Blenderole

Now it begins to get confused. There’s no way to move freely the pivont point (the pink dot) of an object, with a gizmo for example. You have to position first the 3d cursor to your liking then center the pivot to the 3d cursor. PLUS, sometimes the pivot is called “object’s origin”.

Extremely essential to this, thus, is snapping. Done through SHIFT+S. Options are clearly self-explanatory, but you have to understand what you are moving (Cursor to Selection means moving the 3d cursor to what you have currently selected, a vertex for example). After you’ve placed the cursor where you want the object’s origin to be, you use one of the following buttons:

Fortunately, you don’t have to go through all this when you want to just rotate/scale an object with a different pivot. On the pivot mode options, bellow, you can quickly change which pivot point to use:

References used for this post are:

Blender Underground post by penix1 with an in-depth explanation of Blender Objects Origin
2min video tutorial from Josh (3DMacDaddy)

All this is usefull if you are going to use Mirror, because it mirrors on the object’s origin point.

And if you want to rotate the pivot, you actually have to use a script named Object/Scripts/Axis Orientation Copy.

From Blender3dClub:

Most use keys:

G - Grab/move selected items.
S - Scale selected items.
R - Rotate selected items.
X - Delet menu. Many options.
E - Extrude a vertex, edge or face.
B - Box selected items.
B - again..  ’Paint Brush’ select items.  Mouse wheel will adjust the size of the brush.
A - Select all (Deselect all).
K - Loop cut mesh faces.
Z - Switches between ‘Solid’ and ‘Wire Frame’ views.

ALT M - Merge menu
CTRL Z - Undo.. multible times if needed.
CTRL W - Save.. like any software, it crashes sometimes so save your work often.

And the very important: N, for the transform panel (the image below is for when on OBJECT mode, edit mode transform panel is diferent).

On the Blender manual there’s also a long list of modeling tools.

TAB: changes between edit mode and object mode. Obviously, object is for whole object, edit to edit the object.

CTRL+TAB: allows to change between vertex, edge or face edition mode.

Subsurface is here:

In Ubuntu the alt key moves windows. Change that at System/Preferences/Windows. If you are using GL Desktop (Compiz) you might also change that there (System/Preferences/GL Desktop).

To navigate on the viewports: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/The_3D_Viewport_Window

The defaults, resumed are:

MMB: rotate

Shift+MMB: pan

Ctrl+MMB or scroll wheel: zoom

The rotate view feels completely different from Max/Maya because the default option is View rotation as Trackball instead of Turntable. You change that on the Preferences menu, dragging the top panel down a bit, so you can change this options:

Basic views can be changed on Numpad: