Beginners tutorial in Blender

I've decided to diversify in my software so that I'm comfortable in using all types.

Today I had a look at blender using this beginners tutorial which gave me some flash backs for when I first started learning maya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y__uzGKmxt8

I made a cup;

I got excited when I saw that there was a maya preset for the controls but they turned out to be too buggy so I'm using the blender hot keys.

It all seems to be pretty much the same except the rendering seems to be a bit different. For one thing I don't know what renderer it uses although I'm assuming it's just its own one. You can also create lights by emitting out of a plane(you can do this with maya but its not standard practice) and its common to blend materials(once again, it can be done in maya with particular materials but it isn't standard practice if you're just using blinns etc.)

I'm probably going to do a few more tutorials in blender to see how different the rigging and animation is. I think it's valuable to learn blender in case I don't have the funds to use maya in something commercial.

After blender I'm going to move onto 3DSMax so that I can do architectural stuff.