Well, first of all, there is no Alembic (official) support for Blender, or some fancy plugin for transfer. Best I got while ago, for animated camera and few static objects (used Blender's smoke sims), it was something like FBX from SI, convert FBX to Collada with AD FBX Converter, load Collada in Blender. Don't know does this works for deformations.
Static things are transferred nicely, obj or like.
Anyway, once you're there:
- Blender's ''up'' is Z. Some exports - imports considers that (mentioned obj), some don't.
- Camera in Blender does not ''look at'' at something, by default. You'll want to re construct direction constraint - in Blender, that's called 'track to' constraint to ''empty'' (null). I think vectors are the same as in SI, negative Z axis, world Y is up vector.
- In case of obj, you'll get materials on clusters, if there are some (they should show up as materials, something like xsi.polycls.my_material), and one (first) uv.
- To render with Cycles, enable it in menu at top of GUI.
- To use nodes, go to node editor, enable "use nodes'', choose what kind of nodes to edit. When it comes to rendering with Cycles ( and else, generally), Blender makes difference between ''texture tree" and ''material tree'' - this allows to load one texture tree in different materials.
- environment texture goes under 'world' on left 'big' menu (small Earth icon).
- to get GPU to render, first enable it in file> user preferences> system. Once you're in preferences, you can enable LMB for selection, too (under ''ínput''), instead of "unusual" default.
- once GPU is enabled, get Octane renderer and switch to Octane
(sorry couldn't resist, Octane has reputation as much faster GPU renderer).
And that should be it. Cycles itself offers a lot of options, I'm pretty sure there are tutorials around - like for any path tracer, mainly about cleaning the noise. In any case, I'll take look at latest tuts, because of changes in Cycles - for example, three years old samples from tuts I have, didn't rendered in last year Blender (or, did, with all sort of problems and slowdowns).
P.S. don't know anything about FreeStyle in Blender.
