Chapter 11: Customizing the Maya Interface

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Overview

Working with UIs is not limited to creating windows . Almost the entire interface is available to modify. Many artists limit their customizing of the Maya interface to changing colors and perhaps modifying the hotkey assignments. This is only the beginning. In this chapter, we will examine the user elements of panels , menus , and heads-up displays .

While panels and menus can be and often are implemented into windows, much of the power in using them comes in accessing the menus and panels that make up the main Maya interface. Menus are not only the bar at the top of the interface and each of the modeling views. In Maya, there exist two other types of menus: marking menus , seen in Figure 11.1, and popup menus , seen in Figure 11.2.

Figure 11.1: A typical marking menu.

Figure 11.2: A popup menu.

Heads-up displays exist as an overlay of the modelPanel . Because a modelPanel can be implemented into a window, it can be said that heads-up displays can be part of windows, but that is dependent on there being a modelPanel , so it is a matter of semantics.