Various noob questions.

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi I am an experienced Maya user. I am trying to figure out Blender which seems to have a great price/performance ratio!:wink: But I am running into some naggin issues I would like to clear up.

For one thing, whenever I "Add > Something " it creates the something at some seemingly random position and random angle in the scene. I don’t know what I did to start this behaviour but I would rather just have new objects be created at the origin with 0 rotations.

Another annoyance is that whenever I add an object the program switches to Edit Mode for some reason.

Another small thing (and I will probably have many more of these type of questions in the future): is there a way to make it so you can box-select by default? So like if you click and release over something it will select it but if you click and drag it will do a selection box. It is just a natural thing in most 3D apps so I hope I can get that in Blender.

Also, I’m confused about how Blender handles scene settings. Or maybe I do understand how they work and I’m just disappointed. It seems to me that in order to save any settings changes you make you have to select File > Save Default Settings which then also saves the current file you are working on as the default scene when you go File > New. That is dumb. How do you save settings without messing up the starting scene? I have of course messed up the starting scene. It is just a blank scene with no cube or camera or light, which I kind of miss. Well the cube I don’t really care about but the scene should have a default camera and light, but they should be more like hidden things that you don’t have to think about and when you add real lights to the scene the default light turns off.

This brings me to another conundrum. I would expect that you could just render the current viewport but you need to have an actual camera, fine. But then how can you control the camera in a viewport with the normal pan/dolly/orbit controls? As soon as you try that the view detaches from the camera and you see the camera in front of you like an out-of-body experience.

2

HI Moss,

Welcome :slight_smile:

Objects are created at the “3d Cursor”. LMB to place the cursor. If you want to create at 0,0,0 press SH-C to re (Menu:View / Align View / Center Cursor and View All)

For 0,0,0 rotations, you need to create from the Top View (NUMPAD 7)

AFAIK, no, you need to press “b” to enable box select

That’s another “feature” :slight_smile: UI settings are saved with each file.You can either set your settings from a starting “default scene” or if you’ve changed the windows / views etc, to how you like them, save that file, then when you initially open another file, in the Open File dialog, turn off the “Load UI” button at the bottom of the file open dialog. That will load the file without changing your UI settings. Then save the file. This is especially handy if you open a file created by another Blender user, with the Load UI button off, you’re UI settings are not changed when loading that file.

You can hide lights / cameras on layers (select object, “M” to move to a layer, click on the desired layer button to move to that layer.

“Real Lights” replacing default ones, doesn’t work that way in Blender. You might experiment with the “Layer” button for lights (Buttons panel / Lamp Panel, with a light selected 
“Illuminates objects in the same layer as the lamp only”

To control the camera while viewing through it, to mimic Maya’s behavior :

  • to aim the camea, press SH-F to enter “fly mode”, then moving the mouse around will aim the camera, LMB will set the new orienation, RMB or ESC will cancel.

  • to roll the camera, the camera needs to be selected (while viewing throught it, RMB on the solid rectangular edges selects it), then press “r” to enter standard object rotation mode, the default will be to rotate the camera in it’s local Z axis. You can adjust the “pitch” by rotating along the local X axis, press “r”, then “xx”. The first “x” (or “y” or “z”) selects the global axis, pressing the “axis letter” a second time selects the local axis. (This works when rotating any object)

  • to dolly the camera, press “g” then MMB

  • to “track” the camera, is just “g”(rab) and move the mouse (LMB to set position)

  • to zoom the camera, you’ll need to change the LENS in the EDIT buttons

panel (no mouse equivalent AFAIK).

Mike

P.S. I assume that you’ve downloaded 2.42a, the current release. 2.43 is expected to be released in the next week or so, you can get a “release” candidate here :

http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.43rc/

Or for daily updated CVS (windows) build (this is the one I use :

(You’ll need the “complement” and “ffmpeg” zips too 
 but only on the initial download / install).

P.P.S. If you’re looking for character rigs, look in my “best of blender” thread in my signature for the best rigs that have been posted here.

3

Thanks for that very in-depth response. I had hoped there would be nicer answers for those questions. Blender has lots of amazing features but the developers should really get the basics working smartly and conforming to standards, so Blender can be an efficient and fun program to work with. Is there a proper place to discuss feature requests?

Creating stuff based on the angle of the viewport makes no sense and just makes things tedious. Pressing tab after you add a mesh or something isn’t so hard but I don’t understand that feature of jumping into edit mode. Seems more like a bug to me. Some (or most) program settings should seriously be separated from the file, who came up with the way it works now? What other programs act like that? That is just crazy. Maybe it would require a reworking of the camera system but being able to control the camera with the regular view manipulation controls is a pretty obvious thing to expect.

4

As an experienced user, I know that you render scenes involving meshes slightly more complicated that a ball and a box. on a plane. We know this too, so when you create the basic box, we assume that you are going to be doing box modeling, and thus leave you in edit mode so you can do your job, without pressing tab, saving you a keystroke.

As far as conforming to standard, forum etiquette rules out my response. Let me just say that perhaps you need to give the UI a chance, and find out a little more.

You can also simply control the camera by just moving it (Grab) and/or rotating it in any 3D view, perfectly consistent with moving any other object. Also, any object can be a camera.

5

Well, there’s a fine line between “standards” and indivuality. If every program did eveything exactly the same way, what would be the point of their existence ?

There have been numerous threads here in the past about the Blender interface / conforming to standards etc. and usually those threads are started by users of other software wondering and often complaing that Blender doesn’t work just like their favorite program.

As Roger says, going into EDIT mode immediately after adding a primitive is usually a time saver, and a simple TAB press is no big deal IMO. XSI on the other hand, has a default behavior of popping up a dialog every time you add a primitive, which is annoying (to me).

Saving the UI settings with the file IMO is a feature (albiet it might be nice as an option), as the file re-opens just as you were last working on it. Calling it crazy is your privelege, though :slight_smile:

Btw all of the questions you raised were in the manual, and I went out of my way to try to give you a head start. But it seems that your more focused on bashing the program and already looking for the “requested changes thread” on your second post than actually trying to learn how to use the program. Not exaclty the best way to “win friends and influence people” :frowning:

Mike

6

Mike_S failed to give you the link to the manual. Shame on you Mike. So, if you’d like to RTFM, it is here: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual. No charge for shipping, or end-user support. The developer forums, where you can post your requests, is http://www.blender.org/forum/. Enjoy!

7

Ya that link is “hidden” under the Blender Help Menu :slight_smile:

Though everyone seems to find the Websites item :wink:

Mike

8

well, imho, that’s a really really stupid place to put it, cause its obviously hard to find. who invented that standard? Microsoft? oh yeah, that’s right they did. never mind.

9

the title says it all

10

Thank-you for your help guys. Let me just respond to some things.

Well, there’s a fine line between “standards” and indivuality. If every program did eveything exactly the same way, what would be the point of their existence ?
Well the point of Blender I think is that it is the biggest and best free 3D app. The other ones exist because they all want to make some money by attempting to do funky new things that their competitors can’t and doing the basic stuff more efficiently. But often what ends up happening is that competitors borrow each others good ideas and this is fine. There is no sense being different for individualities sake alone. Sure different people will appreciate different programs for their style and subject of work. But I think Blender, being THE open source 3D software package, should try to play well with the commercial software out there if it wants to win the interest of their users. So unless there is a good reason to do things differently the default behaviour should be the conventional way, or at the very least there should be an option to do things the conventional way. Like left-clicking to select an object, pretty standard in any piece of software ever invented. Why would I want to move a 3D cursor around so much? That could be relegated to some mode or key/mouse combination. I’m sure glad there was an option for normal left-clicking behaviour.

There have been numerous threads here in the past about the Blender interface / conforming to standards etc. and usually those threads are started by users of other software wondering and often complaing that Blender doesn’t work just like their favorite program.
Recently XSI added the ability to map keyboard and mouse behaviour to mimic Maya behaviour. I think that was an interesting idea although I couldn’t really stick with it because I lost a bunch of XSI shortcuts I had already learned, but I was able to use the Maya style Alt-button navigation which was nice.

As Roger says, going into EDIT mode immediately after adding a primitive is usually a time saver, and a simple TAB press is no big deal IMO. XSI on the other hand, has a default behavior of popping up a dialog every time you add a primitive, which is annoying (to me).
OK, pressing TAB isn’t a big deal but that little “shortcut” is unintuitive for the average user I think. So new users will try adding objects to the scene and won’t realize that the extra objects they are adding are being appended to the first objects geometry. I think it is fine for XSI to pop up the window because generally when you are creating an object you don’t want to leave it at its defaults. If you did want to make a bunch of identical objects you could just duplicate them. By the way, I get the feeling that Blender has no creation options for objects. I would gladly be corrected if I am wrong about that.

Saving the UI settings with the file IMO is a feature (albiet it might be nice as an option), as the file re-opens just as you were last working on it. Calling it crazy is your privelege, though :slight_smile:
I will most definitely call it crazy, or worse. Indeed opening things the way you were last working on them is great, nothing wrong with that. Dreamweaver, Notepad++, most IDEs, Freemind, Opera can all open things up the way you left them. And I believe most 3D programs will also save and open files with all the viewports, windows, and scene specific settings in tact. But the Blender developers are either confused or lazy about this. There needs to be a clear distinction between program-wide settings and scene settings. Saving your panel layouts and what object you had selected with your scene file is all well and good. But mouse button behaviour and language settings have no business being attached to a working file. In all my life I have never seen a program work like that and can’t imagine why you would want it to. So compare the steps needed to change a setting in a program like Maya vs Blender. Say I want to add a hotkey command in Maya, I would go to the hotkey preferences and add the key, done. I don’t know if you can change hotkeys in Blender but assuming you could do it through the preferences I would first have to save the file I am working on, start a new scene, change the key, save the default settings, re-open the file I was working on with Load UI turned off, then save that scene again, and do likewise with every other scene I want to have the new settings in. Which seems better to you?

Btw all of the questions you raised were in the manual, and I went out of my way to try to give you a head start. But it seems that your more focused on bashing the program and already looking for the “requested changes thread” on your second post than actually trying to learn how to use the program. Not exaclty the best way to “win friends and influence people” :frowning:

Mike
Well thank-you again Mike for going out of your way to give me a head start. I’m sure I could have eventually discovered those things on my own in some documentation somewhere. Or realized from the absence of documentation that certain features didn’t exist, but I hadn’t figured it out yet in the number of months that I have been using Blender, so I thought I would dump all these accumulated annoyances on this forum for some quick answers. That’s what these forums are for right?

I will bash the program all I want thanks. Sorry if I come across as arrogant, I will try to restrain my criticism to just the unnecessary shortcomings. And I will try to channel those criticisms to places where they actually belong, like the feature request tracker which I somehow found at projects.blender.org, though it was quite a maze getting there. I realize that a lot of perceived problems for someone transitioning from other software stems from different mindsets and workflows for doing things. But a lot of the answers you gave to my questions seem to point out lacking functionality in Blender.

But don’t get me wrong. I like a lot of things about the UI, and I am sure I have only scratched the surface of Blender’s greatness. I am curious to learn more about it.

11

I have to say that it is unreasonable to expect that a dozen or so part-time spare-time volunteer programmers, geographically dispersed around the globe speaking different native languages, to compete with a hoard of local, full-time paid programmers, documenters, with coordinated testing etc. sorry. Open is not Infinite, and Open is not Paid Dedicated. Secondly, Blender pre-dates Maya, so yes, if Blender was re-invented Now with millions in startup capital, who knows what neat and nifty features it might have, and abstractions of UI. But the reality is we have a huge code base, and it works, and our resources are so very thin.

I think there is a Maya-to-Blender hotkey map. search this forum for it if you want to try to compare red apples to golden delicious.

The User-defined defaults, for mouse button behavior and language selection etc are user-definable, and not changed with each file, and I really dont know why you want to make an issue out of a non-issue. I think you need to leave that soapbox and see what changes are saved with your files, and see if it helps you. If it does not, don’t do it.

And regarding the Tab thing, point well taken that newbies could add a cube and a sphere vertices and then a plane vertices as one object and would be confused. However, in the years I have been on this forum, that problem does not exist in any significant size. More often they are grateful they can go right to Extrude.

12

I just did a test setting the “view rotation” to trackball and “select with” to right mouse and closed and re-opened Blender and it didn’t remember the changes.

13

I am pretty new to Blender myself and for that matter the whole forum community thing as well . Please don’t get too disturbed by the somewhat too over-protective attitude towards the UI by the more experienced users - it’s just that a lot of new users find it “unintuitive” simply because the work-flow from other programs is very MS Widows based while Blender as far as I know is the only 3D software that supports all three major OS and then some . You probably wouldn’t think it “unintuitive” if you were a Mac user with only a single click option with no left or right or middle mouse buttons (back in the day) 
 and didn’t have many 3D apps to work with in the first place 

Having said that perhaps there is some misunderstanding about changing the user preferences 


There needs to be a clear distinction between program-wide settings and scene settings. Saving your panel layouts and what object you had selected with your scene file is all well and good. But mouse button behaviour and language settings have no business being attached to a working file


I don’t know if you can change hotkeys in Blender but assuming you could do it through the preferences I would first have to save the file I am working on, start a new scene, change the key, save the default settings, re-open the file I was working on with Load UI turned off, then save that scene again, and do likewise with every other scene I want to have the new settings in. Which seems better to you?
You’re right but that only happens when you change them from the User Preferences menu during a work session . If you want to save a default user preferences for left-clicking to select etc. 1) start up a new Blender session - 2) change the user preferences to how you want it 3) and use the hotkey combo Ctrl U (“Save Default Settings” from the File menu) - that will save all your changes for every time you start a new session in Blender (you can even remove or add new primitives, cameras, etc. these will aways show up every time also) . With Blender you can set up a new default scene however you want it set up depending on how you like to work even very complicated ones- not only with the default cube primitive . It just assumes that when you Ctrl U and decide that that is how you want your default setting every time to be that you know what you are doing .
And unless you “Save Default Settings” during the session mouse button behavior etc. are not saved with the file . All those are always based in a file called .B.blend in the Blender directory to which those settings are appended not to your working file .
If you mess with the user preferences and then Ctrl U during a work session that becomes your default scene every time you open a new session .

And no you can’t change hotkeys in Blender now from a user preferences menu . Though if you wanted to the source is available to change if you know how to compile (hint: most of the hotkeys are in space.c ) . I’m pretty noobish to using hotkeys in applications - though getting hooked to PC based video games helped me get used to it - Blender is the first program that forces me to use hotkeys for a faster work flow .

Like you said “Well the point of Blender I think is that it is the biggest and best free 3D app.” . Free being an operative word here (right now over at some other forums I frequent some people are shocked with the results from the new sculpt mode due out in the next release) . I mean you have a program for which you don’t have hassles like paying for upgrades and such . You have direct access to the code and if you know how to program you can try to change it yourself . Yes the UI is different but not that hard to adopt to . The point is that there are a lot of “quirks” in Blender, some seem more serious then others, but a lot of the more experienced people here know that they are not impediments to doing good work in Blender .

14

that it is the biggest and bes free 3D app

More correctly Open Source GPL’d app, there’s a significant difference, and the reason it’s OS is by dint of historical circumstance. That being said folks like yourself who have migrated from mainstream apps or are looking at Blender as a compliment to the pipeline are a potentially valuable asset and are welcome to discuss the kind of issues you’ve brought up. It’ll obviously take you a while to discover all the web-nooks related to Blender development, but in time you’ll be able to influence development, hopefully for the better.

%<

15

It took me a couple months to get over the feeling that the Blender UI was “weird”; and I hadn’t used a 3D program in about a decade. It is a little weird, but once you begin to intuitively understand the “Blender way” of doing things, it’s remarkably self-consistent throughout the program. Not that there aren’t major annoyances and room for improvement, but it works pretty well. Give it a chance.

My only problem now is that, now that I’m so used to using Blender and my Apple Mighty Mouse, I get confused when I’m using other programs and I can’t seem to get the middle button to spin things around. Like still pictures on web pages! Or terminal windows!

Sarah

16

Almost all of the commands have Menu equivalents.

The main hotkeys to know are Spacebar , TAB and “I”. :slight_smile:

One of the most significant thing that helped with the UI was discovering that the Buttons window can be zoomed (NUMPAD-PLUS/MINUS or CTR-MMB or CTR-ALT-LMB) and panned (ALT-LMB or MMB). The popup Dialogs (“N”) can also be resized using the NUMPAD-PLUS/MINUS keys. I guess Ton likes the look of micro-minature buttons or else he runs his screen at 640x480 :evilgrin:

Mike

17

So then my example scenario is accurate isn’t it? I guess there aren’t a whole lot of preferences to change anyway so perhaps this problem is moot. But if more stuff gets added like hotkey configurations and object presets, something will definitely have to be done.

I must say that from my first thread on this forum you guys do seem like an intelligent and helpful community.:slight_smile: And also, these smileys are great.:cool:

I really would like to have a say on usability issues I encounter, and I think it is good idea to voice them as they come up before I get used to them. I don’t expect dazzling new features, although I am continually surprised by the features being added to Blender like fluid simulation and this new sculpting tool. But it really irks me when I see problems in software that would be simple to fix and could greatly increase productivity (usually related to operations you perform a lot) or features that are implemented in such boneheaded ways that they are useless (like the Soft Modification tool in Maya, to take a stab at my preferred app). And with Open Source software I feel like I might have a better say about its future than with the commercial stuff. That feature request tracker place I found seems like a bit of a ghost town, but you are right, I seem to be finding some other nooks as I type this message.

18

And how is it you know they’re “simple to fix”?

If you follow the developer’s links on the main Wiki and read the dev docs on blender3d.org, you’ll find out that some areas of the program, internally that are an admitted “mess”, for various reasons. The UI in particular is apparently built with multiple layers of API’s / sub structures (which may or may not be influential on the changes you want).

And getting back to your original points, I truly fail to see how “saving user preferences”, “one extra keystroke to return to Object mode”, a slightly different workflow for camera navigation or needing to press a key for “box” select could “greatly increase productivity”. Btw there is a preference setting for LMB select.

If you want to see an example of productivity being inhibited, fire up a copy of XSI or download the demo and load one of the supplied rigged characters, then try to play a simple animation back. It simply won’t play in real time without some “jumping through hoops” (fast playback / caching etc), which in effect means you have to do a “sub-render” of the scene. Blender’s animation playback / viewport manipulation is blindingly fast (with subsurf’s turned off :slight_smile: ), in comparison.

Check out Blender’s Action editor / NLA interface. For an equivalent in 3dsMax, you need to buy a third party utility like C.A.T.

Download project Messiah Studio and tell me that the viewport navigation doesn’t drive you crazy. Fire up a copy of Houdini apprentice and see how long it takes you to get productive. How about Maya? 
 were you able to actually accomplish anything without reading the docs. Took me about an hour to find out the hotkeys for selecting objects (you don’t just LMB in that app either).

All apps have their quirks, so I don’t think any of them follow a “standard”.

Mike

19

Well I don’t exactly how easy things are to fix. I have done my share of scripting, enough to know that some seemingly simple things can turn out to be painfully complex for unforseen reasons. And I wasn’t referring to particular problems in Blender or even Blender at all.

But honestly, it couldn’t be hard to make box selection work without a hotkey. The functionality is there, just remove the hotkey. (I know about the LMB selection mode, it was one of the first settings I changed in Blender.)

Perhaps you fail to see how all the “little things” add up to greatly increased productivity, but it certainly does. When you do a certain action thousands of times a day and that action requires more clicks than necessary that can add up to many minutes of lost time. Minutes may not seem like much but when you multiply that by the scores of common commands (assuming they all require too many clicks) it can add up to hours. Maybe I am more sensitive to this than others. As a rule I am slower at everything than everybody else.

The trick is to supply the most common actions in a program to the user in the fewest keystrokes and mouse clicks possible and tuck secondary actions behind further menus and complex key combinations. For example Ctrl-Alt-G/R/S is too much work for the very basic and necessary transform tools IMO, Maya and XSI and probably others all use single keys. Wherever possible controls should be context smart to keep the relevant commands for the current job close at hand (Blender seems to be good at this already). As a program and the techniques it implements evolve, these controls need to be re-evaluated to make sure that the features that are used most are still the most accessible. No program is perfect about this of course.

You touched on the fact that Blender is fast. I have noticed that. The loading time alone is quite amazing. I am curious to know how it handles very large files, because when I worked on a movie production in Maya it would sometimes take up to ten minutes to load and save 100MB+ files on the workstations. Closing your scene to change some program settings and reopening it would mean 20 minutes of lost time.

How about Maya? 
 were you able to actually accomplish anything without reading the docs. Took me about an hour to find out the hotkeys for selecting objects (you don’t just LMB in that app either).

Coming from 3DS Max to Maya I was almost immediately quite productive. The only thing I remember throwing me off was that the channel editor didn’t seem as functional as the respective area in 3DS Max. And Maya certainly doesn’t have as convenient a way to deal with its “modifier stack”. By comparison Softimage 3D which I also began learning at that time seemed totally unintuitive and cumbersome, and I hated it all the days I had to work with it. When XSI came out it was a vast improvement (although lacking in features when it first came out) and I actually prefer modelling in XSI over Maya, because they have done a better job of making their polygon tools quick and smart. I don’t know what you are talking about for selecting stuff in Maya. You do just LMB click to select objects.

I should probably stop these long winded replies. It seems I could go on forever talking about this topic.

20

Ok, I honestly don’t know how hard that would be to do, and I respectfully submit that you dont’ either, so it’s a rather dumb statement to say “it can’t be that hard”. I’ll leave it at that.

For me, RMB is no big deal, and LMB in fact doesn’t work well with a Wacom tablet, 
which I use instead of a mouse. LMB on the Wacom is just touch the tablet, no buttons required.

Are you talking about Blender ? 
 or a hypothetical program? Because with Blender is just G/R/S 
 no CTR / ALT is necessary. Blender also has something called “gestures” which I don’t really use, as I’ve gotten used to to G/R/S. With gestures, just LMB and drag (RMB if you’ve changed the default). Depenidng on the shape you make with the mouse cursor, 
 a straight line triggers drag 
 a round shape triggers rotate and a “V” shape triggers scaling. Pressing “X/YZ” constrains movement / rotation to that (global) axis. Pressing the same letter again constrains movement to the local axis.

EDIT
Ok, after reading StarWeaver’s post, I didn’t realize that CTR-ALT-(G/R/S) even existed :slight_smile: Whenver I use the 3d manipulator, I have been using the mouse / 3d panel to switch move/rotation/scale modes.

The 3d-Manipulator is an alternative to just using the bare hotkeys (G/R/S). It’s not necessary for it to be displayed. For some operations I find it invaluable, for others it gets in the way, so I disable/hide it.

There’s a large ~100meg (~50meg compresed) file you can download from the News forum 
 Do a search for “The Crosswalk”. My meagre 1.2g / 756meg machine can’t really handle it. Slows to a crawl. But other factors other than file size will influcene performance. :

  • Many subsurfed objects

  • particles / hair

  • fluid simulations

  • “heavy” textures.

I hate the Max “cutesy py” squeeze everything in as little space as possible. Would much prefer floating panesl that I could decide how big to size.

Ok, I just learned something (that I could have learned had I read the docs more thoroughly :slight_smile: I didn’t realize that I could just LMB on something and the current transform tool remains active. I had assumed I need to go back to the select tool (“q”) every time before selecting an object :slight_smile:

Btw what is your area of intersest with Blender ?

If you’re intersted in character animation, I’ve collected links to the best rigs in my “best of blender” thread in my signature.

Mike