Sure. If youre willing to write your own UI or mod every .mel driving the interface, yes thats possible. Been possible since v1.0. AW made a huge frikkin deal about that back in 97. Thats not the point. I'll never forget in 98 there was no invert component selection. What was AW's response to that? Script it, and throw it on the shelf. Not everybody can do that, has the time to do that or experience. Besides its a basic thing that should have been there. Was i customizing the interface by writing my own inverse selection tool, sure. But i should not have had to do that.Thats been the issue since Maya was conceived.
If somebody wanted to make the perfect UI for Maya they could do that if they had the time money and ability. The whole things been rewritten in QT but its practically the same thing as the native Maya UI that preceded it. Whats up with that? The developers back in te day produced a fairly reasonable next gen UI for Maya by 97. Using TAV, Power Animator, 3Design and its greatest competitor Softimage 3D as benchmarks, the interface was light years ahead in many ways. Even I will admit it was easier to use than SI3D. Multi selection anyone? Then they completely dropped the ball and failed to follow through. What we have today out of the box is an 18 year old GUI. I frankly could care less if it is customizable if it was designed with the user as an artist in mind. I'm not opposed to customizable UIs. I want to customize it, desire it to be customizable because it isnt designed with artist in mind. The Hotbox is a perfect point. Count the steps to perform any command with it versus the basic interface. In the Hotbox its often 1, 2, or more steps extra. Why would anybody want to use a system like that if they know its going to create so much extra work. Thats illogical. Its an awesome idea, but its traditional implementation is illogical. So close to be something truly beautiful, but not designed with the user in mind. Yes its practical. But the commands you need are not there when you click on the spacebar, you have to keep digging through marking menus to get there, but they should be if you want it that way. You don't have to sell me on the idea of the hotbox, its a very good one. But its not cooked yet. In some ways its an unpleasant experience. Somebody needs to put it back in the oven and let it finish. But that i guess is the true irony of Maya. Its a strong capable and stable software, but often not the most pleasant user interface experience and its available customizations often dont help that situation. Incidentally i don't blame AD for that. They did not design the software, AW did. And only time will tell if AD is able to fix it. Joey ________________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Cesar Saez [cesa...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 9:07 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem In all fairness, Maya GUI is much more customizable than Softimage's one... just saying. On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] <j.ponthi...@nasa.gov<mailto:j.ponthi...@nasa.gov>> wrote: I'm not talking about zone marking menus. Custom marking menus can be created and there are a handful of contexts that can be used. But thats not what i'm taking about. I'm talking about the Hotbox itself. Being able to hide some or all of it isn't sufficient. I want the ability to create hotbox layouts,choosing only the commands i want and where they are placed in the hotbox. The zone marking menus are an extra step beyong the hotbox, and while they are customizable i don't care to use them. Getting to those commands take two or three extra clicks at which point the using the hotbox no longer interests me. Yeah i know i can hide a lot of the extraneous stuff in the hotbox. But i know of no way to save that as a hotbox layout or hotbox set. Ever try to set up a viewport layout and a hotbox layout to match? Yeah its kind of weird. Get all fairly close to what you want, remove the hotbox file bar and interface filebar for example and i can find no way to save the layout. This is my point. The hotbox is a very novel idea, but its half baked and isnt thought through to its ultimate value. Give me the ability to get to just the commands i want with one click the spacebar, give me alt-spacebar to optionbox any of those commands. Then i will be impressed. Joey ________________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>] on behalf of Raffaele Fragapane [raffsxsil...@googlemail.com<mailto:raffsxsil...@googlemail.com>] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 6:13 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Subject: Re: Maya thinks they're clever....and that's the problem You can select what appears in the hotbox and what doesn't already, Joey, and you can customise marking menus (which respond to gesture) which are even quicker. Maya's UI is, in most places, borderline disgraceful, the hotbox and the gesture driven contextual menus are not those places.
