wants I stumble upon this blog, when I was lookin for something completly diffrent. A open source organization in Thailand Blender UI to work like Maya UI, and have asked a programmer if he could do that.
I’ve been contacted by a government-funded open-source advocacy organization in Thailand. They asked me if I could make Blender user interface work like Maya’s.
Don’t know how old this article is (kind of hard to tell the date), but I if find it very interesting that some open-source organization want to change Blener’s UI so that it looks like Mayas. Anyone who have heard anything about it?
Yes, broken’s sciptable button interface would give you that nice big button bar across the top of the screen. Maybe for the next version after the redesign of the underlying infrastructure. Ton has said he’s thinking of taking on the task for 2.5 so that project may want to wait a bit? Just guessing here, or exercising an over-active imagination. We already have the space bar pop-up. With the scriptable interface it might be possible to add menu items as well? Again, there’s a lot of sci-fi background noise in that line of thought.
Making the UI customizable, so that you have the option of creating a ‘maya version’ is pretty cool. But I certainly hope they leave that as an option and nothing more. Maya’s UI drives me crazy; Blender’s UI is so much faster and easier to use.
It might be great for people who want to get into CG as a career. They can learn with the Maya UI and then going into a job where they use Maya might not be so difficult. Although, Maya and Blender have completely different toolsets, so there would have to be some differences.
i personally don’t like the Maya interface, i think if anyone is going to rewrite the blender interface make customizable so that you go to a menu and choose which interface you want to work with, ie people who like the Maya interface can pick that interface from that menu. (this might be where different factions start building different versions/distos of blender altogether)
Hmmm… I’m not convinced that it is such a good idea. Why should blender look like maya? they are very different beasts. The most worrying thing about the whole idea of change blender’s UI is the fact that there is SOOoooo much blender documentation out there on the web, that changeing everything around would mean it is all virtually redundant!!
If you want Maya’s interface… go get Maya.
Me… well, I’m happy enough with blenders UI… it needs a shake of course (the button hacks I have seen around look good for instance) but I think loosing all the tutorials just so you can dress up as a commercial app isn’t worth the effort.
So for me, the only Maya keystroke I’m gonna learn is ALT-F4!
J
what is so much better about mayas UI? you can cut and slice windows and load different modules into it. you can do that with blender as well. and c4d. i must be missing something here.
the only thing which bugs me very much about blender is:
no custom hot keys
the menu structure is bad. all functions should be accessible via the space bar menu.
i recently missed few tools because i thought the window header menus and the space menu are the same.
having no windows is fine with me. thats what i liked in maya, different slicing of the main window and loading different modules.
and with blender you can also have different layouts.
isnt that great?
I used maya for a couple years and then i started using blender because i had to travel down to the college where my dad works to use the non-personally learning addition.
So I end up finding blender and i download all the video tutorials off the website. And I have to say that blender has the best U.I. of the two but thats my personally preference.
i get the impression the original blog post requires the maya UI so they can hire existing trained maya animators. xsi’s done this to entice users over, seems to work. i’ve just started a job where we’re required to use xsi, the maya mode has been a life-saver.
wouldn’t take much… the alt-key camera nav, q/w/e/r for select/trans/rot/scale, s to set a key. that’d get 80% of existing maya character animators running very quickly.
i am not so crazy about blenders UI compared to Maya or C4D.
They are in my opinion pretty much the same.
but whats nice about blender is that the workflow is faster.
as stupid as it might sound to people but x for del is faster to access than the delete key. all those unique things to blender makes working wiht it fast.
however you need to keep in mind how many features maya has. and their tool set is very structured. blender is kind a mess in that case.
I’m glad that a fully customizable GUI is on the cards at last. Now people have the option of a Maya-like GUI if they want it. Or any other kind of GUI they can dream up.
Can’t wait for the overhaul. Some quick thoughts of what I’d like to see, on top of the aforementioned key remapping and stuff.
Broken’s toolbar from the old Tuhopuu.
Ability to close panels, and a menu for which panels to show.
Lock cursor patch should be included.
Option to configure Blender’s mouse like Maya, Max or whatever - like Wings does it.
Make tweak mode an option (Many newcomers from other apps will be used to this behavior).
It would be nice to have a setting that would change the hotkeys and stuff to match the keyboard shortcuts of Maya. But it would have to be optional, and not the default. That way, all those awesome tutorials would still work.
What would be better for me, but will never happen, would be for Maya to have a setting that would change the Maya hotkeys and UI to match Blender’s. It sure would make my Maya classes easier.
I think ideally Blender would come with a ‘first startup dialog’ that would allow you to choose between interface presets. It would default to the normal Blender UI, but you could choose your Maya or Lightwave UI, or even a ‘beginner UI’ that has more extensive labels or something like that. That would be a huge benefit to the new users who currently have no idea where to begin.
The old tutorials would still work fine, since it would be clear that you need to be in Blender mode to do them.
