Join Alan Thorn for an in-depth discussion in this video Activating the Maya controls, part of Blender: Interior Environments for Games.
- [Voiceover] In this course we're going to focus on the construction of an interior game environment using the Blender software. There are several key words in that title I want to draw your attention to. First of all the environment we'll build is an interior environment. That means it's going to be indoors. And secondly, the environment is going to be for a game engine. That means we'll build, construct, and texture the environment inside the Blender software, and then ultimately we're going to export it from Blender and import that into a game engine.
For this course the engine we'll use is the Unity 5 engine, which is the latest version of the Unity software of the time of recording this course. What you see in the view port right here in front of me is the latest version of the Blender software, which is 2.77a. You may be using a slightly later version, and if you are that's perfectly fine, as many of the user-interface tools, presets and controls are consistent across the Blender versions. So the instructions I show you here should be good to go for many later versions to come.
Now if you don't have the Blender software, you can download it for free from blender.org but the first time you install and run the software this is what you will be presented with. So you can see in front of me here we have the Blender splash screen. I'm just going to move my mouse outside of that and just click to get rid of that splash screen, and this returns me to the view port and the default user-interface arrangement. This is what your Blender software will look like the first time you run it but if you have run Blender before and customized the user-interface, your software may look different.
Now what I want to show you here first of all is how you can reset all of your user-interface and the Blender software back to the original defaults so that you can do that if you want to and it allows us to both begin from exactly the same place for this course. So to restore the Blender settings back to their default, you can move your mouse cursor up here to the top left-hand side and select file and then choose load factory settings. That completely restores the defaults for the Blender program. I'm not going to click down here since I'm already on those defaults but you may want to choose that if you want us to begin in exactly the same place.
The next thing that I want to do here is to customize the Blender controls. To do that I'm going to move my mouse cursor to the toolbar here and click on the Blender icon. This will display the Blender splash screen that we have seen before. Now by default, Blender has the Blender controls enabled. That means the mouse and the keyboard control scheme use a default Blender customization. Which is absolutely fine in many cases but since we're going to be to jumping between the Blender software and the Unity software and since Unity uses the Maya style controls, I want Blender to use the Maya style controls too so that we establish a consistent single-control scheme between the two applications.
That makes it much easier for us as users to jump between each program and pickup and use the controls easily. To do that I'm gonna move down here to the interaction drop-down preset, and under interaction, I'm going to change that from Blender and then select Maya to activate the Maya style controls. This simply changes the way the keyboard and the mouse work. I'm just gonna click outside of the splash screen to get rid of that. The Maya style controls are now activated. In the next movie, I'm going to give you a brief run-down of how the Maya style controls work, and then we're going to look at tweaking a few more user-preferences for the Blender software.