
Just these 3 shortcuts will help you speed up a lot.
Also instead of changing tools all the time shortcuts are much faster.
e to extrude ez2 etc
Ctrl r to loop cut (hover over the face you want to cut). Ctrl r6 (6 cuts)
When you hit a short cut extra key options available are shown on the bottom bar.
There are many shortcuts in Blender and you can also set your own. I know it takes time to get used to them and you will probably not learn them all (I have not), but learning the ones for the most common tools in your workflow will speed you up a lot.
Another good thing about using shortcuts is that they do not make the tool “active” (persistent).
I usually leave the active tool as select and use as many shotcuts as I can for basic operations. This makes things much faster as you simply select a face e to extrude, s to scale Ctrl r to make a new loop cut etc without having to go to the tools.
alright thanks, i’ll try that out. you got any tips for improving UV mapping workflow as well? any way to quickly scale and select UV islands?
i’ve set up a few shortcuts, although i struggle with setting up custom shortcuts since they sometimes overwrite other functions, and causes blender to act strangely. i accidentally removed some shortcuts as well… oh btw, any way of setting up modifier keys like in max? or do i have to do it through python?
You can set up custom keystroke for any operator, no Python required. Just go to Keymap in Preferences and click Add New 
For working with UV maps more quickly - you can press L on a face in Edit Mode to select faces that are part of the same island. If you split your workspace- viewport on one side, UV editor on the other- you can very quickly grab a face, press L, move to the other side of the screen, press S, and scale that way. You can also select islands directly in the UV editor. Another useful thing is the Synchronize Selection button in the UV editor- looks like two arrows going in a loop, up in the header. Turn that on and your edit mode selection = your UV selection
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to set your own shortcuts right now…
It will help you catching up with blender faster because you’ll be able to set it up like you used to do…
But will it help you to get used to how blender is supposed to work in the long run ?
Start by watching some basics tutorials and don’t focus on speed right now… especially if you’re planning to use it on a regular basis. I understand that’s going through the basics again but you’ll be able to get good habits right from the start.
Eventually you’ll be able to work quite fast, most of the time blender is oriented toward working fast and simple.
Alright thanks. i have added back some of the keyboard shortcuts with “Add new” however, i am not exactly certain the rules for it. where it says “none” i added in some existing tags, but not sure the exact functionality.
for the UV editor, you should watch the video to see my current workflow. i have Synchronize enabled, and utilize the “l” shortcut key although i have remapped it to “4” to mimick elements mode in max.
however what specifically slows me down in the UV editor is non-uniform UV island scaling.
in max i have set up the unfold map to also automatically scale down the UVs to a specific scale, and move them off to the side of the UVmapping area. does Blender have such functionality?
also, the stitch function slows me down a bit. i have set the shortcut key to alt+S, but it does not stitch to the currently selected, instead a list pops up that asks me which part i wish to stitch to.
is there any way to have it automatically move stitch to the selected edge?
another issue i had previously was with stitching to another object.
in max you have a function that automatically scales the island to be stitched down to the selected island, however i could not find this functionality in blender. the only workaround was to match scale, and this ruins the scaling relative to other parts, so is not a good option.
any help with this would be appreciated, as i’d like to at least increase my modeling speed in blender to be on par with that in max.
While UV editing is a bit subpar out of the box, there’s some great addons that can add the functionality you’re looking for. Magic UV comes with Blender, you just have to turn it on, and there’s a bunch of paid ones on BlenderMarket as well. I’m personally a huge advocate for UVPackmaster3, although that may be more than you’re looking for
thanks, i’ll look into magic UV and probably packmaster eventually. that locked stack functionality looks really nice.
Went through the same process. It takes a bit of practice to build the muscle memory and learn the shortcuts, but from personal experience I’m at least 2-3 times faster in blender now than I ever was in 3ds MAX after using it professionally for 10+ years.
DNorman already mentioned using the hotkeys for scale/rotate/translate r/s/g. for Rotate/Scale/Grab
You can lock movement to an axis by pressing x/y/z
And you can lock movement to a plane by pressing shift x/y/z
Here’s some of other hotkeys I’ve found useful. This is off the top of my head.
Tab to go to edit mode,
1/2/3 to switch between select verts/edges/faces
/ : on the numpad isolates and centers your zelection.
h : hides, alt h unhides (alt is used almost everywhere to do the opposite of a hotkey)
ctrl r adds an edge loop
m : Merges selection (merge verticesm edges etc …)
f : creates a face with your selected verts
k : knife tool. c: makes it cut through the object.
o : activates proportional editing (soft select) use Mouse wheel while editing to interactively adjust the distance
Numpad period : focus selection
L : Select linked (important when doing UV’s)
Shift L : Select Linked by data type (material, data, etc )
ctrl L : Link object data between multiple objects
alt L : Unlink
When doing UV’s
The quick and dirty way is in edit mode, Select a vertex. Ctrl click another vertex. This selects all the vertices along the shortest path between the two. Ctrl E, Mark/Unmark your seams then menu/ UV unwrap. Live unwrap lets you do it even faster. In edit mode while in select faces mode, if you hover over a a face and press L that selects the UV island that face belongs to.
Ctrl A = Apply transforms (Reset xform)
Alt g : Resets the translations to zero
Alt R : Resets rotations to zero
Alt S Resets scale to 1
Shift C Resets cursor to zero
Shift D copies your object.
Alt clicking an edge selects the loop
Ctrl clicking 2 vertices selects shortest path between the two
Shift S : Snap menu
A common operation is Shift s Cursor to selected , select another object Shift S Selection to cursor or in object menu Origin to 3d cursor.
There’s a lot more, I’d strongly suggest printing out a chart like this and keeping it handy when you’re working : https://www.giudansky.com/illustration/infographics/blender-map
As others have said shortcuts.
Shortcuts is 90% of getting faster. Not only in Blender but also in every other software.
You should use shortcuts for all the stuff you do very frequently like transforming, navigating, extruding, local viewing and stuff like that.
For slightly less frequent operators use the quick favorites menu in combination with shortcuts. You can right click buttons and even search menu items and assign them to the quick favorites.
For example, I have “grid fill” in my quick favorites menu. The quick favorites is called with “q”. While the quick favorites menu is open (or in fact any menu) you can see that the menu items have underlined characters. These underlines show which shortcut will trigger them.
In this case I can press “q” “g” and it will trigger “grid fill”.
This is a gazillion times faster than selecting “grid fill” from a menu the side bar or a quad view.
You can even put menus into the quick favorites. I have the view menu inside of my quick favorites menu for example for screenshotting the viewport. Pressing “q,v,i” is faster than going to the view menu and looking for the “Viewport Render Image” item.
The nice thing here is that it is easy to remember these shortcut combinations because they allways start with “q” and are ususally followed by the first character of the operator you want to trigger.
The search menu is another speed up possibility for stuff that is a couple of layers down in the UI. I find it a lot faster to hit “F3” and typing first couple of characters than clicking through several layers of menus.
And finally you can put the “tools” menu in the onto the space bar.
preferences → keymap - preferences → spacebar action
Hitting space bar will make the tool bar pop up right under you mouse. Seeing that you are used to the quad menu in Max this might be a familiar work flow.
Just to add a bit to these very good tips, if you press G to move something you can press shift-Z to move the object in every direction except for Z.
And also holding alt while rotating the camera to the front for example will lock the camera in front orthographic view which is very useful for modelling
thats nice, i’d like to see a video of this workflow in action. could you make the device i posted fully unwrapped in 2-3 minutes?
It can be done fairly quickly with good tools and good hotkeys. Here’s me using BoxCutter addon to do it:
Anyway, just keep in mind that the default Blender’s keymap is really, really, I mean really crappy, so it takes quite a while to get anywhere close to 3ds Max efficiency. I had to create my own keymap from scratch.
Blender is good, but they are doing the best they can to scare the new users away with the keyboard and mouse mapping.
oh man, really nice, that’s what 3ds max probooleans should have been.
I’d recommend watching a few modeling tutorials too (Blender Guru’s anvil series helped me a lot back then). Sure, you don’t need any explaining what polygons or vertices are but some things are just done differently in Blender. By bringing old Max habits into it or trying to do things the same way you might restrict yourself.
And yes, shortcut-wise, Blender is heaven compared to Max. Only after switching I realized how much I hate to search for tiny little buttons all the time. I’d recommend sticking with the defaults at first though.
Personally I find Blenders Keymap to be pretty good besides a couple of really silly choices.