Rigging Dojo Link! The interest was in the Maya hotkeys for Blender. It’s funny because earlier in the week I had a discussion with a coworker about how hard learning Blender is for users of other software.

I’ve had a newer version put together by the wonderful and talented Rob Garlington sitting in my inbox for the past few months, but between moving across town, starting a new job, and getting engaged, I’ve been very lax in blog updates. For the interested, I’ve posted his updated file here:

 

Blender2MayaHotkeys_2.61.zip

 

It’s a shame that Rob’s setup can’t be added to the main Blender distribution; I think that having “familiar” hotkeys and navigation would go a long way towards swaying users of other packages to give Blender a try and show them that integrating it into any pipeline has its benefits. (I put quotes around “familiar” because the only software I’ve been using longer than Blender is Lightwave, so Blender’s hotkey setup has always made sense to me.)

The following are Rob’s installation notes.

 

Install (Note this has only been tested on Windows 7)

Full Functionality Install: (to fully take advantage of the keymap changes)

  1. Start Blender and open the ‘startup.blend’ file included in the ‘Blender2MayaHotkeys_2.61.zip\config’ folder. Then go to ‘file/save user settings’ (or press ctrl + U) to save this file as the default scene, then close Blender. (This will setup a special directory under your ‘Users’ folder.)
  2. Go to the folder C:\Users\’your name’\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.61 (note that the ‘AppData’ directory may be hidden, but it is there nonetheless and you’ll need to unhide it). Extract the contents of the Blender2MayaHotkeys_2.61.zip archive into the 2.61 folder (overwrite files as necessary).
  3. Open Blender again and it should all be setup. To ensure it’s working, if you go to the ‘Input’ tab under ‘file/user preferences’ you should see that ‘Maya Advanced’ is loaded into the filter section.

Partial Functionality Install: (Some mouse selection features are missing with this method)

  1. Simply open the startup.blend included in the ‘Blender2MayaHotkeys_2.61.zip\config’ folder. Then go to ‘file/save user settings’ to save the scene as the default.