A friend and fellow Blenderhead, Rob Garlington, spent a great deal of time working on an input remapping for Blender 2.5. What’s neat about his solution is that he’s also gone in and remapped the mouse inputs with the keyboard, so users coming over from Maya will really have a much easier time selecting objects or components and getting around the scene in general.

He doesn’t have a website set up yet, so I’ve offered to host his file here. It requires and has been updated for Blender 2.59.

After the download link, I’ve posted notes on usage from his email.

Download: Maya Input Remapping for Blender 2.59 (724kb)

Install:

The easiest way to install is to open this startup file in Blender 2.59, then go to ‘file\user preferences’ go to the bottom of the preferences screen and click the ‘save as default’ at the bottom. And that’s it, all the keys have been loaded into blender so that when you open any new scene it will use my key setup. If you ever want to go back to blender default simply click ‘file\load factory settings’.

Notes:

  • One thing to note despite my many changes to animation there was no option to deselect keys by simply clicking on blank space in the f-curve editor. So just press ‘A’ to deselect everything that way.
  • Most default blender settings that have been changed to accommodate this new setup usually require a ‘shift’ to work now. For instance to extrude a face press ‘shift e’ to work now.

    • Animation Changes:

  • ‘left click drag’ to marquee select keys
  • ‘middle mouse button’ moves the keys
  • ‘right click mouse’ will scrub the dope sheet and f-curve editor.
  • ‘s’ set to insert keyframe
  • ‘ctrl + alt + left mouse’ button for border zoom
  • ‘f’ will view all
  • ‘alt + right mouse drag’ for view zooming
  • ‘alt + middle mouse’ to move all 2d screens
  • ‘k + left mouse’ to scrub timeline in 2d screens
  • ‘, .’ goes to next or previous keyframe
  • ‘alt , or .’ goes to next or previous frame

    • 3D View Changes:

  • ‘left click drag’ select
  • ‘middle mouse button’ moves everything
  • ‘f’ will view selected
  • ‘left click’ outside of the object, deselects in object, edit mesh and pose mode
  • ‘spacebar’ brings up the dynamic spacebar menu
  • ‘right click’ (in edit mesh mode) brings up the mesh selection of faces/verts/edges
  • ‘4,5,6’ are mapped to the corresponding shading modes
  • ‘ctrl d ‘ duplicates objects/faces and everything else in Blender that can be duplicated
  • ‘g’ for repeat action
  • ‘shift + LMB’ will add more objects/verts/faces/edges to your selection
  • ‘ctrl + LMB’ will deselect objects/verts/faces/edges
  • ‘shift right click’ for 3d cursor placement
  • ‘shift space’ for search
  • ‘z’ also does an undo function in addition to the standard ‘ctrl z’
  • ‘ctrl + right click’ will enable lasso mode.
  • ‘alt + s and r’ go into scale and rotation mode
  • ‘ctrl + alt + s,r or g’ have been changed to clear the scale rotation or translation on any given object.
  • ‘y’ will bring up a special material selection toolbox.

    • Timeline:

  • ‘left click drag’ to scrub the main timeline

    • Things that remain the Blender default:

    Get used to using ‘a’ to either select or deselect everything as it is Blender’s default. UV view remains mostly the same as before.