De-Clutter Maya 2011

MikeF

So i'm thinking about making the leap from my fairly dated copy of maya2008 to 2011, so i've been giving the trial a go for the last few days, the one thing that's really bothering me is how much more cluttered the UI is, almost like the viewport is being squashed by everything around. Anyone have any tips or presets to get things looking more like 2008?

jipe

Hard for me to remember what 2008 looks like; it's painful for me to even look at screenshots of the pre-2011 interface. You can turn off the toolbar on the left if you don't use it, obviously, and some of the bars at the bottom (help line, command line if not necessary, etc.). And I'm always animating but if you don't need the timeline, get rid of that as well. I also believe Maya has a "pro" mode that gets rid of all the other interface junk, but I don't use it; perhaps someone else can help with the hotkey.

Gilgamesh

Almost all of it is customisable, you can hide/unhide almost all of the UI elements (just like in '08) I had to do some altering of the UI for 2012 but coming from 08 myself it's quite simple to do. The screen being squashed sounds like the Animation slider and status bars which you can hide easily.

MadnessImport

When i realized Maya's whole UI is in the space bar i turned everything off, theres more than 2 ways to do 1 thing.
I love the tabbed feature for the Channel/Attribute editor

http://i.imgur.com/kEjEq.jpg

Best way to use it i say

Just saying: v2012 is less buggy and tends to crash less than v2011 i would get a crash every 20 minutes or so now i get none at all in the areas i use to

kodde

Is 2012 not an option?

I always chose to run 2010 instead of 2011 at work. I felt that 2011 was really slow in general. Didn't really give any hotfixes for 2011 a chance as I figured they would not solve the performance issue.

2012 however feels better in this aspect imo.

Entity

2011 was a mess to work with, 2010 was much more stable and 2012 is running pretty well so far

MikeF

thanks for the tips guys, i'l work something out.
Honestly i had downloaded the trial for 2011 a long while ago and didnt even think to grab 2012, maybe i'l give it a shot

CheeseOnToast

Wait what? I thought only every odd-numbered maya release was any good?

Anyway, Ctrl+Space used to be the hotkey combo to enable/disable pro mode. Don't know if that's still the case (stuck on 2009 here).

haiddasalami

CheeseOnToast wrote: »

Wait what? I thought only every odd-numbered maya release was any good?

Anyway, Ctrl+Space used to be the hotkey combo to enable/disable pro mode. Don't know if that's still the case (stuck on 2009 here).

Still works. Annoying though that disabling it sometimes the menu toolbar doesn't show up Just waiting for Maya to get their asses on those modeling tools

thatanimator

still using maya 2008 10th anniversary edition..

best
maya
ever

Fingus

Not a huge fan of 2011. The interface looks nice and all, but it has a lot of bugs and the marking menus have gotten pretty sluggish, which is a killer for me because I use those things for everything.

I just downgraded back to 2010, would prefer 2009 but I can't find an OSX copy of it. I just need to rebuild my marking menus to be compatible with 2010.

malcolm

Reverted back to Maya 2010 after using 2011 and 2012, seems as if updating the interface to be black totally fucked over the performance in every respect. Too slow and painful to use for modelling now.

Rick_D

MadnessImport wrote: »

http://i.imgur.com/kEjEq.jpg

that's the most disgusting thing i have ever seen

malcolm

Holy shit, agree. Puke green and smooth wireframes, very hard to look at.