Maya Animator Tries Blender 

Thanks for all the helpful comments! If anyone is interested in a mentored course that comes with a student license of Maya and you want to learn animation, check out: AnimatorsJourney.com

Mistake number one: Blender is not "free maya" :)

The reason you still saw the rig in the graph editor while selectin the plane is because the rig is pinned to always be visible in the graph editor. If you look at the listing on the left of the graph editor, you see that for the rig that little pinboard prick icon is active. Which means it'll be visible no matter what is selected.

RIG vs. Object in the graph editor. Blender has a concept of ACTIVE and Selected, meaning that something can remain selected as an object even if you jump out of Pose mode and select something else. The Graph editor curve isolation speed is big and while it is is being worked on in Blender, it is out of the box a much better experience in Maya. Someone mentioned it already but the Hide/Hide unselected hotkeys are required to learn so you can quickly isolate the selected channel. Vertical scale zoom: good point and the way and there isn't a way that I can find to do that exact thing you can sort of control it with zoom to mouse preference with the scroll wheel but that exact action is better in Maya until we find out otherwise. No stacked curve view but normalized is possible. Autokey and keying sets is all being worked on and needing improvement many of us feel and are working on it actively. The size bar menus is not the channelbox, the Sidebar (N) item view does show selected bones attributes. The "Doesn't Autokey" example when you rotated the bone, it doesn't have an existing keyframe on it so it will not get keyed just changing the value...and depending on your animation preferences it will do the same thing when you rotate. This is part of the autokey improvement that needs to happen in some ways and others it is just different...but overly complex while lacking some of the control expected and why there is a lot of work looking at how best to improve it now in the animation module. The camera: Object change near the end is also a pain when you are still thinking in Maya language /interaction mode and honestly when you are used to it after a little while don't get in the way overall but for sure it is a tripping hazard and a learning curve much like Jumping between MotionBuilder, Max, Maya, Unreal etc. if an animator is used to just working/staying in Maya then there is a sometimes steep ramp in some places and there are going to be things that just flat out are better in Maya or whatever you are most used to/learned first. Nice work exploring the tools though and I will share this with the Animation Module as well to get more eyes on it from dev. side.

Same, long time Maya animator now mostly enjoying Blender. Welcome to Blender animation, there aren't many animators in Blender yet, not pros at least which is why the animation side is less developed than the modeling/rendering side. But it's changing and changing fast. To answer your questions: First thing I notice is you still go through the UI to switch between Object/Edit/Pose modes, use the hotkeys, you'll get to be earlier. 3:08 You can still use the manipulator all you want. But getting used to the hotkeys does speed you up. I switch between both still. 4:35 You accidentally pinned your Rig object in the graph editor that's why it shows up even when deselected. Just hit the Pin icon so it goes back to being an outline. 5:20 Solo curves: Click the Eye next to Torso and all the curves will be hidden, then you can unhide just the curve(s) you want to work with. Maya still has a better workflow with Fcurves in general. 6:50 Yes it zooms around the center of that window. you can select your keys or whatever you are trying to zoom in on then frame it "." hotkey. then zoom from there. 7:24 inserting a hotkey: you can fix it once and for all in the Timeline window. On the left side you'll see "Keying" dropdown. In the "Keying" dropdown you'll find the "Active Keying set" Field probably blank if you never touched it. Click and scroll down to the "Location/Rotation/Scale and Custom properties" one. Now every time you hit I or whatever your set key button is, it'll key everything without prompting with a dropdown. You can save that setting in your default file so you never have to think about it again. Another cool thing about "I" shortcut it works when you hover over any channel in the menus that is keyable. Also as you hover on that channel, the left and right keys to jump to the previous/next keyframe also work which can be helpful if you key channel properties on materials or outliner visibility, renderability... 8:00 The Menu on the Right is not your channels. Those are tucked away behind the hard to notice little arrow in the top right of your 3D viewport. You can hit "n" while hovering over the 3d port to hide/unhide it. Or pull the little arrow tab with your mouse. Those are your channels which will switch when you switch modes. the Sidebar menu is just an additional way to access the same data. 9:25 with Auto Key on: Dragging values in the channel will only set a key if a key already exists on that channel. Unlike the 3d Viewport where pulling a control will set a key when the channel hasn't been keyed at all. 10:45 Contextual menus only show up for the active object/element which is the last thing you have selected. It usually shows up in Orange (instead of dark orange) for objects. and whatever color set you have for control bones on the rig. But as you concluded, yes don't expect your Maya habits to help you in Blender lol. Just like you can't expect your native language to help you in a country with a different language. You gotta become bilingual. @PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN has some helpful animation centric tutorials. Good luck !

Hint: stop thinking like maya, blender has a different and much better UI/UX, you keep trying to bring your UI/UX muscle memory from maya. One of the reasons why people like blender shortcuts is because they are not just shortcuts, they complement the UI/UX, you can be in pose mode and select other objects while still being able to enter and exit edit mode of each one of them using the shortcut (tab for me). Also you can swap between object and pose mode with Ctrl+Tab. Blender is data driven, objects are just an abstraction, what matters is the data they contain, one object contains skeleton data while another contains vertex data. Why is this important? because it's one of the bases why an edit mode exists. You enter edit more to edit the data the object contains and you use modifiers on the object because you don't want to change the data inside, you want to modify the object. If you are struggling with the idea of going from edit mode to object and then to pose mode think when would you want to both animate and change the bones inside. This is like saying I'm making my rig while I animate. QWE versus GRS: It funny how you said "I just want to grab things and move it". Blender defaults try to use the human common sense and intuition, yes you can change them but the only reason you are having a hard time is because you trained yourself with a different standard, for you it would be a matter of time. I can as easily press G to "grab", lock or not axis, enter precision mode or not, confirm or cancel with mouse buttons (no need to esc), and, more importantly it's much faster. why? because you need control over the gizmo, you need to select the arrows, square, circles, lines, etc which you do by looking at the gizmo, this takes your eyes of your subject. I only look at my model and bones and all actions are loosely achieved while being precise. A trained person using shortcuts will always be faster than a trained person using tools/gizmos. Regardless of what shortcut you use. BTW, there's another reason why all shortcuts (not just for animation) use these weird letters. 80 to 90% of the time if you think about the action you want to do the shortcut uses that action initial letter, sometimes with a modifier like shift/ctrl/alt. In graph editor you can click the root track hide button to hide everything and then show only the one you care about, however there's a better way, you can select one or more of the channels and hit Shift+H (H for hide and shift to make it exclusive), this will show just the ones you selected and hide everything else, you can also do Alt+H to unhide everything. Yeah I know it's one more click than in maya, but this generates less confusion, why would selecting something hide something else. I would however perhaps change this so you could use a modifier key and mouse click to replicate the same behavior as maya without having to select first, the problem though is that the modifiers are already use for selection patterns of the channels. No winning here, selection patterns is more consistent with the rest of the software, and you want consistency in a software. Zooming in the graph editor, the dot in the numpad is your friend, to be honest I don't like the 2D zoom to always be centered either and I think it could be changed or adjusted with a modifier key, like Shift+Ctrl which is not occupied by anything, so this could be improved. However you can use the dot key to focus on your selection, if it's a single selection point it will go to the center of the screen when then you can do the 2D zoom and have the exact same behavior, but this is not really convenient. I'm not sure if I understood what you meant by normalized curves, do you mean to resize your canvas to fit the curves? if yes you need to use the dot key (focus) to do that, you select however many things you want, you can select all by pressing A for example and then focus and it will adjust the canvas to your selection. I also think there should be a single click key to insert a keyframe in the last mode you selected, not sure why this isn't a thing by default, but you can change in the remap settings, you can make it to use a single key to do one of the option and a combo for the popup for example. You asked what is the point of the pose mode if it doesn't switch to armature during selection. Like I explained before the armature is just an object with data inside (in this case bones), if you are animating, what would you possibly want to do with the object that holds your data? You did a better question afterwards about why it doesn't change automatically the context depending on your selection, while many software do that it's not a well defined problem that can be easily solved, what would you show automatically when selecting the armature? the armature details? the bones details? and more importantly how would I then see other data? would I then need to click to switch? so if then select something else and come back I would need to re-select it. There's no clear winner here, I work with both in different software and never had any problems adjusting, they have their pros and cons, not changing things dynamic is more beginner friendly because the UI isn't changing all over the place over simple things, it also more work friendly in the sense that when you are doing tasks in 3D you usually stay doing the same task to the same data all the time, and you change only when you want to do something different. This way you can set it once and forget. The issue with selecting the camera also seems stupid to me. Not sure why it works that way. Background image works as a overlay on the screen, if you want something in 3D you'd use a 3D plane instead. Render times are dependent on settings and content, you can blame the default settings but why is that surprising? Would you prefer garbage but fast rendering as default? Blender is missing proper animation layers, Maya wins this, no contest here. Blender is adding their own but it wasn't released yet. If you are used to them, you'll miss them.

Hi, I'm an animator to, I've been animating in Maya for about 10 years, before that I animated for 5 years in 3DsMax. In the last few mnths I've been animating in Blender for personal projects and I understand your frustration. When I started learning Blender I thought people in Blender foundation HATED animators, but now Blender has become my favorite tool for animation, not that Maya isn't a a great softare, it is. Not only that, but learng blender improved my hability to use Maya. That being said, let me answer below you kind request for tips and alternatives on the things you talked about in your video.I think it may be useful to other people what may be going through this adaptation jorney as well.

there is an option called "lock object mode" unde edit tab I remember. it's enabled by default. if u disable it, than u can seamlessly "move" between "pose mode" of an armature and object mode of any object

To work easily between rig and other objects you have to disable "Lock Object Modes" under the 'Edit' menu on top left corner of the window. This saves you from the hassle you were having with modes 1:29

I'm a long time Blender User and I also teach both Maya and Blender, when I use each software, I stick to the software's hotkeys and shortcuts. I never and do not recommend changing Blender's shortcuts to match Maya's. Blender's shortcuts are designed to work very efficiently when used well. The modes changes take some time to get used to especially for people coming over from Maya, but in the long run, I feel it is superior to Maya as you won't accidently enter component mode when you right click on an object. As for the matchmoving tracker in Blender, I have used SynthEyes and even ILM's in house MARs matchmover, and Blender's tracker when used correctly works fantastic. Your tracking shot is a Nodal tripod shot, there's not much parallax I can see so if you track it as a free cam you won't get much good results. You should set the tracker to solve as a tripod shot and it will give you much better results. Anyway, this is a good video to show the frustrations of Maya users coming over to Blender, but trust me, Blender when mastered can do pretty much what the rest of the "industry standard" software can do.

1:50 activate pie menu on drag in the preferences man, so you easily by Tab+MouseDown move to pose mode from any other mode as far as you have an armature rig selected, it is really fast

3:27 dont ever use middle mouse to move something along an axis, use XYZ on the keyboard. Yes, after maya's way of using gizmos this can seem harder to use, but it gives you precision maya can give only when making a gizmo bigger or smaller. Using gizmos in blender is so unnecessary when you are good at touch typing

At 5:20 when you try to select and isolate channels, just turn on "Only Selected Curve Keyframes" on the Graph Editor's View menu. It will work just like you want. On Blender 4.0 that option has been changed to Preferences - Animation.

I too feel that blender is too overwhelming, maya is more comfortable, i have tried learning blender to animate, but i find it better for modelling, and prefer maya for animation.

5:59 Maybe this help, because i have no that weird zoom on curves, it works as should. I switched to Blender in 2022 from 3Ds Max after 16 years. I started with 2.93, but i changed lot of settings at first day and i just copy and rename profile folder to new releases and still working: It looks like this now in my Preferences/Navigation: Orbit Method: Turntable Orbit Sensitivity: 0.35° Orbit Around Selection: ⬛ Auto Perspective ☑ Depth ☑(Important) Smooth View: 200 Rotation Angle: 15.000 Zoom Method: Dolly Zoom Axis: Vertical Zoom to Mouse Position ☑(Important) Invert Zoom Direction: Mouse ⬛ Wheel ⬛

4:30 you gotta click on the pin icon 📌 of the rig graph. I believe it must've been off by default, so you probably misclicked it or something But yeah I understand, learning a new software after using a different software with the same type for years is kind of ridiculously frustrating

Someone else probably commented the same thing, but, if you select your rig and switch to pose mode, you can click on the Edit button in the top left, and uncheck *Lock Object Modes*.

A great tip when animating in blender and still want to be able to select stuff…remember that each window segment is its own area, so you can have one area be object mode and another the pose mode..

Y'all, I think kindly pointing out solutions is a better option rather than shouting at him that he's "using Blender wrong". Just saying. Some of you guys are doing the same thing that ToAnimate got on their channel.

Just hit tab to change modes. It's not difficult. I have come from Maya/Softimage and found the modes odd at first, but it actually makes sense when you get your head around it.

Take shortcuts, man. Blender is about using shortcuts. I've been using Blender for fourteen years and I don't even know exactly where many things go without shortcuts, and using it without shortcuts can be horribly frustrating. I animate daily with Blender and Maya (yes, both are part of the pipeline at the studio where I work, and sometimes I need to animate different scenes in both in the same day) and I can say that they both work very well, but it's important not to wait that one behaves like the other. They are really different.

As a generalist I managed to drop maya 4 years ago and and switched to Blender. But there is still things today that I miss from Maya. Just not enough for me to want to go back :D . The first 2 months of switching were pretty painful. I did 2 hours a night but by the third month I had cancelled my Maya subscription. 2:27 - Edit -> preferences and enable pie menu on tab. Then you have access to a "maya like" radial menu that will let you jump between these modes. Which is faster than mayas method. 5:20 - Yeah i do not enjoy using blenders graph editor compared to maya. I hear there are some changes coming there so fingers crossed 12:35 - I bet it took 4 minutes to render because you had the default samples at 4096 when you could have the same quality at 80 samples with denoising (if you have NVIDIA RTX) and it would render in seconds. For something that simple EEVEE would do it in a second or 2 for very comparable quality. And as a side note, .... Oh boy! .... switching from Mayas hypergraph to Blenders shader nodes + node wrangler was a dream come true. It became such a pleasure to work with shaders and textures again. Great video, I enjoy a lot of your others too, so much great insight, thanks for sharing your experience. I hope you use whatever software you enjoy using most. Open source is fantastic for some. But sanity (if you are struggling) and your time is arguably more important.

You can tick the key frame button on the right if you want to set a frame on the transform or right click + s to set it after changing the transform

I actually hate that maya have no separations between modes because I always end up selecting stuff that I dont want to select, like when editing verteces I accidently select another object just because maya gives sht about what type of an element or an object you want to work with

It looks like you had the FinishedRig pinned in the graph editor which is probably why it wasn't going away even though it wasn't selected. The toggle is to the left of the visibility toggle you were clicking.

you can use CTRL+TAB shortcut for quick switch between modes

Definitely recommend you watching so basic blender videos for navigation and default preferences specific for animation. One Tip: I've added a new hotkey in the keymap preferences for quick hide and unhide a channel. In the Keymap panel go to, Animation Channels at the bottom, add new hotkey, set to 'graph.hide', left mouse, press, ALT and Tick unselected. So now in the channel box if you click on a channel and it's orange if you alt + left click it will isolate it. Then A to select and ALT + Left to unhide. It's quite quick.

Blender is all about the keyboard shortcuts - learn the basic shortcuts and Maya will feel like a slow tractor in comparison. :)

Man using Cycles default setting CPU, 4096 sample, OpenImageDenoiser and questioning why it take 4 min a frame

You're in the Lock Objects Mode. You can disable it under the Edit menu so you don't have to switch between modes manually. And most of the other complaints come simply from lack of experience and basic navigation understanding. I mean, you don't even seem to know where the armature tab is. You might want to know more about the app before you judge it.

The default sampling settings for the render are waaaaay tooo overkill for literally everything. most things I render I do it under 100 samples. Anyway, blender has an option to limit the render time per frame (so you can set the render to take 30 seconds or whatnot)

It all comes to muscular memory rather than software capabilities, if you try to user blender like maya it will be frustrating, but when you follow blender logic is very fast. Blender have all menus, panels and gizmos available, but buttons are small and quite hidden. But when you learn all the shorcuts and gestures you don't need to leave the viewport and this unlocks the fast mode. Learning UI takes some weeks, but is probably the only entry barrier for people coming from another software, once you figure its logic you can start doing pro work without problems. For example you dont need to figure axis for each action, your hands will do this automatically after some time and is much faster and accurate for small movements than picking the gizmo axis, same with changing modes, is quite convenient to have different contexts for specific things, you break less things. It also was a experienced 3D artist in other software that downloaded blender every 6 months only to end up frustrated in few minutes. But I tried only to learn UI for a weeks and that helped me a lot. 4 minutes per frame seems like a bad config or not telling blender to use your graphic card, if you + denoiser every frame would take less than 10 seconds.

in edit mode u can take whatever you want there u don't have to take one object .. u can take all objects to edit mode and edit them all there not ones at the time this way sometimes taking one object to edit mode is very useful to deal with complex shapes freely and select small facess or vertexs with out missing up the other object by accident

I am new to Blender too: for selecting without changing modes, does using the outliner remove one step? I know when I am in Edit mode, just clicking another object in the outliner automatically changes me out of edit, and onto the object I selected.

Tab is used to quickly move between modes

Watch the blender guru donut series it will show you call the tips and tricks that almost every beginner now has.

I don't think it will go nicely the other way either because I had your same exact reaction when I tried to do modeling in maya coming from blender and max and saw maya doesn't have any modifiers. Blender is not a free maya, it's made by diff people with diff goals and ideas and workflows in mind, it's not supposed to imitate maya in anyways. watch some tutorials or manual before jumping in otherwise you'll face the same culture shock with every new software. Pretty much 80% of all problems you were having were you not knowing how Blender works.

this was hilarious to watch, really takes me back when i got into blender 2.8...it does take some time to get used to,

So as for the thing you mentioned in the beginning with the different modes, I would highly recommend you learn the shortcuts, it makes it so much easier to switch to the mode you want without having to mess with all the drop downs. I personally like to enable the pie menu addon which allows you to switch to any mode in a pie menu with just ctrl + tab and once you get used to it, you can switch through a variety of edit and view modes instantly

Am a VFX artist and a pro blender user, most of the thing that are greyed out in the graph editor or behaving weirdly can be fixed through the available options at the upper right of the graph editor.

Hover your mouse pointer over the object you want to edit and hit Alt + Q. The object will flash orange. No need to switch back to object mode.

You can press "TAB" to switch between EDIT MODE and OBJECT MODE

I am wondering how you are so patient for this, i would be exploded by anger and frustration.

I imagine the reason Cycles took so long is because you're probably rendering on the CPU and not the GPU. Even my 1050ti should be able to render that at no longer than 1 minute per frame.

A Maya power user struggles to use Blender like Maya 😱 Well hopefully some people helped him

Ctrl tab changes the modes from pose, object, or when editing as well, even when changing the timeline to a graph editor, thou your mouse has to hover in the timeline area when you Ctrl tab most likely why your render took so long is that you might have had 4k samples or didn't activate your graphics card

-isolate curve = shit-H on the selected curve, and alt H will revert it. -to zoom in from a curve center, just select the curve(s) and press numpad dot, it will center your curve, and then u can do the zoom Y you can also select a keyframe, and do the same so the center will be the selected keyframe.

you can go to Edit next to file and untick "lock Objects mode" to press on whatever you what even in pose mode, also a faster way to go to pose mode, is after you click on the armature and just press ctrl+tab, if you just pressed tab it will take you to edit mode for rigging purposes, and pressing ctrl+tab will open a pie menu so you can choose, but if you're interested in only animating, just crtl+tab from object mode, and untick objects mode, the I shortcut is annoying and it is the default behavior, but you can create a keying set in the timeline next to playback, and it will key after a single click not the best solution but it works

I've been working with Blender for 2 years. I have a student license for Maya that expires in about 7 months...is it worth cramming as much Maya in as I can in that time? I'm aspiring to a job with a small VFX studio, or maybe some freelance work. Any advice is appreciated!

Shift + H to isolate selected. works on object mode edit mode etc.

Activate pie menu in preferences and switching modes is a quick keystroke and swipe. Going to the interface to switch modes would literally kill me.

Maya can be set to key all attributes, which is what I use every day in Maya

5:34 yep. I miss that from Maya too, but still you dont need to untick visibility by clicking on every eye icon, just click on one and drag the mouse up or down until you disable visibility of all the tracks then set the track you need visible = 2 clicks instead of 9

Changing modes is just tab and control tab. It's pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it. I am going to maya from blender now, and I also had this similar problem in Maya. I think it's just how our brain gets wired for the first time, that becomes our second nature.

Hey Lucas! I've taken your course on 3D animation in Udemy and I'm very satisfied and learning a lot, you're a great teacher and mentor, thank you!

Right approch is Never compare workflow with other software because every software has different way of working, i have made same mistake when coming form 3dsmax. I cussed a lot when i was learning blender but now i am now completed comfortable with it. So start learning without any bias that why is it complicated. Just practice 100hrs to get used to it. Good luck.

I understand the frustration of this guy, but if you got used to a software from the beginning and learned all the tools and shortcuts, you will feel frustrated thinking that the new software is the same one you already used and it is not. The new user will misjudge any new software because it is not configured as they are used to. It happened to me with *Lightwave 3D* when I was already in *3DS Max* so I left *Lightwave 3D* but now I use *3DS Max and Blender*

Is there a hotkey in blender that allows you to select something in object mode without having to swap modes?

2:50 You can pin the object properties list (on the top right side ) for one object and then creat another one (the normal one will update automatically when you click on an object ) and then the pined window will stay the same even if the object is not selected. I know it can be really frustrating to switch between modes! Hope they figure out a smother work experience with this topic

Modes are what makes Blender stand out in my opinion. The advantage is that it allows for reuse of keyboard shortcuts. Same key would do different things in different modes. Also, Gizmos are slow! In comparison with Blender's transform operations like GX5, RZ90, S-1 and similar, using Gizos is very limiting (although they exist if you want them). The other thing that's not too obvious for newcomers is that you can use MMB once you're in Move mode (G key) to constrain movement/translation in the axis of mouse movement.

numpad period to focus on selected keyframe if you get lost.

Hi Lucas thank you for sharing your vids, i know how frustrating it is for new Blender users coming from other 3D softwares. But i've been using blender way back before the overhaul update of 2.8 versions. In fact previous blender versions you can directly select the objects without the need to change modes. And that functionality is still available on the current version of blender. On your blender screen you can go to the EDIT option then you'll see the "Lock Object Modes" you'd be able to select objects outside of its current mode and whatever the selected object's current mode is it will retain it until such you change the mode of the certain objects. One draw back to this is that when you're weigh painting and you're trying to select a bone from the rig the controls may pose hindrances to the work you're currently at, so i suggest utilizing blender's multiple window workspace that you can customize to your needs.

Simple rules use blender for modelinh, Z brush for sculpting and maya for rigging...thats it

4:32 FinishedRig is still visible in the Graph Editor because it is *pinned* (you can see the pin icon highlighted in white, click to unpin). 5:38 You can click & drag the visibility icon to hide multiple tracks at once... You can also isolate a curve (or any object) with *SHIFT-H* Hide Unselected (unhide all with ALT-H). 7:33 Blender will set keys depending on the *Keying set.* If you set the Keying Set to _Available_ it will only key already keyed attributes like Maya. You could also set the keying set to _Location, Rotation & Scale_ for example, basically all the options you see in the list when you press I. When you have an active keying set it doesn't show you this list. Recommend checking out Rigging Dojo's free "Character Rigging and Animation from Maya to Blender" course for a good overview of differences.

4 minutes per frame ? Did you used an absurd amount of samples and kept the CPU rendering ? Plus, I notice that weird white outline when you composited it but I dunno if that's on purpose.

I think for why the rig was still visible in the graph editor is that the pin icon next to the visibility icon is on...

Hey Lucas, the transition to blender was very frustrating for me too. There are two videos from Mark Masters that helped me a lot, one about fixing Blender's graph editor to look like maya's and the other about keyframes. there's one about hotkeys too that may be helpful. also, they're short videos

Am still figuring out Blender.., but I am a C4D guy.., I would love to get into Maya..,

changing mode is not so difficult as you are saying again and again these modes helps a lot to animator

For the mode selection bit, you need to uncheck "Lock object Modes" This is under the Edit dropdown menu. This allows you to select other objects when in pose mode. For Keying - the timeline window has the "Keying" menu at your bottom left. Clicking this opens the menu to let you set a "Keying set" For isolating the curves - there's the "view" dropdown menu on the graph editor. Check the "only selected keyframe handles". This will isolate curves- does not work in version 4 :( ... For the contextual selection for the bone transform channels, the transform channels are displayed in the viewport side bar (Shortcut N)- downside, minimises screen space To make some things easier, right click on the different options and add to quick favourites - access quick menu with Q - Please note this is also contextual, meaning if you add a shortcut in pose mode, it will only be available in the favourite menu in pose mode Hope this helps :D

I am an animator also and the switch between modes is frustrating like you say.

6:11 Useful shortcut for the graph editor - press period to zoom to selected keys. This shortcut works the same everywhere in Blender - in outliner press period to jump to selected item, in viewport pressing period highlights selected object or vertices etc.

Я пользователь Blender, но много работаю с аниматорами, которые работают в Maya (в том числе самому приходится использовать Maya, чтобы решать проблемы аниматоров). Сделаю несколько замечаний, касательно содержания видео: 1. Не могу сказать, что Pose Mode - плохое или странное решение. Я обратил внимание, что аниматоры в Maya перед началом работы всегда выключают возможность выбора не нужных в работе объектов, например - мешей. Это несколько раздражает, когда ты хочешь выбрать контроллер на лице, но вместо этого выбираешь само лицо. При этом по умолчанию Maya не дает возможность выбрать именно риг, а лишь предлагает оставить возможность выделения кривых, которые часто используются в качестве контролов. Режим Pose Mode. по сути, это то, что и так делают в Maya аниматоры сами для себя. Единственная проблема, которую я вижу, это наличие задержки при переключении между ригами, что усложняет работу в анимациях ,когда персонажи взаимодействуют друг с другом 2. "Классический" гизмо находился буквально на несколько позиций ниже, с левой стороны экрана 3. Риг оставался в Graph Editor просто потому, что был закреплен (значок Pin) 4. "Изолировать" кривую можно через стандартные клавиши скрытия объектов (Shift+H - скрыть всё кроме выделенного, Alt+H - сделать всё видимым) 5. Насчет зума со смещением. Да, это несколько странный момент в Blender. Чтобы сделать зум как в Maya нужно в настройках программы в разделе Navigation-Zoom активировать режим Zoom to Mouse position 6. В Blender аналогом Channel Box выступает вкладка Item в правой части вьюпорта (она у вас в видео скрыта). Там же отражаются ваши "ключи". В настройках объекта, в которые вы смотрели не отражаются ключи анимации, потому что по логике блендера вы анимируете элементы скелета (арматуры), а не сам скелет. Это может выглядеть странно, но так устроено 7. Прозрачность изображения обычно управляется на самом объекте изображения 8. К сожалению, настройки по умолчанию у Cycles имеют очень высокие значения. Их нужно регулировать. Отрегулированные (уменьшенные) настройки можно сохранить для следующих запусков программы через команду File-Defaults-Save Starpup File. Кстати. куб в начальной сцене можно убрать таким же образом, сохранив стартовую сцену без него Извиниюсь, что не пишу сразу на английском, записывал свои мысли по ходу просмотра видео

4:27 seems like you are seeing the rig in the graph because you have it pinned. There is a pin icon active you probably can unpin the rig with

Pose mode is for moving the Rigs if you camera has a rig should work fine.

The easiest way to confine movement to an axis I think is go "G" then "X" or "Y" or "Z", rather than middle mouse, it is pretty much the design philosophy behind Blender. The pose mode though I can't help with!

Blender is unique with pose mode...all other apps: Maya, Max, Lightwave, XSI...grab and go.

I've never visited your channel before and noticed it in my video recommendations... I'm sure someone have probably already mentioned this, but I think coming into Blender as an animator from any other 3D animation software is always going to be very hard and frustrating. I personally would recommend that you first learn to model basic objects in Blender, to the point where you can model basic objects in a short amount of time using the short-cut keys and other Blender systems.This may take weeks or months depending on the amount of time you have. This will set you up for a smoother transition into animation, posing, etc. That being said, if you don't have the time or really don't want to get into modelling then rather stick with Maya, there is nothing wrong with that. Some tools are just better than other in certain workflows anyway. Good luck man!

I come from a design background using Cinema4D, and I actually find Blender way better than C4D in terms of operation efficiency and in terms of the ability to make complex keyframe effects with few built-in effects. I actually like animating in blender better than C4D.

I was a Maya user for 15 years, trust me , once you successfully transit into Blender, you will fall in love with it. Maya is just too outdated and too fustrated to use, blender is simple & efficient once you learn how to navigate it.

Personally, I like Blender's mode changing more than in Maya, in Maya I would constantly accidentally click something I wasn't wanting. Generally I would turn off all selection options except nurbs, then I didn't have as much an issue unless I accidentally selected another rig. In Blender, I use the tab-drag method for changing modes, it makes it way faster. I do wish Blender's curves was as intuitive as Maya's graph editor. The normalize mode may help with keeping the curve fully in view. If normalize gets in the way, then the "." button near the number pad of the keyboard will put your selection in view too (works in the 3D viewport too). I also wish the insert key wasn't so involved. I think there's a way to change the hotkey so it will do it with a single button, instead of pressing a hundred things just to get the keyframe set. To be honest though, Maya isn't worth me paying for unless I'm working for a studio that is already paying for it, especially with so many studios switching to Blender (mostly in Europe & Asia right now). If a client pays enough then sure, but I'm really bad at client acquisition, so I don't have a good reason to grab it myself yet. Right now my preference is employment over freelance anyways. Thankfully if that day comes that I have enough clients that want it and can pay towards that overhead, Maya is pretty easy to pick up again, not quite like riding a bike, but not bad.

Been going through the same issues, glad to have a resource with all the hints in the comments. Thanks so much!

U must use keyboard shortcuts, itopensbig dealfor blender.

Can u make a video rigging maya free rig tool

Hi to isolate curves in the graph editor you can select the one you want and click on Shift+H, when you finished you can click on Alt+H to unhide all the curves

Try Source Filmmaker next 😈

Press XYZ to change axis

I love comments on this video it's an information pack although blender is lacking some features in animation but its really robust in dealing with user for sure it's complicated but it comes with lots of options useful ones just try to learn doing things in blender in it's own way then you want maya to behaved the same

tab or ctrl+tab to change mode

Press ctrl tab to open a pie menu

Most of the issues you had were kind of due to not knowing the software at 1:52 when you had to click everything, you can just tab out of the edit mode and select the rig and tab into the pose mode, it proves useful when you want to do mesh and object level editing at 3:28 you coud use the gizmos or tap "g" and you can press x,y or z to move the object in that direction, blender really works well with the default shortcuts, so to cancel the operation you would have pressed right click instead of esc also, pressing the directions x,y,z twice while moving can make the translation switch between global and local mode at 4:19 Rather than zooming in like that, you could normalize the values by using the normalize button or press "." to frame in on selected curves at 4:57 the keyframe of rig is persistent because you have pinned the (That pin icon beside the name in graph editor) at 5:30 Blender also greys out the handels that are not selected, for more similarity, you can enable "Show selected handles only" in the view menu of graph editor, and it will hide all other handles except for the selected one at 5:41 You can use Shift+H to isolate the curve and alt+H to exit isolation again at 6:17 you could frame by using "." and the do as in maya The video is too long for me to go further but most of the issues that you had were non-issues and could have been solved by giving a day or two to learning it, sure blender lacks in animation capability in some areas compared to a powerhouse like maya but it is not to the point where it lacks basic and obvious functionality, it has most of the tools that you'd need and even more You could check out Pierrick Picaut's youtube channel if you want to learn about animation in blender www.youtube.com/@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN Maybe I could make a video of solving/addressing all the issues that you had in this video so it would be easier for someone to at least get the basics alright

Pose/Object Mode: Maya has this same thing as Edit/Object mode, F8 or object/component mode. You can just start animating but for a character rig in the armature yes you need to be in pose mode...It is and can be confusing. You don't have to go through each mode you can jump between Object and Pose mode with Tab but Yes if you are working back and forth between something that is an OBJECT that isn't rigged and an Armature rig then it is going to be difficult. Just like in Maya if you Filtered your selection to "curve's only" to pick an object etc.. So if you are working in Maya it is just as easy to end up in a "can't select the thing you want" mode when you are trying to select something that is only the "RIG"

8:14 they just added the ability to highlight the property from the numerical input, only in most recent Blender 4.1 I think. Thankfully lots of animation UI changes happening for a project they dub ‘Animation 2025’

Hahaha. As a long time Maya user who has made the jump to Blender. You just need to realize that it is NOT Maya. Using Maya hotkeys is a trap. Using it the way you use Maya is never going to feel "good" or natural. But once you get into the flow, I'm actually faster in Blender than I would be in Maya. It's a hard transition. But it's worthwhile. (Oh. And use the Tab key to bounce between modes. :) Good luck and stick with it!

Well this video came in a great time for me. I'm a Maya user and lately all I hear is the hype about Blender to the point I'm also starting to learn it. But my point is that this video gave me a little piece of mind since I was starting to feel like Maya is somehow obsolote or in its way to be. It does seems that for rendering is a lot faster than Arnold, and I know of an studio that is doing everything in Maya BUT the render, that is done in Blender.

shift+h to issolate graph in blender 4

Bro just hit g, then the object is ready for moving. You don't have to press anything till you get to the right place. Then just hit the lmb and the action will be done. Or if want to cancel the action just hit rmb not the lmb.

Blender Shortcut key is most important for all works 😅 otherwise it's complicated for beginners.

Look at the pin on the graoph edeitor. You have the rig pinned so it is always in the graph editor! Unpin it, and away it goes.

as a maya animator who learned blender: yeah, dude, it's SOOO hard. there's SO many tiny little issues and differences that it drives you crazy. The hardest part of learning blender is finding out all these little things, it's madness, but it can be done if you really want it. Wsh it was easier, LOL