The shelf is more than just a quick shortcut to existing menu commands resident
on the filebar. While the idea that shelves are to there to play around is
intriguing, in 16 years I've never had that impression about shelves.
Shelves are an integral part of the Maya workflow, unless you work strictly
from the hotbox. With the hotbox you can remove everything but a single
viewport and still have access to almost every command. This is useful when
modeling but I never found it comfortable for anything else.
If you don't use the hotbox much or at all, it's going to be difficult to avoid
shelves if you want to improve your workflow in Maya. Maya, like most 3D apps
is multi-modular, meaning that in Maya the filebar and the menu commands it
presents changes context with each Module you are working in such as Polygons,
Surfaces, Animation, etc. Soft does the same thing except in Soft the filebar
does not change. Rather in Soft, the Main Toolbar changes with modular context
instead. Since Softimage's filebar never changes and provides access to all
commands all the time, it provides the same level of access as the hotbox, plus
additional functionality such as construction modes, passes, and search
abilities.
Why might you find shelves important to your workflow in Maya? In general,
while in Maya, and in a particular module, say Polygons, the Maya filebar will
not present all menu commands available to you. This becomes critical to
understand when you are modeling polygons with deformers since deformers are
located in the Animation Module. Therefor you can't access deformers while
modeling in the Polygons module unless you
A. Use the Deformation Shelf in the Polygon Module, or
B. Use the Polygons Shelf in the Animation Module, or
C. Use the hotbox.
Your workflow then consists of mixing shelves and general filebar menu commands
and potentially hotbox commands if you are willing to put up with the hotbox.
Other examples of combination practices will include polygons and materials,
surfaces and materials, polygons and subdivisions, and animation and dynamics.
If you are like me and refuse to use the hotbox anymore, because it has grown
to a ridiculously overbearing capacity of things over the last 16 years,
shelves are an imperative. You really can't avoid shelf use unless you choose
to constantly switch modes which in Maya is far less comfortable than using
shelves and the filebar menus simultaneously. You can use shelves to make
custom tool groups and store custom commands or scripts for immediate callback.
You add commands to shelves by executing a filebar command via CTR+SHFT+Command
and the icon will be added to the currently selected shelf.
As for having to decipher shelf icons not being an issue, I completely disagree
with this assertion. Some icons such as chamfer vertex or gravity or nonlinear
bend are easy to decipher. Others such as Attach Surfaces looks like "Measure
Surfaces" and can be really difficult to decipher if you've not been using them
over and over for a couple years.
As you will quickly find that shelves are an integral part of the Maya
workflow, and can't easily be ignored, the need to decipher icons will not go
away. They idea that shelves can just simply be ignored, especially for someone
trying to learn Maya and develop productive long term practices on this
software, is debatable. And while you can turn the shelves off and ignore
them, you may ultimately find this to be a far more uncomfortable practice than
committing to the long term effort and continual practice of learning and
relearning the shelf icons.
After more than a decade of using Maya, I found Soft's interface to be far
easier to use and while Soft offered shelves, I never had a need or desire to
use them there because all Module commands were directly accessible from the
Softimage filebar. I can't say the same about Maya and the hotbox is not a
comfortable option. This is definitely something on the long list that needs to
be addressed in Maya.
--
Joey Ponthieux
__________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not
represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-
> boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau
> Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 4:06 PM
> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
> Subject: Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5
>
> You can turn on the labels for the Maya shelf in the shelf editor (in its
> Option
> menu) but the point is, the shelf, or toolbar in general, are quick
> shortcuts to
> things that are the menu, so having to decipher them is not an issue. The
> shelf is fun and made to play around. You can tear off a menu to get a quick
> toolbar for one-click access to menu commands. The only maya thing doesn't
> do correctly in that area is it's not showing you the shelf icon next to the
> menu item to help users learn that these two things are the same, which
> might be leading some of you to believe that these are different. Now about
> the wonderfulness of text labels, I have no clue what a QuadChamfer is and
> if there is an ointment for that. :P
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Octavian Ureche <okt...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Icons are great for people comfortable with the application, not that
> > much for everyone else. A perfect example of an elegant solution would
> > be what the sidefx dev team did when doing their own version of "the
> > shelf". They added 3 modes for displaying it: icons, text and icons with
> > text
> underneath.
> > The shelf in maya, has always been icons only. Yes you can hover the
> > mouse over the icons and it will show you what that icon represents,
> > but it's pretty annoying to have to do that all the time, or learn the
> > shapes of the icons. Yes, you can also hack it, by building your own
> > custom color square, and use that for every single shelf button, and
> > then add a custom label for each, taking into account that you can't
> > use more than 6 or 7 letters for each square, thus reducing things
> > like "rigid link" to "rgdlnk"...and this is exactly the point - this
> > is the maya way...hacking your way through with a mental machete,
> > instead of just having things layed out elegantly in front of you.
> > The truly great thing about text is that it is usually consistent
> > throughout all 3d applications.
> > A sphere, an extrude, a cut, a material, a vertex etc, are all usually
> > the same in all apps, or similar concepts very easy to translate
> > mentally. While a square cut in 4 sides with one side greenish and
> > arrow pointing at it (component selection icon), or a set of bowling
> > pins with a large circle around them (rigid body from selection) is
> > only in maya. If i am a max, lightwave, c4d, houdini, xsi etc user,
> > and i see a set of bowling pins, how does that make me think of rigid
> > bodies from selection? i could think of nurbs or game engine tools or
> > shading or who knows what. Each of us understands an image
> > differently, but a "rigid body from selection" is the same to everyone
> working in 3d.
> >
> > Does this make sense?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Octav
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:56 PM, Andy Goehler
> > <lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Would you want to ged rid of that massive arrow in the MCP too? :-)
> >>
> >> Icons have their place, they need to communicate well and be used
> >> with care. The Nuke toolbar icons work great IMHO.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Andy
> >>
> >> > On 25.03.2014, at 17:40, Paul Griswold
> >> > <pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > 1. Text based everything - I hate the shelf in Softimage as well
> >> > as the UV editor. Get rid of icons entirely.
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Octavian Ureche
> > +40 732 774 313 (GMT+2)
> > CG & VFX
> > www.okto.ro
