Creating icons for Maya 2009

eduardofranz

Maya 2009 doesn't want to recognize my .bmp icons that I use in 2008
What do I have to do so Maya reads the icons I create?

MoP

They have to be .DIB or .XPM format.

I usually convert TGAs to XPM using Autodesk's "imgcvt" utility that comes with Maya.

It should be runnable from any location since it's in the global Maya path, you can just do the following:

1. Start -> Run -> "cmd"
2. Navigate to your icons folder ( DOS style command like "cd C:\Path\To\Icons" )
3. Type the command to convert the image: "imgcvt my_icon.tga my_icon.xpm"

This will create a new .XPM file in the same location. You can then refer to that in any scripts or shelves.

I've got .DIB files working in the past too but I can't remember how to save them. It's a bit of a shame too since XPM is a colour table format and rather than choosing the best available palette, it forces its own (even though each XPM stores its own colour table) so you end up losing colour precision a lot of the time.

I wish it could just read in regular BMP or TGA files as icons, like Max does...

Lamont

Strange, all my icons are BMP's, saved from PS.

jocose

Lamont wrote: »

Strange, all my icons are BMP's, saved from PS.

Same Here

pior

I noticed that bmb work, but after a few overwrites they dont get recognized anymore for some mysterious reason (it fucked up the tool deploys at a previous jobs, as sometimes the shelf icon where just not showing not)

COME ON MAYA at least try to do that one right :P

Frump

Great tip MoP. That fixed the problems I was having with the BMP files I had been using in the past.

The best part is knowing that this will probably never be fixed within Maya.