Customisations to maya...what do you use?

Steve Schulze

Ok I'm getting into the swing of Maya now, but am still somewhat overwhelmed by the number of possibilities at my disposal. Seeing a lot of you have been using it for a while, I'm wondering what your favoured personal additions to the hotboxes and shelves and whatnot are?

Faucet

Shelves and custom hot keys are really awesome. I often find I've been modeling for hours without even once going switching to the modeling menu set.

Anyaway, I'm still using Maya 4.5, so I'm sure a some of the add-ons I use are now obsolete and/or come with Maya 6 but here we go...

One essential thing that I use most offten is MJ Poly tools.
This allows one to work with edge loops and such in Maya 4.5... I'm thinking Maya 6 probably has this functionality built in, though.

Another thing I use a lot when doing quick renders for WIP posts is GIJoe. GIJoe is a quick and dirty light dome setup from your pals over at pixho.com. I like doing WIP shots with this as it communicates a model's form quite nicely and I find the resulting renders easier to read than a straight flat shaded render. I will often use a GIJoe light dome as my fill light in 3 light setups. I recommend following some of the tutorials on Pixho.com. It will really show you how powerful and flexible hypershade is. Also good tips on faking HDRI, sub surface illumination, and stuff. Yes, you can get GI, SSS and HDRI with Mental Ray but these fakes will allow you to get really bitchin' renders in a really short rendering time. Especially if you're going to be rendering animations... I usually try to keep my renders under 40 seconds per frame.


I also have my most common tools mapped to keys.

B - Select edge loop.
N - Select edge ring.
M - Edge loop split.
J - Split poly tool
K - Extrude Face

I have a couple of custom shelves one's for poly editing, one's for particles and one's for custom MEL crap that's kinda specific to one scene.

In the poly editing one I've got the following:
Make Cylinder
Combine
Separate
Smooth
Delete History on Selected
Extrude Edge
Soften Edges
Harden Edges
Center Pivot
Freeze Transformations
Merge Verts (.0001 tolerance)
Merge Verts (10000 tolerance)
Append Polygon
Create Polygon
Duplicate (creates an instance and sets scaleX to -1)
Triangulate
Quadrangulate
Reverse Normal
Reload all textures
Paint Selection
UnSmooth All (sets divisions to 0 on all Smoothing nodes)
GI_Joe (instant Global Illumination fake)
3 Point Light (makes key, fill and kicker directional lights and groups them.)
Collapse (converts selection to verts and merges them)
Make Wires (script that extrudes each edge and deletes the origional faces so I can have wires in my software render)

I also highly recommend learning a little MEL. So nice when ever one thinks "Gee.. I wish I could just click a button and get Maya to do this..." then a few minutes of coding later have that button. Also learn to love the script editor (It isn't at all uncommon for me to do a few things in my scene then open the script editor and select what I'd done and drag it into the shelf so I can repeat the actions by clicking the button.)

Daz

"I'm thinking Maya 6 probably has this functionality built in, though"

You'd be wishing actually BF :-]

It depends what you're using Maya for in a way. At work my setup is different from home, since at work its geared toward in game stuff and various engine related tools. At home I only ever tend to model in SubD-s or smoothed polys intended for rendering, so I have a somewhat different setup. I have pretty much everything Brainfaucet has there as buttons.

Extra tools I couldn't live without:

MJpolytools

http://www.maya3d.dk/Scripts/MJPolyTools/

Byrons polytools or at least Byrons bevel

http://www.byronimo.de/mainpage.htm ( BPT isnt free, but the bevel alone is )

Magnet tool ( really damn nice soft select thats better then Maya's default. Awesome for morph target work )

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=167488&highlight=magnet+tool


Ray diffuse ( radiosity for Mayas default renderer )

http://www.lightengine3d.com/index2.html

Diffusion ( sub surface scattering for mental ray )

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=144747&highlight=diffusion

Dirtmap ( cant find a link right now )

This page has some great little Mels geared toward working in smoothed polys.

http://www.chemicaldust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9

Smooth proxy side by side is particularly good:

http://www.safakoner.com/06_source/01_tutorial/05_spsbs/spsbs.avi

http://www.safakoner.com/06_source/01_source.htm

Jeff Parrott

I just use a shelf set up with my buttons all on it, a reload textures script, a PSD path exporter script, a bone counter script and thats it. I don't like to customize too much because I am switching computers often. I don't reccomend using MJ Poly Tools. Seems it creates a lot of nodes that don't get connected to anything. If you use MJ export the model as an obj when you're finished. There is a new script that is supposed to do the same job as MJ. Haven't used it myself but here's the link:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=154088

Snowfly

I used to load Maya full of add-ons and custom UI, now I just tear off menus and use the Recent Commands box. My Maya is barebones, except for a script that collapses all transforms to the a polygon mesh object except for Smooth Bind, and a reload all textures. It's a funny philosophy I adopted early on (thanks to an old school animation teacher) that "people write too many scripts for Maya".

Jeffro, where'd you find the PSD path export? I've been trying to find something like that for the longest time.. I'm on Maya 4.5 [Nevermind, just saw your other post. I'll see if it works with Maya 4.5]

Daz

"people write too many scripts for Maya".

Well, for high res modeling for example, you absolutely *have to*. The functionality just doesn't cut it otherwise. If I couldn't use scripts, Id have to finally defect to XSI, and frankly, the only reason i dont switch to XSI ( which is the best all round CG package for character work ) is that Maya is just too deeply installed where I work. You just gotta make do, and If you cant, whats the harm in making it better?!

Illusions

Well...the computer station I use at school has the interesting save panel layout named "3D Studio Max". Lol...thats the extent of my customizations so far, creating the default 3DMax 4 panel layout in Maya...idk...I'm just used to it...

Steve Schulze

Theres some weird stuff about this program. Its going to take me ages to get used to not doing things Max style. At least you can turn off that idiotic "no rotating in orthographic views".

How long did it take those of you who've made the switch to learn this new interface and start being productive with it?

ndcv

Illusions - do you mean a front/side/top/persp view? If so, you can just tap the space bar to get that view.

Jackablade - I don't remember how long it took me, but I do remember the frustration as I tried to do everything max style, especially moving the camera/viewport. Don't worry, it doesn't take TOO long... nowadays I keep mixing up Maya and UnrealEd's control schemes and hot keys

Snowfly

for a while there I thought Illusions actually had a max-style Command Panel set up. :-O

Jackablade: Once I dropped the max mentality, a couple of months.

Daz: I have no doubt. But so far all the functionality I need is in the base package. My scripts comprise mostly of macros, really. Maybe if I get out of this mobile games job and find work in a real videogame pipeline I'll start venturing into hardcore customization. God I love this program.

malcolm

Jackablade, I used to use Max before I started working at EA, it took me a month to relearn all my Max skills in Maya and I could never think about going back now, it just seems so much easier now. That was over 4 years ago now so I don't remember too much about Max except for having to use the non uniform scale button, collapsing the stack and the uv editor, all of which were a major pain that I no longer have to worry about. I think once you learn how to do the same things you could in Max in Maya you will like it quite a bit, it is extremely frustrating at first but after a month or so it will come naturally. QWERTY hot keys is the best idea ever invented!

Steve Schulze

People always mention the stack when talking about Maya's superiority to Max. How is this different to collapsing Maya's history (which appears to be far more open to screwing things up) and what is the problem with Max's stack. It works perfectly well and can do some neat tricks. I'm not really trying to defend Max to any degree, the reasoning has just never been explained.

Illusions

[ QUOTE ]
Illusions - do you mean a front/side/top/persp view? If so, you can just tap the space bar to get that view.


[/ QUOTE ]

No, No, no, what I meant was Maya usually has their four panels set up with 'Top' in the upper left, 'Perspective' in the upper right, 'Front' in the lower left, and 'Side' in the lower right. I've set my 4 panel display up to mimic Max's layout, or 'Top' in the upper left, 'Front' in the upper right, 'Side' in the lower left, and 'Perspective' in the lower right...yeah...I'm picky about my layouts....

ndcv

ahhh, gotcha

malcolm

Jackablade, like I said I can't really remember to much about Max, I think it was having to convert things to editable meshes collapsing the stack all the time to continue with your modeling?

Steve Schulze

Perhaps its changed a bit since the early days, but theres not a great deal of collapsing to be done nowadays. Generally the only time I ever need to collapse a mesh is if I'm US mapping and feel the need to go back and tweak the mesh. Its not exactly a complicated thing anyway - right click on stack -> collapse.

Illusions, you actually use the four panel view when modelling? Damn man, I don't have enough screen real estate in the single panel view...

Illusions

[ QUOTE ]
Illusions, you actually use the four panel view when modelling? Damn man, I don't have enough screen real estate in the single panel view...

[/ QUOTE ]

Nope not for modelling, I do however have all four panels up when laying things out, like placing a light, a vertex, or an edge etc. Otherwise I usually work in a maximized perspective view...