Marking Menus and the User Interface

Maya has the potential for a quick and efficient workflow. Watching an experienced user interact with Maya looks like magic because good work takes shape quickly, with a minimum of keystrokes and mouse presses. The key to this efficiency is creating custom marking menus that increase productivity and speed. When you press and hold a key on the keyboard, and then left-click and hold on the mouse, a kind of compass appears onscreen. You can then drag with the mouse toward a command to execute it. If you perform the action a little faster, you'll see only a short drawn line onscreen and a brief flash of the command name (such as "Create Cube") as the command is executed.

After a few weeks, you'll have memorized your marking menus and will be able to zip through creating and editing. Because the marking menu is a two-choice combination (first the hotkey, then the mouse selection), you can group related commands on a single hotkey. The mental relationship is very natural and fast if you assign your marking menu actions and hotkeys logically. For example, you might choose Alt+c as a hotkey for the Curve Editing marking menu, and assign the most frequently used menu items directly to the left and right (at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions ), as shown in Figure 5.2. Therefore, a simple Alt+c and LMB-drag to the left puts you in the correct edit modeergonomically efficient and, in time, blindingly fast. If you've ever learned to play a musical instrument, you know the power of internalizing motions through repetition.

Figure 5.2. One of the built-in marking menus: Translate X is at the 9 o'clock position.

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For this chapter, and the rest of the book, we have constructed a set of marking menus specific to the tasks you're learning how to perform. They are available on the book's CD-ROM; by loading them before you start the tutorials, you'll get a good idea of the many ways marking menus can be used. These marking menus also give you a good starting point for building your own set. Learning Maya's hotkeys and adding new hotkeys will also add to your creation speed. We've included a few hotkeys in addition to the ones used for the custom marking menus. Let's load them now.

Customizing the Interface and Loading the Marking Menus

First, you need to import the marking menus and hotkeys for this chapter. Chapter 15 explains how to create your own marking menus and assign them to hotkeys, but to save time, we've put them on the CD-ROM for you to load in a few steps. Remember that when you see the little CD movie icon like the one listed here, that means you can load a movie from the book's CD-ROM that corresponds to the skill being presented.

Note that the directions are for Maya users on Windows-based operating systems. If you are using Maya on Linux, Mac OS X, or IRIX, you'll find analogous folders and files on your hard drive. Consult your reference manual if in doubt.

Make sure you have closed Maya 4.5, and then when you start Maya again, it will load the files you're about to change.
With this book's CD-ROM in the drive, open the folder called Marking_Menus, which contains all the marking menus. Click the first file in the folder, hold down the Shift key, and then click on the last one. All the files should now be selected. Right-click on the selected files, and choose Copy.
Next you need to locate your preferences folder for Maya. In Windows NT, it should be in My Documents\Maya\4.5\prefs\Marking Menus, or winnt\Profiles\Administrator\maya\4.5\prefs\markingMenus. In Windows 2000, it might appear under Documents and Settings\Administrator\MyDocuments\maya\4.5\prefs\markingMenus. If you're on a networked multiuser system, the preferences appear under your login name rather than the administrator's (a nice feature that lets each logged-in Maya user have unique settings). In any case, the folder is usually on the C drive. An easy way to find the folder is to have your operating system search the hard drive for windowprefs.mel . Browse to that directory, and paste the files there.
Files pasted from a CD will be set to "Read Only," which must be toggled off. For Windows, you must right-click the selected files, choose Properties, and uncheck the Read-only attribute. If you accidentally unselect the pasted files, you can reselect them with the Ctrl key.
Access the CD-ROM again, open the Hotkeys folder, select all the files in that folder, and copy them.
Browse to the Maya preferences folder on your hard drive, and paste the files in that directory to load your custom hotkeys. As in Step 4, right-click the posted files, choose Properties, and uncheck the Read-only option.
Now open Maya. Before you load the marking menus, you need to hide some unnecessary user interface (UI) components so that you have more area to work with. First, hide the entire user interface by opening the Hotbox (hotkey: spacebar hold ) and clicking Display UI Elements Hide UI Elements. Notice how much larger the work area is now.
You should have a couple of UI elements visible, however. In the Hotbox, click Display UI Elements again, and in the list, check the boxes for Help Line and Command Line. When you're constructing something in Maya, these two elements display help information and error messages. You still need to hide the File and Panels menus. To do that, use the hotkeys Ctrl+m and Shift+M , respectively.

tip

You can also access detailed UI controls in the Preferences dialog box. On Maya's main menu, click Window Settings/Preferences Preferences. In the Categories list, click Interface. Modify the general interface preferences by unchecking the options for Show Menubar in Main Window and In Panels. You could go even further and hide Maya's title bar if you like, but if you need multiple applications tiled onscreen, hiding the title bar makes it a little more difficult to work with Maya.
Click the Save button. You have now simplified the Maya interface for the tutorials in this chapter.

tip

Replacing all your Maya settings can point some parts of Maya to the wrong folderfor example, your Visor brushes for Paint Effects. If this happens, you can fix it easily by choosing Tabs Revert to Default Tabs in the Visor menu.

Customizing the Hotbox

At first, the Maya interface might seem intimidating, because hiding all those UI elements makes it seem as though you have less control over the software. However, you actually have access to every menu with the Hotbox. Follow these steps to customize the Hotbox so that all your options are showing:

To make sure all the menus are enabled, hold down the spacebar to display the Hotbox, click the Hotbox Controls section, and then click Show All. You can see that all the elements are available. When you need to access a feature that doesn't have a hotkey or marking menu, you can simply use the Hotbox. When you find yourself using the Hotbox repeatedly for a certain group of commands, you can create marking menus and/or hotkeys to handle them.

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If you own the Maya Unlimited package, you should hide a few of the Hotbox items for now so that the Hotbox displays only the functions you are using. To do this, open the Hotbox, click Hotbox Controls, and uncheck the boxes Show Cloth Menus and Show Live Menus.
Before you go any further, save your preferences by clicking File Save Preferences.

trap

You can't access the Hotbox with the spacebar unless one of the panels is active. When you have a dialog box open on top of the panels, none of the panels is considered active, so right-click on any panel to make it active. This activates the panel without selecting or deselecting any objects (left-clicking a panel activates it, too, but is a bad habit because it could cause accidental selects or deselects). Notice that the panel's border turns blue to indicate that it's active. You can then hold down the spacebar to open the Hotbox.

Here are the marking menu hotkeys you've loaded:

Marking Menu	Hotkey
mfNURBSPrimitives_Press:	Ctrl+z
mfNURBSediting_Press:	Alt+z
mfNURBSsurface_Press:	Ctrl+Alt+z
mfPolygonPrimitives_Press:	Ctrl+x
mfPolygonEditing_Press:	Alt+x
mfCurvesCreation_Press:	Ctrl+c
mfCurvesEditing_Press:	Alt+c

You can test out your new hotkeys by pressing the key combination and then LMB-clicking on your viewport (see Figure 5.3). Keep the mouse button pressed, and suddenly a menu will pop up! Drag the mouse toward any of the menu options to take that action. Try each of the hotkeys for your marking menus.

Figure 5.3. Your new custom marking menus.

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Here are the other hotkeys we've added or reassigned:

Function	Hotkey
Script Editor	Shift+S
Hypergraph	Shift+H
Attribute Editor	Ctrl+a
Show/Hide Channel Box	Shift+C
Hypershade	Shift+T
Outliner	Shift+O
Toggle the Time Slider on/off	Alt+t
Undo	z
Visor	Shift+V

The hotkeys have been positioned so that they are more easily accessible to the left hand for right-handed mouse users. You can always reassign them to other keys if you choose. You would also want to move the translation hotkeys ( q , w , e , r ) because they too are on the left side of the keyboard. By keeping your hand in one area, you can work even more quickly. The objective is to be able to press the primary hotkeys without having to look at the keyboard. We'll add more hotkeys as you get further into the book, after you have memorized the ones just assigned.

The first of the hotkeys you'll use and memorize in this chapter's tutorials are as follows :

Ctrl+z Gives you access to a menu containing NURBS surface creation tools.
Alt+z Brings up the marking menu for editing NURBS surfaces.
Right-click in a panel with a NURBS object selected Brings up the marking menu for selecting elements of a NURBS mesh, such as an isoparm or a control vertex.

trap

If you accidentally press Alt+v , Maya begins playing the animation. This can be frustrating because you don't have the Time Slider visible, so you won't be aware that Maya has started playbackyou haven't created any keyframed animation yet. You lose the ability to create and edit most objects when the animation is playing. You can bring back the Time Slider in the Hotbox, using Display UI elements Time Slider to confirm that Maya is playing back. We have also mapped a hotkey that toggles display of the Time Slider: Alt+t . Pressing Alt+v or the Esc key stops the playback if Maya has started it.

You can reprogram this default hotkey to some other key by using the Hotkey Editor. In the Assign New Hotkey section of the dialog box, enter v as the key, select the Alt check box, and click the Find button. Now you can easily reassign or unassign this hotkey.