Manipulator Hotkey

Hi there,

i am new to blender and in the process of changing from other 3D software to blender.

One thing that saves you quite a bit of time over the day in other soft, is the ability to change the 3d manipulator with a hotkey.

I found the blender hotkey reference, its a bit much for a beginner, but a search for ‘manipulator’ and ‘handle’ did not bring up anything.

Is there such a hotkey to switch between transform/rotate/scale manipulator, or can i add it somehow?

Thanx.

We don’t really use manipulators dedicated to rotating, scaling, grabbing etc. in Blender3D (I guess that’s why they don’t have hotkeys), though hotkeys S (scale), R (rotate) and G (translate) is the way to go when using Blender.
Apart from the dedicated manipulator modes that can be clicked in the bottom bar, you could make a hotkey script quite easily in python to let you access these modes using hotkeys.
Also double-clicking the R and G hotkeys brings you into different rotate modes and translate (edge slide) modes.

Cheers!

Thank you very much, assigning own hotkeys helps very much.

There are two reasons why i prefer manipulators over the s/r/g method:

a) Move/Scale/Rotate along the selection normal

b) Move/Scale two axis at once, by Shift+Alt clicking the handles

Is this also possible with the s/r/g commands?

Is this also possible with the s/r/g commands?
Yes
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/3D_interaction/Transform_Control/Transform_Orientations

For two axis use shift to exclude the 3rd axis. G Shift+Z constrains the transforms along just the X and Y axis