Also in the “Drawing Overrides” submenu there´s a dropdown menu to choose between “Index” or “RGB” and below that a color chooser. Also in the Display menu there´s a checkbox called “Use Outliner Color” and below it is the color chooser. Many times a node doesn´t have extra attributes so the “Extra Attributes” menu should also be greyed out until an extra attribute is created.
Users should be able to show or hide these and other menus in the Preferences or the AE settings itself. I also got rid of the “Node Behavior” and “UUID” menus as I don´t think they´re used that often (I never used them at all) to be permanently present in each node. Again same Dark and Light versions collapsed to continue with the explanation. Dark and Light versions with expanded menus and scroll bar These are just examples and this depends on each node but I think there could be a massive clean up overall. Same with the submenus in the “Limits Information” menu. Although I kept them as they are, I think the “Local Space”, “World Space” submenus in the “Pivots” menu don´t need a submenu, they could be in the main menu itself. In my proposal I included it in the main Display menu and greyed it out, so one submenu less.
![zmodeler 3 no skelton node found zmodeler 3 no skelton node found](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ocUiC_-JdYQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
I understand that one is a general option and the other one is per object but the one in the AE should be greyed out untill the proper option is selected in the Preferences or it should act as an override. Ironically this option does nothing because in Maya´s Preferences the option “Selection Child Highlighting” is set to “Always highlight” by default, it has to be changed in order for the AE option to take effect. I don´t think it is efficient to have a submenu just to have a single option when you already are inside a menu dedicated to customize how things are displayed on screen. I also condensed some stuff, for example, in the Display menu of a Transform node, there is a submenu called “Selection”, inside this one there´s only one option called “Selection Child Highlighting”. Aside from the difference in color, they´re connected with hierarchy lines (or however these are called).
![zmodeler 3 no skelton node found zmodeler 3 no skelton node found](https://i.imgur.com/BSNiq1B.png)
What´s most noticeable is that in this proposal the submenus do not get confused with the main menus, something that is probably the most annoying part of the actual AE. I´ll leave the AE banner explanation for later and start with the settings menus.
![zmodeler 3 no skelton node found zmodeler 3 no skelton node found](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T9x11bZMGmQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Dark and Light versions with collapsed menus. Everything is aligned to the left and sorted alphabetically as much as possible to make it easy to find stuff and avoid “eye jumping” constantly. Aside from the color palette the main changes I did are: - A mini outliner/banner at the top of the AE instead of the tabs and not much data that is present now. This one is more elaborated and took more time than I would like to admit but if it triggers some good ideas for the development of Maya it´s worth it. Now I want to make the same with the Attibute Editor (AE). So recently I proposed a slight change to make Maya´s menus more readable here. The Booleans workflow and tech in Maya needs updating - do something similar to Mesh Fusion or Hard Mesh (links below).īooleans should be more interactive (allow users to more easily move around Boolean operands after the Boolean is executed)īoolean intersections should have beveling/chamfering optionsīoolean results should require less clean-upīooleans workflow should have a clean, dedicated UI for easy editing of Boolean operations and operands (like sculpting and interactive grooming tools do)