Should all (Video)Tutorials be completely free of shortcuts?

Hey everyone,

this is my very first post. I hope I am in the right forum. I couldn’t find a more suiting category.

I am using 3d tools since almost two decades now (UEditor / Maya / Max / Unity / Nuke etc.)

As everyone I am super happy about 2.8 and most importantly:

I understood the “industry standard” keymap and controls as a very generous invitation into the blender world. Which I gladly followed.

But now that I am trying to learn the more complex and technical stuff like rigging - I become more dependent on tutorials. But unfortunately I get stuck most of the time since I can’t follow even the official video tutorials because the hotkeys don’t work.

I have two thoughts on this:

  1. Make some sort of policy (and even a call out to the whole community?) to suggest everyone to make tutorials that work with any type of hotkey configuration.*

  2. Make it really easy to switch between the two configurations (like clicking the “blender” icon in the top left corner and checking either “industry standard” / “blender”… or something like this). So that switching becomes something that can be done within seconds.

Or am I missing something and there’s a much smarter solution for this problem in the making?

(*of course: Except for tutorials like “How to model extremely fast thanks to blenders amazing hotkeys…”)

/alex

tl:dr: I tried learning how to rig with the official tutorials and I get stuck and frustrated because I cannot follow because of the industry standard hotkeys. So please make all tutorials independent of hotkeys and / or switching super easy

1 Like

I know your pain. The issue with Blender right now is there are more than a few dozen operators that are non-existent in the UI, thus mouse and visual UI guidance is… hard. The reason people rely on hotkeys today is due to the lack of good exposed UI features and consistency… which makes changing the hotkey from the UI near impossible and also if the hotkey gets removed, it will be nearly impossible to get the operator back unless you memorized the code of it.

I have friends who have forked Blender to expose these operators and iconify them for quick and easy UI learning/teaching - though we don’t have a lot of tutorials on the dev build yet as it’s still all up in Alpha. Maybe you could take a look at that.

It’s the duty of the instructor to make good and comprehensive tutorials, Blender/BF has nothing to do with it.
If the instructor only uses shortcuts and don’t know how to explain things, then he’s not qualified to teach.