3ds max to blender

ScottJ

I am sorry if this has been asked before but searching for blender didnt give me what I was after.

I am an experienced 3ds max user and I want to start using blender, I am finding it frustrating as hell as nothing is the same, even after changing the preset to 3ds max, sure it starts to feel a little like max in the viewport but absolutely nothing else seems to work like max.

so my question is there a tutorial out there that goes through the differences between how max and blender works, where things like the cut tools that are in max located in blender etc.

I didnt think I was going to be asking for much when opening blender and getting used to it, but I am shocked at the learning curve for blender (coming from max and other modeling apps viewpoint)

Or... is this one of those situations where you have to throw everything you know out of the window with blender and start from scratch?

electricsauce

I think it would be best just to get used to the standard Blender hotkeys. There's a lot of good tutorials out there that use screencast keys (I recommend Blender Cookie and BlenderGuru). Once you get used to it, you can model quite quickly.

This probably doesn't help much, but here's a comparison of Maya and Blender:

Jeza87

It's funny because i'm so used to using blender and know where everything is that when i tried to switch to MODO i just couldn't get into and came back to blender, i can just do things much faster.

SnowInChina

(for cut tools press "k")
one thing that helps out at the beginning is to enable dynamic spacebar menu under addons in the options menu
now you can access (almost?) every function just by pressing spacebar

and here´s a quick rundown of many usefull stuff by ralusek
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70687

frmdbl

I use Blender and 3ds Max, though less and less of the latter.

I wouldn't bother with Max's keymaps in Blender,
I don't see the point, you have a similar navigation, but there's a lot of original Blender shortcuts needed change selection modes, open menus etc.
You may only confuse yourself.

All the tutorials will be using the default shortcuts too obviously.

Blender is very different from Max in terms of how it's using shortcuts, if you learn them I'm sure you will see the benefit.

Dataday

I recommend checking out this thread:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?306867-BMax-Tools-or-how-I-left-3ds-Max-%29

To be honest, blender's default controls are HORRIBLE, and a good keymap change is necessary in my opinion. Some of them are less polished than others though, in part because no one maintains the keymaps and few of the developers are making sure they are compatible.

That said, the maya keymap seems to be the most polished out of the list and there are some who have made their own keymaps that you can install. I recommend going that route as well.

Blender is free, and its the only thing with a modifier stack similar to max, so its bound to have some downsides.