Blender 2.8 keymap mixing maya/max ALT camera and QWER transforms with default hotkeys

Ninja Dodo

Blender has made a lot of strides forward in UI and usability with 2.8. If you haven't tried it recently I recommend giving it another look, speaking as someone who has bounced off it multiple times in the past. Blender now has a hotkey (keymap) preset called "Industry Compatible" that replicates a lot of hotkeys from 3dsmax and Maya which can help ease people into working in Blender.

Unfortunately this keymap changes so many keys that it also becomes really hard to follow tutorials (which tend to use default hotkeys).

So, to fix that I put together an alternative keymap that takes some parts of the maya/max-like Industry Compatible hotkeys, specifically ALT-camera manipulation and QWER select/move/rotate/scale, while otherwise keeping most blender defaults so that tutorials still make sense.

I don't know if this is the right sub-forum to post this but I thought some of you might find it useful.

The keymap can be found here, on the Right Click Select feature suggestion site:

https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/w0fbbc/

CheeseOnToast

When I first started learning Blender last year after bouncing off it several times like you, that was my issue as well. To be fair, it's the fault of the tutorial if it refers to a default hotkey rather than the function it represents. Or even stating things like "I'm using the extrude function, "e" by default" would be fine. I ended up sticking with the defaults just to get me started. I'm gradually adding more customization as I've become more familiar with it. Still dealing with the brain bend jumping between apps that use Maya style navigation and Blender.

Ninja Dodo

Yeah, the brain bending around navigation is the whole reason I did this keymap. It just saves time and aggravation if you change at least the camera control and select/move/rotate/scale to be like other tools, especially if you're frequently switching software.

The one problem with making your own custom hotkeys is Blender insists on having a separate hotkey entry for *every* mode, so if you want to change things consistently you have to change like a 100 hotkeys instead of changing it just once (something I've also made a feature suggestion about incidentally)...

I think it makes sense to use Blender defaults for tutorials because that's what most people will be using, but the better tutorials tend to call out what they are doing as they do it and sometimes also have a thing enabled that shows the buttons they are pressing as a text overlay, which helps too. I would recommend the tutorials on the official channel and on the Blender Cloud (some of which are free, some subscription only).

thomasp

Yep, too many tutorials - or just references in some forum thread - that only reference the key being used, not the function name.

For what it's worth I disabled all the frigging hotkeys in Blender when I moved in and did my customizations from scratch. That took weeks to get it right. I came from a background of Softimage->Mirai->3ds Max & some Maya and had always done a mash up of most liked hotkeys from all those.

No defaults feel remotely familiar to me.

On the upside at least in Blender you can customize basically everything. Even if it's a real pain to set up, not the least because the hotkey editor does not check for multiple key assignments.

Dave Dind

This was really useful! Thanks very much

Cathodeus

Hello,

Thanks for the keymap. It is great however in grease pencil edit mode the W  E R shortcuts still acts ala blender ... not showing the GIZMO ... it activate the immediate move rotate and scale blender mode ...

I tried to do it myself but couldn't find a way ...

How do we ?

Cathodeus

ooooooooooooooookeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy i found how to do it ...

It seems that a conflict was in and blender doesn't notice users about that  ...

Blender should tell Double entry for all WER shortcuts ...

I removed Move rotate and scale from preference the one with "translate"

Saved the preferences.

Reboot Blender.

Ninja Dodo

You're right, Grease Pencil QWER keys don't seem to be working right. I had missed that.. When you say you removed move/rotate/scale do you mean just in the Grease Pencil category?

Cathodeus

Yes indeed this is what I did

Ninja Dodo

I've updated the Hybrid keymap with some fixes for Grease Pencil, should now work correctly out of the box (download from same link above). Thanks for catching that one. I hadn't really been using Grease Pencil at all before so had overlooked it during testing.