Move From Maya To Blender (In Under 30min) blender tutorial for maya artists

hi my name is chris bailey and this is a maya to blender first steps tutorial so if you're a maya pro user and you want to know how to get into blender this is the video for you let's get started [Music] now i use maya all the time in my professional work um but i also use blender all the time too and blender is my preferred tool if i had to pick between using maya using blender i'd pick blender every time now you might be wondering to yourself why like what's the big deal why why is blender a good tool to use well let me show you this right here is a short film that i've been working on in blender and this is a rendered image as you can see of one of the shots of the film but it's also rendering live in my viewport so i can jump out of my camera at any point here and zoom around my scene and get a closer look i can turn in all my my widgets come in here and actually start posing my characters to be able to work this quickly and this smoothly and to be able to see everything in a live context is just mind-blowing i've got it down to so far even cutting between shots here using markers on my timeline so i'm able to map out and plan my entire short film create it in this whole like rendered real-time viewport here's another much simpler scene that's set up but again with the real-time rendering you can see i'm even getting real-time depth of field i can come in and begin to tweak materials in real time changing things on the fly and getting actual results to see what the final render is going to look like another advantage that blender has is it's really powerful geometry node system which is a really dynamic uh system a lot like something you'd run into in houdini where everything is node based and you can create really cool animation effects modeling effects procedural systems that you can then create assets it's a really powerful tool under the hood that's constantly being improved on all right so when you're starting out a blender you might want to be using uh hotkeys that you're familiar with um but you can get a hold of those by going into edit preferences and we come over here to key map and you've got a different uh presets here we've got the blender we've got old old style old school blender and then we've got the industry compatible industry compatible is going to be um very much like maya so it's going to be holding down the alt key using f to focus things like that they'll all come back with that but i would strongly encourage you and i strongly encourage everyone to actually learn the blender hot keys and one of the reasons for that is there is a wealth of information about blender on the internet so youtube channels like this one tons of documentation and everything is going to refer to the blender hotkeys and if you can learn the blender hotkeys you're going to be far better off to be able to take advantage of all those resources so grin and barrett i would push in past that you know the the the pain of all the muscle memory that you have just resist the alt key just tape the alt key down and just keep your hands off it you can do it i believe in you it's worth it in the long run if you can begin to wrap your head around it so i'd encourage you to give it a try so using the blender standard hotkeys is what i'll be talking about today and the main thing you want to know is just to move around in your viewport what you need to do is hold down the shift key and use the middle mouse button this will give you your your movement around the scene if you let go of the shift key you can middle mouse click to orbit to move around and then rolling the mouse wheel zooms you in and out then if you want to focus on something instead of f it's going to be the full stop or the period key on your keypad and that will do the exact same thing and bring you in other stuff so those are kind of the main you know how to get around the viewport but what are we looking at when we see this viewport some of the things you might be confused about and not make sense right up at the top we've got all these different tabs now these aren't shelves so it's not like in maya where we've got the different tools that we can have with the different shelves these are actually just custom layouts for different windows so i can jump in here and have different um when preset windows that enable me to do different types of work within blender likewise you can come over here and create your own layouts um whatever you want you can create custom layouts and name them anything and save them in your own shelf up here at the top now what's cool about that is that the windows in blender are fully dynamic so you can move all these things around but you can also change any window into any other type of editor so in the top left hand corner of every single window you've got this little icon i can click it and this gives me all the different editors that are available within blender all the different spaces you could think of these as different spaces so i could switch here to 3d viewport and now suddenly i've got another viewport available so i can have two different views i can switch this to my timeline so now i've got my timeline you can you can really set this to anything you want so it means that blender's a really flexible environment to be able to set up your workspace you can also split views so if you go into the bottom or the corners basically of any window you get this little plus symbol and i can come here and click and drag up to split a view this way i can click and drag the other way to split the view that way and i can get rid of use by doing the opposite so get the plus click and drag over one of the windows and that will get rid of it so you can create really complex uh layouts with a lot of different windows doing different types of things if you want it's all there for you and it's easy to to mess around with it don't worry about things crashing it'll be fine you can just go nuts with it some of the most important windows so the outliner here this is very much like the outliner you would have in maya which you know of course normally would be over here and this gives us a layout of everything that's in our scene all the different objects are listed here everything has to have a unique name just like in maya so we've got all of our different objects but one thing that is a little bit different you'll notice this thing here called a scene collection and a collection collections are basically like folders um they're not groups so this doesn't have any kind of 3d location in my scene i can't change the translate or the rotation values of this this collection it just exists solely within my outliner but they're really powerful in this top right corner i can clearly create a new collection and i could have you know collection too you can rename them anything you want and i can you know drag objects in and enables me to then like turn off whole collections just to hide a bunch of stuff if i don't want it you can put all of your geometry in one collection and all of your lights and another one for example or have different lighting setups and different collections and turn them on and off as you want to view them what's also cool is you can have objects have multiple collections they belong to so i could actually take this cube so i can hold down control and drag and now this cube exists in both of these collections so there's not two collections uh there's not two cubes there's only one cube and you can see it's highlighted when i select one it's highlights both but i've got it in two separate collections so i can organize stuff uh really easily you can also drag collections inside other collections so think of them like folders that's probably the best analogy but don't think of them as groups they're very different now if you did want to group some objects there isn't really a similar system of selecting multiple objects and you know control g to group them together what you need to do is actually create an object in the scene and parent things to it come over to my viewport and hit shift a which is the quick menu for adding objects into my scene i can come over here and add another you know cube or a uv sphere let's say and if i wanted to group these objects together i would need to either parent this sphere to the the cube itself or typically if you want to have a similar uh functionality to what you have in maya you would want to then create shift a go empty plane access empty this is just a null basically that's just an empty uh just a position a 3d position in rotation within 3d space it also has scale values as well but there's no geometry associated with this but i can select shift select these guys and then shift select this ctrl p to parent and parent these and now they are parented to this null and i can do whatever i want to with it and these guys are going to follow along and you can see it lives over here in this kind of uh sort of layout that's very similar to what you would expect with a group now some of the like really most important things you need to know um moving things around in blender there's a really good hotkey system for this so instead of using the we and the r keys to switch between rotation translation and scale we have different hotkeys and i really want you to encourage you to learn these okay because they get really fast as you use them more and more the g key g stands for grab so when you want to grab something not move something you hit g and you can grab it around but what's so great about it is you can then hit once g is active you can see it's kind of locked to my mouse i can hit x and it will lock it on the x-axis or i can hit y it'll lock it on the y-axis or z lock it on the z-axis and this is an important point as well you'll see z is up and down in blender so if you're used to y being up and down just get used to seeing z as the up and down when you're in blender you can correct for that when you export for example in fbx uh you can export stuff and say look i want y to be up so that you can easily move between maya and blender with your project files if you need to so that's not a problem same with scale so it's s to scale but i can also lock it on the x or i can lock it on the y or the z um and then r is for rotate and once again you can lock the axis which is really powerful you can also do some cool stuff like holding down shift and selecting an axis so if i hit g hold down shift and hit z it will turn off the z um location uh movement and i'm just grabbing it along the x and the y you can see just the x and y are highlighted one last thing that's going to really drive you nuts you're going to hit w at some point when trying to move something so you're going to grab an object you can hit w and your cursor is going to change into this mode and you won't be able to get it back and it's a bit weird and confusing so actually what w does is it changes your selection mode so you see right here in the corner w actually changes the selection so if this ever happens to hit w and you're trying to move something just go over here click hold switch it back to tweak you'll be good to go now what's beautiful about that is that these caught keys the g for grab are for rotate ester scale you can you can use that same conceit in pretty much every window so i could come here right and if i set a keyframe for my cube here let's say so i'll hit i and set a location keyframe and then go forward a little bit bring it over here rotate him and i'll set keyframes by hitting i over these and i'll come back and let's just rotate them again over here i can click on these keyframes in my timeline and i can hit g to grab to move them around i can also select multiple keyframes hit s to scale and it will pivot based on wherever my playhead is so you can see i can scale those keyframes here likewise i could switch over to the graph editor and it's going to be very familiar to you the graph editor is quite good here in blender as well and we can scale actual individual handles we can rotate them and we can g to grab we can also lock on the y-axis or the x-axis so you see you don't have the functionality up here the buttons to constrain to the x or y plane all you have to do is just hit that within the hotkeys and you get the same functionality now a couple of things i think are really useful to know if you're coming from maya going into blender about the graph editor let me just show you over here if you go up to edit preferences and we go to animation right here we've got f curves we have the unselected opacity by default blender is set to one so every everything even the curves that aren't selected are full opacity i can drag this down i like to really bring this down so they're quite dim so it's really clear which one's selected um i'll close that out and another thing that's really really useful is that by default whatever curve you click on is going to be the one that you select and this can be a bit of a problem when you've got keyframes in the same position like for example if i have this z location here and my x if i'm clicking and i want to grab the z i'm like click to grab the x and up it switches me over is that this can be really frustrating for my user if you're not used to this functionality i would encourage anyone even blender users to change this by just going to view and select only selected curve keyframes now it's going to mimic maya where you can select the channel and that's now the only thing that enables you to select a keyframe so it doesn't matter what keyframes exist here on what curves if they're in the same position i can still grab and move them around so that's all pretty good so again with um keyframes you know you can use the same uh hotkeys using the viewport so i can select all with a and then hit full stop to zoom to view this or i could select all my channels like this and hit a to select alt and full stop and that will zoom everything you can also hold down control just to change your your zoom uh and the different different axises um within this view so now what we can do is we can come in here and you know grab multiple keyframes and we can scale along the x if i hit x to constrain and now you can see i'm able to just change my the timing of my keyframes again using the playhead as the pivot point and you can change that you can actually come over here and change it from instead of bounding box center which is the default which will do it right around the playhead you can have other ones like individual centers so if i select that and scaling x you can see the keyframe stays still and now it's just going to be scaling the handles you can also right click any keyframe like you would in maya and change the interpolation mode so constant linear we've also got some other cool ones bear in mind that whenever you have selected whenever you deselect it it's going to disappear from your timeline and from your graph editor and that's because by default this button right here is turned on which is only shows selected so if i turn that off and now show me everything that has animation in my scene all the curves everything stays up so you can use that to kind of focus in um on stuff now if you wanted to edit some mesh let's say you're working this cube you want to extrude some there's no right click menu to get to the edit mode um or be able to edit faces and edges and stuff in blender it sort of lives as a separate uh a separate workflow separate state i guess you could say so if i hit tab i'll go into edit mode and now i've got these options up here i've got the vertex edge and face mode i can switch between these i can grab them and now i can have all the functionality i'm used to having once i get the hotkeys down you've also got these handy tools down here just for icons you can use to and do things like extrude they're quite easy to work with inset stuff like that but we also have all the hotkeys as well and you can use the x y and z to constrain um your access so whenever you're extruding out you can extrude in whatever direction you want it's very very easy to switch between when you're done editing you hit tab to go out of edit mode now if you notice up here object mode this little drop down these are all the different modes you can switch between them here manually something i like to do is come up here to edit preferences key map and turn on tab for pi menu and this allows you to just hit tab to get this pi menu you can select all the different modes now if you're working with a rig it's important to note that in blender rigs or armatures bones all that stuff they live as an object in your scene okay so you don't just directly click on the bones and start controlling them what you do when you click on a bone you actually end up clicking on the armature object you can see right up here this droid rig is an armature object there's a different mode in blender and it's called pose mode that's you have to switch into that first before you can pose bones so we can go over here from object mode and when i have a rig select you'll see i get some new options if i have the mesh selected if i go up here i'm not going to get those options it's just if you have an armature picked um you come up here and we go into pose mode now i can pose my character one thing about this is if i have any other objects in my scene let's say i have like an object some set pieces or something and i'm in pose mode and i'm posing my object and stuff and i want to click on something else it won't let me so blender forces me to stay in pose mode so all i can select one in pose mode are these bones now this can be a little frustrating if you're not used to this so there is one setting that you can change that will make this a little bit more like maya but not entirely so if you come up here to edit you can turn off lock object modes and what that's going to do is basically whenever you're in pose mode now if you click on something else it's going to automatically let you select it and it'll switch the mode to what's appropriate the downside of this is that if you've got multiple characters and you're seeing multiple armatures when you select it if you put them all into pose mode you'll be able to select their bones but they'll all be active at the same time so if i hit a to select all for example it will select all the bones in all the characters that are in pose mode so it's not quite like it would be you would expect in maya but this is a good workaround at least to kind of make it more familiar until you're getting used to the idea of pose mode being a separate space so for example if i was to go shift a and go here to armature and create an armature you see this new armature object if i just grab it over here it's just a single bone and unfold these armatures to see what's inside them so you can see the different bones now if i go into edit mode this is different from pose mode so edit mode is where i can sort of create my rig and my bone structure let's say then i can switch into pose mode and pose mode is where i pose the the bones right the idea is you create the armature the bass rig and it's sort of t pose in edit mode you get that all set up you get constrained to your object you get everything working and then when it's time to animate you're switching into pose mode now let's say you're you're doing some work and you want to figure out how to do something and you're like i know what it's called in my i know how to do this thing in maya but i don't know how to do it in blender uh you know let's say you want to duplicate this object it's like how do i duplicate thankfully blender has got a very powerful uh tool search functionality so if you hit f3 this is going to be like your favorite key hit f3 and you can type anything in so let's type in duplicate you can see we get a couple of options and it'll show you where it lives so object duplicate objects so this is referring to the um the menus so up here you can see object is one of the menus in object mode so i could select object and in the drop down i could find duplicate objects it also will tell you the shift the hotkey if there is one so ship d duplicates so i can do that now and i've got another uh another cube here that i've created but you can do this for anything and thankfully it's uh not it doesn't have to be exact you have to spell it right you don't have to get it in the right order you can kind of just you know roughly guess you know what what could it be called and it will give you all the different things that have these letters within the name so it's a really really powerful way of learning not only the hotkeys but learning what it is you can do in blender and how to find it so now if i wanted to change my orientation so right now we're in global um i can turn on my widgets here so you can see these which is you know of course very familiar if you're in maya very similar widgets like you would have you can turn these on manually just this little menu off to the side and be in mind every window in blender has got these sort of side windows you can actually drag these guys and hide them you can see there's one here and you can bring them out by grabbing and bring them back and you can see that little arrow icon just above my mouse that's the clue that there's one of those menus hiding so you can see like for example here if i drag those icons i can hide them and i can bring them back you can also use the n key and the t key to bring them back so it's very uh very easy to to hide things if you don't want to see them um so i'm gonna hide that one so i've got my uh my widgets here you can see i'm in global mode right now my orientation so i can come up here to the top and just switch this this is where you have all the different uh translation sort of orientation modes so i can switch to local now and work within the local space where i could you know have a face in edit mode for example and you know grab this face which is a weird angle and i could set this instead of local to normal and now i can grab and move it along it's normal so that's uh how you could do that likewise we've got the different um pivot modes and this brings up one of the cool features of blender which you don't have in mind the 3d cursor the 3d cursor is quite powerful so 3d cursor is this thing right here and we can move it around and place it in different spots to do stuff so what i could do here for example let's say i wanted to move this sphere to be right here where this vertex is on this bottom corner so i could go into edit mode i could switch to vertex mode select that vertex and then i could do the hotkey shift s if i didn't know the hotkey i could type f3 and type in cursor and i can see all the things that do stuff with the cursor and i want to snap the cursor so i'm going to go snap cursor to active let's do that cursor 2 active now the 3d cursor is in the exact 3d position of this uh this vertex now if i go out of edit mode and object mode i can select this object and i can type f3 and snap selection to cursor there it is you can see it gives me the key the hotkey as well shift s so if i go shift s get my radial menu here i can pick what i want and i'm going to take the selection so the selected object i'm going to move it to the cursor so now bam that's going to move that over here kind of think of it as like a null or an empty that lives in your scene permanently and you can use it to position things it's also the place where new objects will be created so i could come over here let's say and i could shift s cursor to selected so now this cursor is at the origin of this object and i can go shift a and let's create a mesh isosphere and i can scale that up so we can see it and it's positioned that isosphere right there so whenever you create a new object it always puts it at the position of the 3d cursor moving along the top we've got the magnet up here this is for snapping we've got all these different types of snapping which is you know pretty self-explanatory so you can position things with snapping it works in edit mode as well we have personal editing which is a really cool tool if i go into edit here edit mode i can select one of these vertexes let's say and hit g but i'll turn on my personal editing and i get this circle and i can roll my mouse wheel to expand it also different view modes and stuff we can hide things just like you had in maya and we have our gizmos button here with a little different gizmos and their view stuff and then also with the um the overlays um these are all the different ways you can turn off like the floor or the 3d access things like that likewise you have transparent mode for selecting hidden vertexes and stuff if you're in edit mode you're trying to do some work and you want to make sure you're selecting everything that's a good way to do it then we have our view modes we've got our wireframe mode flat shaded mode and the material shaded mode and then we have the rendered view and the render view is going to switch us into ev which is the real-time render engine for blender i'll just come here i'll turn off scene world so we can get a built-in hdri and i'll just turn in turn up my world opacity so you can see it and you can see it's coloring my scene it's creating lighting for me it's doing some really great stuff i can see my real-time lighting and shadows here all those settings live over here now this is another kind of really important thing to uh understand about blender and it's this section over here the properties panel so in my when you select an object you know your outliner you get the properties for that object then you'll see the attribute editor and things like that the equivalent of all that stuff lives here in these different tabs so these tabs give you all that information if you select an object um you'll see you get different options depending on the type of object so if i select this light i'll get a new light tab and there's a few less options so they always relate to the object you have selected the top ones here from this little camera down to this world icon these aren't relating to the object they're relating to the whole scene so this is your render settings what render engine you want to use and different things you want to be doing if you're using eevee i'd recommend turning on bloom ambient occlusion and screen space reflections they're not really going to hit your performance and it's going to make things look really nice if you switch down you've got the printer icon which is the output settings for your scene where you can save we've got render layers and stuff we're doing compositing and then we have some scene information here we can change things like the units if you want to use a different system for the metric or you can match you know mayas unit scale specifically if you wanted to be going back and forth that's all really handy and then you have some stuff for dynamics and rigid body systems then you have the world which is the world shader so what shader are we using in our world we'll talk about shaders in a moment and then we've got a collection tab here which gives us information about the collection that we have that's relating to the object that we have selected so in these we've got our main transform controls here under the orange box so we can set the different you know location rotation transforms the scale transforms for the object we have selected so if i select this isosphere you can see i can just change the scale here directly the next tab down is modifiers and this gives us some really cool stuff like an array modifier these are basically like non-destructive uh little tools that you can use to do all kinds of wild and wacky things in your scene with your objects you can stack these up so i could put like a subdivision surface here to get a smooth subdivisions on my object i can turn up the number of subdivisions and also too they're affected by what order they're in so you can stack them in cool ways to do really interesting dynamic stuff that's non-destructive so we can just turn those off particles allows us to emanate by like emit particles from an object and you can set those up here with the plus symbol adds a new particle system and now suddenly we've got particles flying around in our scene we've got all those settings that appear there and then we've got uh our um physics tab so this allows us to do things like you know turn this guy into a fluid or make him a cloth or allow him to to collide with stuff keep going down we've got constraints and these are all the different types of constraints so there's no constraint menu you're going to add a constraint to an object kind of like a modifier so let's say i want to take this object and give it a you know dampen track constraint to always look at the isosphere now i can move this isosphere around and this guy's going to constantly be constrained to look at that isosphere and you've got all the controls there so object data is a bit more specific to the individual data within an object so things like the uv maps live here shape keys vertex groups this is where you can find all of those and we've got the material tab which you can see we already have a default material that's applied so say you've got an object selected and you're like look i just want to apply a default lambert shader how would i do that in blender well you can select the object and come to the material tab and you just click new and this will create a new material you can call it you know whatever you want and it sets it up here for you now this is automatically going to default to the principled bsdf so the you know the realistic shader if you click on surface you've got to drop down many of all the different types of shaders so you could do something simpler you could just do a straight up diffuse bsdf if you don't want to have a lot but i find that the overhead isn't really that um expensive so you know you can really just leave this on the principal bsdf and uh it'll work it'll work really well so when you want to work on a shader you can edit things in here but it's not as easy it's a bit cumbersome here uh using it within this side so i i like to bring up the shader editor and this is kind of like the hyper graph uh but not quite um it's nodal based and uh whatever shader you have selected in the list you have multiple shaders in this object let's say we had a few you know different shaders here whichever one you have selected is the one that will be displayed here um you've got this drop down menu as well which you can select them from and this allows you to you know create all kinds of stuff and you can come in here and add nodes for different types of you know noise effects all kinds of procedural stuff and you can use these to create some really interesting shaders also too if you want to get rid of the faceted look where you see each normal kind of rendered as a hard-edged object you can select objects and right-click shade smooth and that will shade them as smooth you can also switch back easily so everything's pretty much animatable in blender you can really any of these inputs you can animate and it's very simple to do so we can switch this one let's say let's switch this to 4d which would give us this w value and i can drag it and you can see that when as i drag it i'm getting you know variation in my in this procedural shader so you know i could right click on this guy and i could insert a keyframe i could also use the hotkey i and just set a keyframe there and i could go forward a little bit in my timeline by pressing the space bar which is play in blender if i bring my timeline back up here just by creating a split view you can see i've got a keyframe that's appeared just like it looks in maya in my timeline i can hit g and grab this around i can come forward a bit i could move this guy forward some set a new keyframe with i and now you can see it's going to animate between the two um now you also have the gpu renderer which is cycles you can just switch this by going to the camera tab switching over to cycles um and it's going to be a an actual ray traced uh you know really high-end gpu renderer it's really beautiful but i find ev often does the trick now as i said before spacebar is the play button so it plays your timeline so if you want to actually split your viewer jump between different view splits that's where you need to set up different layouts up here or do your your splits this way to then set up you know individual shots or individual layouts so if i wanted to like look at this from the top view i come up here to view and i go to viewport and you can see we've got this number pad 7 control 7 all these different hotkeys these are the hotkeys you can use to jump between different views so you can use your number keypad to change those different orthographic or perspective views you can also jump into the camera by either clicking on this camera icon to jump inside or what you can do is hit the zero on your number keypad and that will also jump into a camera that's really useful one last thing well two last things i think that are really great to know about i open up the side thing and i go to view right here under view lock i can lock my camera to view so if i tick on that box that means that now wherever i move my view my camera is going to come with me this is really great for framing up shots very very handy another thing that's very useful is the quick menu quick selection menu you can take any property and right click on it and you can add it to quick favorites so i could go to this you know lock to 3d cursor and i could add that to my quick favorites i could add anything i want to my quick favorites and then if i hit q in the viewport it's going to give me all the things that i've put there so i can easily for example lock my camera to view i can turn that off and jump out of my camera i can turn it back on jump into my camera and now i'm once again moving my camera so uh really really useful because you can set that up for every window and so you've got a lot of different workflows you could use there which are really useful so there you have it i hope you found this intro to blender really helpful and that it makes sense in your my brain being able to translate over to how things work here in blender if anything didn't make sense or you have more questions please leave a comment below don't forget to hit that like button if you enjoyed the video and subscribe to this channel if you'd like to learn more about blender especially if you're interested in making short films that's a big focus of this channel thanks so much for watching i'll catch you in the next tutorial until then have a fantastic [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 45,760

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film, blender for maya artists, maya to blender

Id: 0C0njghXPAI

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022