The Hotbox

Maya's Hotbox is another way of getting to the same menus that are in the menu bar. To activate it, hold the spacebar. The Hotbox is centered over the mouse cursor's position at the time the spacebar is pressed, so make sure your cursor is somewhat in the center of the panel.

To see the entire Hotbox, click in the Hotbox Controls section on the right-hand side of the window, and drag your cursor over the Show All option (see Figure 2.15). You might want to come back to this same Hotbox option and disable the Cloth and Live menus if you won't be using them.

Figure 2.15. Turning on all Hotbox options.

Now the Hotbox displays every option. Here, in one panel, is every single Maya command. In addition, there are five zones with special options. To see them, click on the top, bottom, right, left, and center (the A|W logo box) of the Hotbox. New menus will appear, as shown in Figure 2.16.

Figure 2.16. Clicking in the right Hotbox zone.

Going Further

You have only touched on the Hotbox in this chapter, but use this opportunity to explore it more. Try each of the five Hotbox zones, and activate the modes that appear there. You can change panel layout and panel view and enable and disable parts of the user interface, among other things.