Its fair to say that I'm very critical of a lot of Maya's UI. The Hotbox however in the early days was quite a novel idea. One must understand that in 1998 Maya was not as massive a program it is today. So in some ways the Hotbox, something that was quite easy to use in the beginning, became quite complex after a decade of new features.
Why the Hotbox? Well its simple. In Maya you can turn off practically every viewport, menu bar, shelf, menus, dialog etc until you have nothing but a single blank viewport of your choice and you could still operate the software through the Hotbox. It's a novel idea actually, one that at the time reminded of the early days of 3D when we had menu monitors and the viewports were clean of menus. It struck me that poly or NURBS modelers might find this approach useful. Single mode task for example that required large screen real estate. I used it this way for NURBS occasionally and liked it. Problem is that with every new feature, every new module, Artisan, then PaintFX, Cloth, Fluids, etc the Hotbox kept getting bigger and less pleasant to use. I slowly stopped using it altogether at some point in the early 2000s. While i certainly understand someone having the first impression about the Hotbox that they do today, some historical context is useful however. Time has not been kind to the idea. One that had great promise. But with a lot of other things that AW did back then, they would have these moments of UI inspiration then just totally stop thinking about the UI and spend all their time on improving or adding new core features. In doing so the Hotbox eventually grew into something quite unlike its original appearnce and intent. If the user had been able to create custom contexts for tbe Hotbox, that is custom Hotbox layouts that only included what the user wanted it it, for things relevant only NURBS modeling for example, it may have been more useful. Problem is, the Hotbox theory appeared to be predicated on everything being in the same place so the user could use it gesturally without having to read the menus similar to marking menus. Don't know if they ever managed to implement hotbox contexts. At some point about 2005 I switched back to SI and didnt give it much thought after that. Joey ________________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Chris Marshall [chrismarshal...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 6:10 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem What's the Hot Box? Or have I just made that up?
