No One

Very good point and that was (and is) one of the most annoying things of Blender in my journey to customize it. So, basically when you create a new hotkey, Blender does not show you any existing and conflicting Hotkey and an option do delete or replace the old one, like C4D, Maya and 3ds Max do. And it should, because there is some hierarchy of hotkeys. As far as I could understand, the Global hotkeys have preference to modes hotkeys (i.e. 3D View Global vs Mesh Mode hotkeys) and, I think but I could be wrong, the standard hotkeys have preferences over custom ones. The solution? After you create the new HotKey, you have to check for any conflicting hotkeys and delete them. For example, I changed my QuadView toggle to Spacebar, to act like Maya (not middle mouse like C4D, because the middle mouse is important in Blender for move, rotate and scale). But to do that I had to look for conflicting hotkeys and the one that needed to be deleted was the Play Animation hotkey, which is spacebar by default. Oh, that's awesome! Thanks for the link! I'll watch it today or tomorrow and comment here. I do know that Andre Price knows what he is talking about. I remember watching a presentation he did YEARS before Blender 2.8 about improving Blender's UI. That was back when Blender forums were still full of people defending Blender's right click select...lol

Awesome. Let us know how that goes. By the way, here are the screenshots I forgot to attach in my reply above, showing the two different rotate commands in the different keymaps.

You're welcome. I forgot to add another one that is essential for me: the "Render Time Estimation" addon. Let me add a little description of what each add-on does and how they make Blender easier for Cinema 4D and/or Maya Users. This could be useful for other users interested in Blender but without time to research and investigate hundreds of addons: "Pie Menu Editor": Let's you create Pie Menus and other types of menus. Very powerful, it lets you create Pie Menus equivalent to the Maya Marking Menus, 3ds Max Quad Menus or Cinema 4D V-Menu (or the old Dials addon). "All Material List": Creates a list of all the materials in your scene on the side-bar. Lets you select materials, create new materials, delete, etc.. In sum, it works like Cinema 4D Material Manager or 3ds Max classic material editor. "Xport": Corrects the quad view behavior so it acts like in Cinema 4D, Maya and/or 3ds Max. Then you just need to change the Quad View shortcut (Spacebar in Maya, middle mouse in C4D, Alt-W in 3ds Max). "Matalogue": Creates another list of all materials but this time in the Shading workspace, so you don't need to select the objects to work on your shading nodes. "Render Time Estimation": Creates an extra tab on the side bar in the Rendering workspace with a rendering progress bar, completion time estimation, render time of last frame, average frame render time, etc... So, it basically give us the info that we usually get in the Cinema 4D's picture viewer. With those 5 addons and my own custom variation of the industry Compatible Keymap, Blender became a powerhouse, very similar to Maya/C4D and VERY easy to use. Which surprised myself because I used to hate working in Blender. Honestly, I think these 5 addons should come with Blender.

Yes, you are missing a trick here 🙂 The first thing you should do is to change the keymap to industry compatible BEFORE you make your changes to be more like Cinema 4D (in my case, a mix of Maya and Cinema 4D). That's because the industry compatible does not change just the shortcuts, but also some behaviors (like this free floating behavior) to act more like Cinema 4D, Maya and/or 3ds Max. In this specific case, what happens is that in the normal Blender Keymap, the rotate shotcut R activates the command transform.rotate (which floats unless you define the axis) while the industry compatible activates the wm.tool_set_by_id, builtin.rotate, that acts more like C4D and Maya, just showing the rotate gizmo. See the attached screenshots. I know that most people in the Blender community will tell you that you should not use the industry Compatible Keymap because then it would be hard to follow tutorials, but I disagree. I have no problem following any tutorial and translating to the Industry Compatible Keymap. You have years of experience with 3D like me, so I think that would work for you too. I'm pretty software agnostic, as I started in 3ds Max, transitioned to Maya when I moved to the US and taught myself Cinema 4D on the side. Since then I have being using Maya and CInema 4D in parallel for more than a decade (Maya for professional and educational uses, Cinema 4D for freelance and personal work). So when it became clear that C4D was going into a different direction than the one I wanted (like you, I saw Cinema 4D as the perfect all-purpose generalist 3D software) it wasn't too difficult for me to focus on Maya and look for some alternatives to Cinema 4D. Right now, these alternatives are Blender and Unreal (and I'm still using Maya, of course). Maxon made a HUGE mistake when they decided to create an extra node system, totally ignoring their existent node system, Xpresso. They should have included the new features in xpresso, even if the new nodes are more low level. They should have been integrated. I'm a pretty advanced user of Xpresso - I even used together with Python in my Master's thesis. And I never touched their new node system...why should I waste my time if they could just abandon it like they did with Xpresso ? No thanks. It's a better use of my time to learn Blender Geometry Nodes or even Houdini. I agree. It's very refreshing to see how fast Blender develops and how the Blender Foundation actually listen to the users. Each number version of Blender feels like 10 versions of Cinema 4D.

Difficult to guess. I see good reasons to transition to each one of the big 3D rivals. as they all have their strengths and have cheap and/or free versions. Character Animator? Maya Generalist? Maya or Blender (maybe 3ds Max if you are old school) Archviz? 3ds Max Mograph? Houdini or 3dsMax with Tyflow (also free). Maya it's a the easiest one to transition from Cinema 4D in my opinion (same navigation, same external renderers, etc...). But Blender can be surprisingly similar IF we take the time to learn how to customize it using the Industry Compatible Keymap and some very cheap addons ("Pie Menu Editor", "Xport", "Matalogue" and "All Material List" do the job for me).

I doubt that. Every single other 3D or VFX software company not only thinks it's important to promote and have a good relationship with schools, they think it is crucial. I doubt Maxon is the only correct one here and everyone else is wrong. What is more likely is that they are thinking in very short term profits and not thinking of the medium and long term effects this hostile policy towards educators will have on their products. Or maybe they don't care that Cinema 4D will die, as long as they have everyone trapped with Zbrush. I do not use the word "hostile" lightly here - I actually have never seen a company as hostile as Maxon is to educators and students. Autodesk, Adobe, SideFX, Foundry, etc...they are all great on this front and have a great relationship with schools and students. Maxon is the ONLY "Screw you students and recent graduates!" company in this industry. And it is pointless to complain - you can read some of my posts here on the forum about this issue in the last few years. The more educators complain, the more Maxon doubles down and makes our lives harder.

A little perspective here as an Assistant Professor in one of the biggest State Universities in the US, with one of the most famous 3D Animation programs in a public school: 1) Since that stupid debacle of CANCELING Cinema 4D licenses IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEMESTER my department (and from a lot of other schools I have contact with) simply do not consider Cinema 4D an option anymore. it's simply a big no-no for so many schools. No department wants to risk something like that again. 2) Even without that, the lack of an indie license really hurts Cinema 4D as an option for any school. Students are being prepared for their life post graduation and no student wants to pay the ridiculous high prices of Maxon when they can get a cheap Maya (the industry standard), 3ds Max, and Houdini indie versions. or Blender, which is free. 3) That leave us Zbrush and Redshift. I suspect Maxon bought Zbrush as a way to trap schools, because they know they killed Cinema 4D education-wise. But Zbrush is a different beast. it's not just the industry standard in sculpting, it is pretty much the standard AND the only sculpting app used in 90% of the industry. 3D Coat is great but really niche and Mudbox is virtually dead. So school HAVE to pay Maxon for Zbrush. Luckly in our case we had old educational licenses before Maxon One was a thing, so we are not changing that as long as we can. 4) Redshift is something that I wanted to add to our labs this semester. Not for C4D (which we don't use) but for Maya. The integration with Maya is great and Redshift is a much better renderer for student projects than Arnold (easier to use and much faster). BUT the geniuses at Maxon outsourced their educational license to a ridiculous company called SheerID that refuses to recognize me as a professor (never mind my .edu email and my faculty page in the University website) and won't let me renew my educational license. Due to this, I wont be asking my department to buy Redshift licenses for our computer labs anymore (we are talking between 60 to 120 licenses per year). So yeah, Maxon is ridiculous in their approach to the educational market. It seems they INTENTIONALLY want to alienate educators and students. And if you lose educators and students you will die eventually. Cinema 4D is going the way of Lightwave. Yes, it will keep going strong in the Mograph field for some years (maybe a decade) but it will eventually die like Lightwave or, at best, become a super niche thing like Autodesk Flame.

That's not the reason Autodesk put the sculpting tools in Maya. It was never meant to compete with Zbrush. They are there for editing Blendshapes for facial animation and Skinning Poses. Don't believe me? Just watch the videos they published when they released those tool. A hint: Both the Shape Editor (for Blendshapes) and the Pose Editor (to fix skinning problems with Pose Space Deformation) are in the Sculpting shelf with all the sculpting tools.

Thank you. I stand corrected. I had no idea D5render was available for C4D. I'll check it out when I have the time. My point was that it's weird that Maxon and Autodesk let Unreal take the lead on this, not that they can take it's place. Anyway, let's agree to disagree here.

I totally disagree with this. Blender is a general DCC and Eevee (with some addons) and Eevee Next can get pretty close to Unreal Lumen. It is totally doable. There is absolutely no reason for Autodesk and Maxon to not be working on something along these lines. And, honestly, even if we could get Unreal 4 quality instead of Unreal 5 quality, that would be an amazing progress. You might not be thinking about this or have any use for real time rendering, but the CGI industry as a whole is. Here in the US is VERY common to see job ads asking for Unreal knowledge along side Maya or C4D. And I'm not talking about game studios.

Blender Eevee can get pretty close to Unreal Lumen with correct use of Light probes. Unreal is still better and faster but Blender (even without Eevee Next) is miles ahead of Maya and Cinema4D in terms of real-time solutions (there is simply nothing for Maya and C4D since U-Render died). Chaos Vantage seems to be closer to Unreal Pathtracer, not super fast like Unreal Lumen - at least in all examples I saw. I've been playing with Blender a lot since last year and the main reason I'm doing this is because of Eevee, as I've been looking for alternatives to Unreal, because I hate the whole workflow between Maya/Unreal or Cinema4D/Unreal. Of course, vanilla Blender can be MORE cumbersome than Unreal, but I was able to customize Blender (with the help of some addons) to work kinda as a mix between Maya and Cinema 4D. Again, I'm still puzzled by Autodesk and Maxon decision about this. Why are they ignoring real-time rendering for almost a decade? The ONLY reason Unreal is being used as a render engine is for the lake of equivalent (or even close to) alternative for Maya, Cinema4D and other big DCCs. I though Redshift RT would become this alternative but it seems pretty abandoned right now and it was never really good. Anyway, going back to the thread topic: this is an outstanding update for Cinema4D. it seems to be an X-Particles killer. Kudos to Maxon on this. But I'd love to see them working on a some real-time render solution now.

To be fair, that's the only thing I've been waiting for more than 10 years in either Maya ou Cinema4D. The only reason people are using Unreal for stuff outside game design is because of the amazing real-time rendering it offers, both with Lumen and the Pathtracer. The only comparable thing (and still kinda far off) in a general 3D DCC is Eevee in Blender (and it seems Eevee next will close the gap to Unreal). It blows my mind that Autodesk and Maxon are letting Unreal take such big slice of their market share. I've been using Unreal in the last 2 years and it's amazing but the workflow is really cumbersome. i wish we had something similar real-time rendering in either Maya or Cinema4D. (U-Render was promising and I was an earlier beta tester and earlier buyer. But they never reached a level that was even close to the Element3D plugin for After Effects, much less Unreal. I was really sad when they closed. They had a lot of potential, specially with the Maya version that was never released.)

I'd love to be proved wrong here.

Maxon does not have a good track record of continuing the development of any new feature of C4D. So whatever we get in the new version will probably be what we will have for the next 10 or 20 years. See Sculpting, BodyPaint3D, Xpresso, etc...

Did you even read what I wrote? I specifically wrote that Blender IS NOT the Cinema4D competition here. Maya is. Maya is free for students, the student license is given without hassle (while Maxon treats students as criminals and takes forever), Maya has WAY more features than Cinema4D (it's not even close), Maya is a industry standard in more industries than Cinema4D, and Maya has a cheaper indie version for the students after they graduate (U$305 if you make less than $100.000 annually). The only advantage of Cinema4D is that is easier to learn and used to have a better UI (not the case anymore). This is not enough for the ridiculous price difference, mistreatment of students (every semester my students tell me horror stories of Maxon cancelling or denying their licenses. This never happens with Autodesk software) and lack of a cheap professional version post-graduation (the indie version)