Blender 2.8 Is Going To Be Very Exciting, Requires OpenGL 3.3+

[DMJC]

Ok here's what's wrong with blender (and Maya). I come from a background of using Caligari trueSpace. I am used to using Location/Rotation/ScaleX/Y/Z in a single window to manipulate all the parts of a model using coordinates. The mouse is only used for selection. This enables me to quickly make precise 3d models without trying to guesstimate using the mouse. Maya and Blender both have the annoying design choice of scattering the text input boxes for location/rotation/scale/X/Y/Z all over the user interface. This means I have to go looking for these inputs whereas in Caligari trueSpace they're always in the same window, and whenever I click on a face, a line, a poly or an object, or a group of faces/lines/polys/objects, the Object Info window updates with the coordinates for the item I've selected. This makes it dead easy to make changes to object coordinates (I also love that the text input boxes double as calculators so selecting a face and you can apply maths to it e.g 2.0 *2 to double the size of a poly of size 2.0). The biggest problem all open source 3D modellers have, and all closed source ones really, is that workflow is completely different across these applications. What's really needed is for someone to really open up the UI customisation so it's simple to make our own 3D modellers using blender or another engine as a base. E.g no 3D studio max user will ever cutover to Linux because they're so used to the Max workflow, same for Maya people using blender, or trueSpace users using other modellers. I am even trying to rewrite trueSpace using GTKMM because I got so fed up with the alternatives and wine doesn't run trueSpace properly.

[polarathene]

I'm sick of the excuse of Blender's UI/UX being different than Maya makes it difficult to use.

If you can't, or more importantly, won't learn new software and concepts, this profession may not be for you, or at least it is a ticking clock for people resting on their laurels.

Second, don't compare Blender to small applications with a specific function such as Unfold3D etc.

Blender is fast and stable to use, flexible and is very actively developed, and can absolutely be called professional. when you _have_ to learn something new because your livelihood depends on it, you may find that it is not all bad and maybe even a bit better.

I'm just citing my own experience and others with Blender vs many other software packages. It's a relevant reason when many share that experience is it not? For example, take Krita(I think this was the app), try view and work on a layers RGBA channels, iirc you have to go through a bunch of options that split the layer into several images and then edit and recombine, it's no where near as pleasant/flexible as with Photoshop and it's channels tab. It's not that Krita isn't nice software, I've seen some great work from it, but certain things have bad UI/UX.

I experienced those issues time and time again when giving Blender a go. I remember trying to do some UV type of work that was very simple and straight forward in other software like Maya or Unfold3D but like the Krita example, awkward. I remember trying to some basic render / bake of depth(Z) and normal maps, either to a quad/plane or screen-space(where I had a camera animating along a curve with a constraint aiming it at where I want to keep focus on). I believe I was using suzanne for the test, and getting these maps was again awkward or weird/unexpected.

I had to be careful about the type of rendering(CPU or OpenGL/CL via GPU I think?), I'd also get different results or not be able to do such at all depending on viewport that was active(I recall 3-4 options? Cycles, Eevee, and the basic/software one? I had another issue with camera navigation, where I think I could focus on a selection to pivot around, and either this didn't work when trying to pivot around a selection of faces/vertices or where the 3D "cursor" was. I had searched quite a bit online and asked the community in several places and what I wanted to do apparently wasn't possible or supported in Blender. It did seem that Blender had the functionality from two other features, it just didn't for whatever reason support such camera pivot functionality.

Learning new software and concepts is something I do often, I haven't done much 3D/VFX work in years, yet in a recent role I got back into it and the current pipeline was inadequate, so I found more appropriate solutions for us(Blender was one that I was investigating into, had plenty of issues like described above, and when introducing to other artists they found it frustrating to use with little benefit). I brought in Unfold3D which was still in beta at the time, widely successful now with it's redesign release late last year, I would talk to the devs there during that beta and get features or UI/UX improvements pretty quickly. We had large environments in millions of triangles for the "low poly" version that was to be used in real-time VR experiences, the high poly was in billions from photogrammetry. With Unfold3D we got huge producitivity and quality gains(100 UDIMs is not uncommon), it was a very good tool for what it did, easily taught to other artists and they quickly valued and enjoyed it more than prior solutions, considerably better results for the initial automated unwrap than Unwrella produced too.

MeshMixer and 3DCoat were another two, the artists we had wouldn't fair too well at learning some of the software on their own(was especially the case with 3DCoat replacing ZBrush which was causing numerous issues, some partly due to UI/UX causing accidental user errors). I'd quickly learn the softwares and be able to answer the artists questions or figure it out, they really enjoyed it and opted to use it for some parts of the process beyond just ZBrush. MeshMixer had some solid benefits, but it's own UX issues, many of it's features apply when you activate the tool(eg decimation) and every settings tweak...we had incredibly grunty machines costing around 10k+ yet this UX issue would slow down the usefulness/gain from the tool quite a bit on heavy meshes. It was used for some optimizations/improvements in the pipeline along with cleanup replacing MeshLab.

I compared Blender to Unfold3D for UX/UI being much better, yes it's focused on one thing, but that wasn't the point so much as it was able to do it well. 3DCoat can do a variety of things like Blender yet it was far more approachable for me and others. If you don't want to admit that Blender is weak in this area, that's your opinion, I think Blender is a terrific software and very capable/powerful, but it's UI/UX is a definite and apparent weakness.

I never meant to say Blender was not professional. Yes it has a large community and very active in development. Stability/speed, even when using the stable release and not the 2.8 dev release, this wasn't always the case. I'd assume due to the size of the meshes we work with, even though our machines have 32GB RAM min and the main workstations 128GB(several 1080/TitanXP GPUs, Intel xeon hexacore or 1950x ThreadRipper, PCIe/NVMe SSDs). I remember it choking on some things too.

Again, no issue learning new things. For a certain ceiling that was hit with the prior process, I picked up Rust to process some mesh data(50-100GB binary file) and process itas even with 128GB RAM and GPUs with 12GB vRAM, the baking process was in need of more resources to handle that data set. Another was Substance Designer where I picked up their SDK and used Python to automate generating the graphs/processes to be more flexible which also improved on final results quite a bit. The company became well known in it's industry mentioned in Forbes, Nvidia and Epic Games.

[polarathene]

I am used to using Location/Rotation/ScaleX/Y/Z in a single window to manipulate all the parts of a model using coordinates. The mouse is only used for selection. This enables me to quickly make precise 3d models without trying to guesstimate using the mouse. Maya and Blender both have the annoying design choice of scattering the text input boxes for location/rotation/scale/X/Y/Z all over the user interface. This means I have to go looking for these inputs whereas in Caligari trueSpace they're always in the same window,

This makes it dead easy to make changes to object coordinates (I also love that the text input boxes double as calculators so selecting a face and you can apply maths to it e.g 2.0 *2 to double the size of a poly of size 2.0). The biggest problem all open source 3D modellers have, and all closed source ones really, is that workflow is completely different across these applications. What's really needed is for someone to really open up the UI customisation so it's simple to make our own 3D modellers using blender or another engine as a base.

Wow TrueSpace, I remember trying that as a kid :P

You can do this in Maya. For a single window, if you're seeing 4 different viewports mouse over the one of interest, tap space, it's now just that viewport.

For Translation/Rotation/Scale, I believe you can type either e/r/t keys to change between those modes without having to click a button or anything, there might also be a mouse context menu too, or you could most certainly add one. Maya's shotcuts and interface is very customizable, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for Blender.

I don't know what you mean about this info being scattered in Maya. Yes there are different places the info exists, usually for different purposes and workflows. In Maya you're interested in the channel attributes panel iirc. It should be on top right, but it's been a while since I've used Maya, it may not be open there by default(could be a tab button you have to click initially). This lists vertically each of the 3 transforms and their XYZ values as text fields. You can select multiple with a mouse click and drag and input a value to apply it simultaneously, you can also use the mouse to drag as if using a UI slider to adjust the values on the fly. If you don't like the location of this panel, you can tear it off into it's own window or dock it anywhere else in the UI, it will always be where you want it. And yes it can also do calculations like you mention.

You could take an object. Move it a few units along an axis away from the origin(0,0,0) and then snap the pivot point of the object to the origin. Press Ctrl+d to duplicate the object, press r to rotate it or go to the attributes and manually set a rotational value(eg 15 degrees), then iirc you can press duplicate shortcut again and it duplicates the selected object with that transform, so keep tapping the shortcut and you'll get a ring of that object around the origin. There is also of course a dialog box you can get from the menu to enter the transforms there and how many copies you want as well.

So you see, Maya is very capable of doing what you want. You just weren't aware of it, not sure how much you looked into it or time you gave Maya. The same is probably true for Blender but I've only had about a week or so with it and don't recall it as well, I do remember it having something similar.

[polarathene]

If only all those "professionals" cared enough to articulate their frustration constructively to the blender devs. Blender might become a bit less frustrating for them.

Any particular place for that? I have expressed my difficulty/confusion in my learning process to various Blender communities in the past. By the use of professional, I meant those who do 3D work for a living. That isn't to say Blender isn't capable of that, it very much is. Just that in film and games, Maya is pretty standard, alongside 3DS Max.At least most of the studios I've come across and know of use these. Plenty of artists I've met know of and may have tried Blender but had the same problems, all except this one German guy who was crazy good.

*who can pick up

Sorry, that grammar mistake just drives me mad.

Haha all good, grammer mistakes(that I'm aware of) bug me too, I always seem to have trouble with who/whom for some reason.

[Vistaus]

I'm just citing my own experience and others with Blender vs many other software packages. It's a relevant reason when many share that experience is it not? For example, take Krita(I think this was the app), try view and work on a layers RGBA channels, iirc you have to go through a bunch of options that split the layer into several images and then edit and recombine, it's no where near as pleasant/flexible as with Photoshop and it's channels tab. It's not that Krita isn't nice software, I've seen some great work from it, but certain things have bad UI/UX.

I experienced those issues time and time again when giving Blender a go. I remember trying to do some UV type of work that was very simple and straight forward in other software like Maya or Unfold3D but like the Krita example, awkward. I remember trying to some basic render / bake of depth(Z) and normal maps, either to a quad/plane or screen-space(where I had a camera animating along a curve with a constraint aiming it at where I want to keep focus on). I believe I was using suzanne for the test, and getting these maps was again awkward or weird/unexpected.

I had to be careful about the type of rendering(CPU or OpenGL/CL via GPU I think?), I'd also get different results or not be able to do such at all depending on viewport that was active(I recall 3-4 options? Cycles, Eevee, and the basic/software one? I had another issue with camera navigation, where I think I could focus on a selection to pivot around, and either this didn't work when trying to pivot around a selection of faces/vertices or where the 3D "cursor" was. I had searched quite a bit online and asked the community in several places and what I wanted to do apparently wasn't possible or supported in Blender. It did seem that Blender had the functionality from two other features, it just didn't for whatever reason support such camera pivot functionality.

Learning new software and concepts is something I do often, I haven't done much 3D/VFX work in years, yet in a recent role I got back into it and the current pipeline was inadequate, so I found more appropriate solutions for us(Blender was one that I was investigating into, had plenty of issues like described above, and when introducing to other artists they found it frustrating to use with little benefit). I brought in Unfold3D which was still in beta at the time, widely successful now with it's redesign release late last year, I would talk to the devs there during that beta and get features or UI/UX improvements pretty quickly. We had large environments in millions of triangles for the "low poly" version that was to be used in real-time VR experiences, the high poly was in billions from photogrammetry. With Unfold3D we got huge producitivity and quality gains(100 UDIMs is not uncommon), it was a very good tool for what it did, easily taught to other artists and they quickly valued and enjoyed it more than prior solutions, considerably better results for the initial automated unwrap than Unwrella produced too.

MeshMixer and 3DCoat were another two, the artists we had wouldn't fair too well at learning some of the software on their own(was especially the case with 3DCoat replacing ZBrush which was causing numerous issues, some partly due to UI/UX causing accidental user errors). I'd quickly learn the softwares and be able to answer the artists questions or figure it out, they really enjoyed it and opted to use it for some parts of the process beyond just ZBrush. MeshMixer had some solid benefits, but it's own UX issues, many of it's features apply when you activate the tool(eg decimation) and every settings tweak...we had incredibly grunty machines costing around 10k+ yet this UX issue would slow down the usefulness/gain from the tool quite a bit on heavy meshes. It was used for some optimizations/improvements in the pipeline along with cleanup replacing MeshLab.

I compared Blender to Unfold3D for UX/UI being much better, yes it's focused on one thing, but that wasn't the point so much as it was able to do it well. 3DCoat can do a variety of things like Blender yet it was far more approachable for me and others. If you don't want to admit that Blender is weak in this area, that's your opinion, I think Blender is a terrific software and very capable/powerful, but it's UI/UX is a definite and apparent weakness.

I never meant to say Blender was not professional. Yes it has a large community and very active in development. Stability/speed, even when using the stable release and not the 2.8 dev release, this wasn't always the case. I'd assume due to the size of the meshes we work with, even though our machines have 32GB RAM min and the main workstations 128GB(several 1080/TitanXP GPUs, Intel xeon hexacore or 1950x ThreadRipper, PCIe/NVMe SSDs). I remember it choking on some things too.

Again, no issue learning new things. For a certain ceiling that was hit with the prior process, I picked up Rust to process some mesh data(50-100GB binary file) and process itas even with 128GB RAM and GPUs with 12GB vRAM, the baking process was in need of more resources to handle that data set. Another was Substance Designer where I picked up their SDK and used Python to automate generating the graphs/processes to be more flexible which also improved on final results quite a bit. The company became well known in it's industry mentioned in Forbes, Nvidia and Epic Games.

You could give Hollywood+Hollywood Designer a try. It's available for Linux as well.

[polarathene]

You could give Hollywood+Hollywood Designer a try. It's available for Linux as well.

What was this in reference to? I was talking about VFX/#D software I've used and some code I've written to do processing(not UI based but I can do that just fine).

[numasan]

I'm just citing my own experience and others with Blender vs many other software packages. ... [snip]

I wanted to reply since I think you deserve it, and before I'll just let it slide.

Look, everyone has different needs, and it sounds like your project had specific demands that Blender (or TrueSpace for that matter) isn't fit to do. That doesn't negate all the areas where Blender actually is a valid alternative, which is a lot. Also I'm sorry to say, but your examples just show a lack of knowledge of pretty basic stuff you can do in Blender. (I don't understand why you would bake the Z-depth tough..?) Also if you mention EEVEE that tells a lot, since the version of Blender using that is in pre-alpha stage. Suffice it to say, the issues you had of not knowing how to do things, is not because Blender is limited. Should you be able to grasp everything you'd expect to do in half an hour? I don't think so, especially in a full 3D/VFX suite. Maya may seem more "intuitive" at first (I think that's arbitrary), but that doesn't mean people doesn't hit a wall after that first half an hour when things stops being "intuitive".

Blender is by no means perfect, neither feature or UI/UX wise, I freely admit that, but that goes for all packages (If you think 3dsmax has great UI/UX, we can't agree on anything..). Maya is not perfect either, the majority of people just live with it and don't talk about it. People seem to forget that when bringing up Blender though. That is also why I reacted like I did, because disregarding Blender has almost become a meme now, where people with no experience (5 minutes doesn't count) in Blender or 3D in general, doesn't hesitate to tell everyone they can about how bad Blender is, because we all know that, right? Just like people still won't stop hating on Gnome3 even if they haven't used it since the first release (I hope you get my point). My previous post wasn't directed at you personally, but more against the trolls, so other readers will hopefully stop believing in them blindly.

Most likely not gonna happen though...

[polarathene]

Look, everyone has different needs, and it sounds like your project had specific demands that Blender (or TrueSpace for that matter) isn't fit to do. That doesn't negate all the areas where Blender actually is a valid alternative, which is a lot.

It's not the first time I've given Blender a look, I remember trying it before it had a UI overhaul many years ago. I think cycles was fairly new at the time, or it could have been before that, it's a project I've kept an eye on but whenever I've given it a look it's not been the best of experiences. For a free tool, it's pretty decent and powerful, lots of features always being added. I've praised it earlier, my issue is just with UI and UX.

Also I'm sorry to say, but your examples just show a lack of knowledge of pretty basic stuff you can do in Blender.

Which ones exactly? The UV process was cumbersome compared to alternatives I've used. The texture baking being affected by different renderers(which isn't obvious at the time as cycles and eevee are presumably only for viewports and not related to texture baking...just rendering. however Blender seems to treat baking the same as rendering a viewport I guess?).

Have you seen how normal maps baking is done in Blender? compared to achieving the same elsewhere? For other maps I think I either had quality issues or distortion/clipping issues that weren't making much sense since they're a non-issue with other software under the same circumstances. Sometimes it was due to the renderer in use which gave very different results. My tests were only rendering a smoothed sphere or suzanne to a plane/quad. Getting the depth/z map was especially confusing or unreliable/inaccurate iirc.

The camera navigation point I made is entirely valid and not "a lack of knowledge of pretty basic stuff"... at least there was no information how to do what I wanted online, in the Blender docs or any knowledgeable Blender users from the community able to explain how.

(I don't understand why you would bake the Z-depth tough..?)

It was for a shader being worked on by someone else who requested it. Used for projecting and tesselating a mesh I think in a game engine. I thought it'd be a good excuse to try see how far Blender had come along. Getting the camera to animate along a path and focus on an object/point was easy enough, the rendering frames I think was a bit odd and I had to look into that for a bit. Biggest issue though was getting reliable output for the renders of z depth or normals(screen space).

For the test that involved baking, this was to get the height map, the prior paragraph would be similar but rather than traditional baking to a plane/texture was just going to render it from the scene.

Also if you mention EEVEE that tells a lot, since the version of Blender using that is in pre-alpha stage. Suffice it to say, the issues you had of not knowing how to do things, is not because Blender is limited. Should you be able to grasp everything you'd expect to do in half an hour? I don't think so, especially in a full 3D/VFX suite.

I did mention using 2.8 dev yes. But I also mentioned stability issues so I used the existing stable version too, 2.8 was mostly to have a go with EEVEE as it was newly available and caught my interest as another reason to play with Blender.

I didn't spend half an hour with it, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to do certain things I wanted. I watched some youtube videos, read docs on features and asked the community when I got stuck on some issues. I believe I commited time over a week after work, tried to show how Blender was progressing to some artists at work that had bad impressions of it but they weren't interested, they were much faster with their existing software and didn't see Blender having anything to offer them beyond especially with it's UI/UX issues they've all experienced in the past and that don't seem to have changed much.

By contrast, several other software packages were far easier to adopt and explore/experiment with. Though none were perfect experiences either, the UI/UX was less of an issue for learning them.

Maya may seem more "intuitive" at first (I think that's arbitrary), but that doesn't mean people doesn't hit a wall after that first half an hour when things stops being "intuitive".

I'd wager that it's far more intuitive to pick up over Blender I understand I may be a bit biased although I have used my fair share of alternatives. Like Blender it's a big package, it gets complicated, some things might even be difficult to figure out where they are too. Camera navigation with the mouse as well as selection/interaction within the viewport is far nicer experience imo, many other 3D software adopts the nav too.

That said ZBrush is a very popular piece of software and it's nav in my personal opinion is horrid, artists usually mention the issue with it but that over time you just get used to it. When introducing 3DCoat for other reasons, artists that had been using ZBrush for years were really happy about the UX being better for them, one of those things was the camera nav, within a week or so they were willing to ditch ZBrush in favour of this alternative being far more appropriate for them and more enjoyable to use and be productive in.

Still, the flow of using Maya and manipulating objects just works so well once you're familiar with what it can do. Perhaps the same is true with Blender, but from the knowledge/experience I had gained while using it, it still wasn't feeling up to parity in UX department.

Blender is by no means perfect, neither feature or UI/UX wise, I freely admit that, but that goes for all packages (If you think 3dsmax has great UI/UX, we can't agree on anything..). Maya is not perfect either, the majority of people just live with it and don't talk about it. People seem to forget that when bringing up Blender though. That is also why I reacted like I did, because disregarding Blender has almost become a meme now, where people with no experience (5 minutes doesn't count) in Blender or 3D in general, doesn't hesitate to tell everyone they can about how bad Blender is, because we all know that, right?

No I don't think 3DS Max is great at UI/UX :P Maya does have problems especially with heavy meshes itself. It can get stuck on operations where the CPU is doing only a single-threaded operation that could go on for hours(if it even finishes). Sometimes the behaviour like that is irrational, where it's quick or reasonably fast sometimes and ridiculously slow at others that you call it quits and try again....I remember when I was using Maya frequently that it would be prone to crashes quite often too. It's not perfect, but like MeshMixer, somestimes it's value outweighs the flaws. I'd like that to be the same with Blender, but that will require me to sink more time into it or delve into configuration to try be more usable for me. Since I've spun off into programming these days, I don't know if that'll happen.

I do hope Blender has an overhaul or papercuts focus on the UI/UX with the 2.9/2.10 release. It could make quite a difference if they get it right. Granted Blender already has a large user base that is comfortable with how it is I take it, so disrupting that might not go so well... At least if the Maya integration(I think it might have offered other adjustments) would mimic the experience of Maya more correctly, that'd perhaps be just as good.

Once again Blender is awesome, but I strongly feel the UI/UX lacks compared to a variety of 3D/VFX softwares I've used, it's one of it's biggest weakenesses imo.

[numasan]

Which ones exactly?

I shouldn't have put it like that. Just reading (and most likely misunderstanding) what you wrote, it sounded pretty basic to me, or at least I know what I would do. I realize now that no matter how we do things in Blender, you (and others) still feel blocked by the UI/UX and that's that. It is true that Blender has a steep learning curve with many keyboard shortcuts to learn, and it does require dedication and to some degree "unlearn" some assumtions on how things should work. It's frustrating until it suddently clicks, but then you also feel the improvements and speed. Of course having used Blender for so long, I don't think about why things are where they are, and forget that Blender has a problem with discoverbility, and many areas that are due for an tune up. Exactly this and a lot of other things is the whole point of the upcoming Code Quest, laying the foundation for the 2.8x series and forward. In a years time everyone is free to poke around in a officially released Blender 2.80 and get out of it what they want.

The texture baking being affected by different renderers(which isn't obvious at the time as cycles and eevee are presumably only for viewports and not related to texture baking...just rendering. however Blender seems to treat baking the same as rendering a viewport I guess?).

Cycles is not only for the viewport. It is a path tracing engine primarily for offline rendering, that can also be used for fast preview in the viewport. Texture baking means rendering to a UV texture map. You need a render engine to do that, and different render engines have different results or looks: path/ray tracing, scanline, opengl, etc.
For Z-depth, it is a pass enabled during redering and needs to be saved in a multilayer format such as OpenEXR. Still not sure why you would bake it, especially if it was for realtime use (just get the depth-pass from the engine?).

The camera navigation point I made is entirely valid and not "a lack of knowledge of pretty basic stuff"... at least there was no information how to do what I wanted online, in the Blender docs or any knowledgeable Blender users from the community able to explain how.

You can rotate around selection by focusing on them (period key on the numpad) or by a Preferences setting to always do it on selections. You can also lock the camera object to view, so it works like in Maya, or press Shift+F to enter "Fly Mode" controlled by WASD, and you can even enable gravity and warp around.

I do hope Blender has an overhaul or papercuts focus on the UI/UX with the 2.9/2.10 release. It could make quite a difference if they get it right. Granted Blender already has a large user base that is comfortable with how it is I take it, so disrupting that might not go so well... At least if the Maya integration(I think it might have offered other adjustments) would mimic the experience of Maya more correctly, that'd perhaps be just as good.

Don't expect any "Maya integration" or mimicry. Blender is a different program, and changing the navigation and shortcuts to Maya's won't make that go away. Things will improve for sure though, and with the Blender 101 project and its many possibilities, who knows what people come up with.

Once again Blender is awesome, but I strongly feel the UI/UX lacks compared to a variety of 3D/VFX softwares I've used, it's one of it's biggest weakenesses imo.

That's fine. I like many aspects of Blender's UI and UX and hope it doesn't change too much, because there are many strengths new users don't "get" at first. I'll adapt in any case. I also don't care too much about attracting more users, that happens by itself, and for people like you who have a valid opinion, it is totally fine to not invest in using Blender or just not being mentally compatible (like emacs vs. vim). Unfortunately many just repeat the same criticism again an again without knowing what they are talking about, and that becomes part of Blenders reputation which then overshadows all of its accomplishments for so many. Perception is changing slowly though, so it's not all bad.

[polarathene]

I guess it's quite like emacs vs vim like you say. For similar reasons despite trying for a reasonable amount of time, ZBrush controls caused plenty of friction for me, along with it's 2.5D approach that had some unpleasant gotchas. How long had you used Maya previously? It's keyboard shortcuts definitely seem better to me and just click/etc as you say for Blenders, could be I'm biased, I can't even recall what the equivalents to many of the Maya ones I know of are in Blender anymore, just that they often didn't feel as good, same with mouse but for the most part that could be resolved.

I do remember an issue with the mouse cursor losing most visibility(it would blend in a tiny/thin black cursor into the background colour being hard to tell where my cursor was. I later found out it was likely more the fault of my DE, the dark cursor being changed to a bright yellow variant didn't have the issue, I don't think it was something I could configure in Blenders settings(other than the BG).

For Z-depth, it is a pass enabled during redering and needs to be saved in a multilayer format such as OpenEXR. Still not sure why you would bake it, especially if it was for realtime use (just get the depth-pass from the engine?).

You understand height maps right? With tessellation you can take say a sphere bake half of it to a texture as a height map or z-depth, roughly the same. Then you have 256 levels of elevation/precision for an 8-bit texture channel that can be applied to a flat surface that had lots of triangles and pushes them out to form the 3D shape that was baked(well in one axis occluded at least, not as good as a vector map).

That type of map was required for the shader experiment someone else was working on along with normals to do some real time mesh effects of detailed high density stuff without the heavy original mesh/data to render on mobile devices, reduced quality by quite a bit I know but it's what the client wanted despite bringing that up.

You can rotate around selection by focusing on them (period key on the numpad) or by a Preferences setting to always do it on selections.

This isn't what I was trying to explain, I'm aware of that shortcut and what it did. I'd have to look up my post on reddit(different username), no one seemed to know how to do the navigation I was asking about, but that shortcut was halfway there and so was another feature, but for some reason Blender didn't have what I was used to with other software packages despite having the functionality of two features that should have been able to enable it.

Here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnblende...und_3d_cursor/

It was about being able to set an arbitrary pivot point for the viewport camera based on where the 3d cursor was from the looks of it. In Unfold3D and 3DCoat(and I think Maya) I could place the cursor over a part of a mesh and press a key to set the camera's pivot and rotate around that point.

Don't expect any "Maya integration" or mimicry. Blender is a different program, and changing the navigation and shortcuts to Maya's won't make that go away.

IIRC, Blender explicitly offers a Maya config option, I think it was even mentioned with the splash dialog when the app was opened. It's had that support for years, but it's not exactly what it advertises.