Hi all,
This is my first post on this forum and therefore thought I would give you a little bit of a background before diving into questions. Feel free to skip this introduction below if you find it irrelevant.
***I have been working in the game industry for close to 10 years now, taking on 2d and 3d tasks ranging from concept art to real time lowpoly modeling, texturing, and high resolution sculpting. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to train myself, be trained and train other artists in many different tools and authoring environments : Max, Maya, Zbrush, Mudbox … and a plethora of others.
I kept an eye on Blender throughout this time but never quite had the chance to dive into it ; like many other CG artists I regularly downloaded builds of the program out of curiosity, gave them a quick spin, but never found the time to get past the initial apparent oddity of the user experience. However I stayed in contact with a former coworker who did the switch to Blender, and this allowed me to keep tabs on the interesting development of the program.
It just so happens that I now have some time on my hands to finally explore Blender at a relaxed pace. I am not hoping to turn it into Max or Maya - I am simply curious about what it has to offer, and I in that context I want to evaluate it fairly from a feature and UX standpoint, especially in the light of other programs becoming increasingly obsolete and ridden with glitches and bad design decisions.
Now on with the questions ! I am using 2.71 and 2.72.
1 - When editing keyboard shortcuts to fit my needs, I somehow managed to break the Object/Edit Mode toggle (which, iirc, is originally bound to the Tab key). What surprises me is that even after temporarily switching back to the default Blender keybindings, this did not seem to be reverted, which prevented me from investigating the issue. Where is this function located in the Keybinding list ? (either the name or the python name would help me find it). The feature itself has not been removed (I accidentally set it to left click), but for some reason I cannot locate it.
2 - In the User Preferences panel I notice that there is an option to set the Dolly navigation “driver” to be vertical or horizontal. Is it possible to set it to both ? As a Tablet/Cintiq user I am often relying on sweeping arm movements for zooming in and out, and I find that having zoom/dolly driven by both screen axis creates a pleasant and fluid interaction. This is not a deal breaker in any way - just something I noted as a possible area of improvement when playing around with the viewport controls.
3 - I noticed that the blender tools are all python commands, which leads me to believe that creating brand new keybindings would be very easy (copy command - create new custom key binding, done !). However I could not find a way to create my own category of bindings - every time I press “Add New”, the newly created keybinding seems to become a child of the currently expanded category. Is there a way to create my own ? Also, each keybinding created with “Add New” seems to receive “A” as a default key. Is it possible to avoid this behavior ?
Thank you in advance for your help ! Sorry for the verbose post - I felt like it was necessary to be as clear as possible.