Maya Shelf Creation

Microneezia

Hello,

Im having to use Maya 8.5 for a month or so - Ive been able to transfer from max fairly painlessly - except for the first hour when I realized that it wasnt going to be a simple swap of shortcuts...

Anyway - Ive found I can copy shelf icons from their defaut sections with Ctrl mmb - and drag them into my own shelf - Im unable to grab icons that are not already arranged in a shelf. For example some Mesh > and Edit Mesh tools as well as Hypershade window ect I want quicklinks in my shelf... but how?

glib

Well first off, I know some people that work with tons of shelf buttons for common actions, but personally I say hotkey standard maya stuff that you need and save the shelf for special one-off scripts that your company provides for pipeline issues (ie. toggling collision, decal mapping, shader swapping or assignment etc).

But as for your question: MMB + drag the button from one shelf onto the tab of the other shelf. To re-arrange buttons within a shelf, use the shelf editor (LMB hold on teh little down arrow to the left of your shelf, then select the editor).

Microneezia

im trying to get the tools out of the dropdown menus and down onto a shelf. Between 2 shelves I gots!

my shelf is small, but picking out the common ones will help speed up the learning mainly.

EDIT: also it it possible to change the attributes of a prim after it has been created? Im going into the shape attributes and I cannot seem to change the height segments ect after creation?

PolyHertz

im trying to get the tools out of the dropdown menus and down onto a shelf. Between 2 shelves I gots!

ctrl+shift+lmb on any tool in the dropdown menu for a shelf icon to appear in the currently open one.

also it it possible to change the attributes of a prim after it has been created? Im going into the shape attributes and I cannot seem to change the height segments ect after creation?

Its in the channel Box under the INPUTS section. click on the primitivs name from their and you can change its base parameters.

Microneezia

Thanks PolyHertz. the dropdown menu clicks worked perfectly.

Illusions

You can also drag and drop code from the Script Editor into the shelf. Just highlight the portion you want, and mmb drag up to the shelf...

fade1

and i also suggest to try working with marking menues. this can speed up your workflow pretty much, when getting used to it.

rooster

using the hotbox can give you acces to a crapload of options at once. each quadrant of the hotbox can bring up a different marking menu depending on left, middle and right click (and probably keys too?)

so that's 12 marking menus, each with 8+ items each
everything you ever need to do can be assigned to the hotbox (spacebar)

edit: there's a central one to, so theres 5 hotbox areas. make that 15 menus