CGTalk - Maya UI oddness?

Mooncalf

10-01-2003, 06:41 AM

Hi y'all,

A friend of mine and I, both a little new to Maya, have found some things in the interface that flummox us a little. They seem like mistakes--things that have been overlooked, but I'm open to the possibility of there being some hidden meaning behind 'em. If anyone has any information on the usefulness of these two things, please feel free to speak up, eh?

(by the way, this is not meant at ALL to bash Maya... I love it, and love learning about it--there's just a few things here and there that raise questions)

- M

Example #1:

These tiny left-and-right arrows that appear at the bottom of occasional windows. The arrows appear to affect the width of the window incrementally, but it seems an awfully elaborate method of resizing a window. Is there another purpose to these?

Example #2:

In the Outliner (and I believe in some other windows as well), it appears that there is a hidden panel/window accessible by dragging the lower edge of the window upwards. The new window displays exactly the same information as in the original, and updates to reflect changes immediately. Again, is there a way to use this functionally?

Jozvex

10-01-2003, 07:50 AM

Hi Mooncalf!

Those << and >> arrows only appear at the bottom of the Channel Box. I think Maya uses those instead of letting you just drag the size, so that it can limit how wide/narrow the Channel Box can be.

And for the Outliner, being able to split the window into two Outliners can be useful if you have lots of objects, characters, lights etc in your scene. If the list of nodes is very long, splitting the window can let you have two focussed lists, because each can scroll independently.

So instead of having to scroll up and down between two groups of objects, you can focus half the window on one group etc. Also, you could parent/group objects from the top of the list to something at the bottom by dragging objects from the top half, to objects in the bottom half etc.

:thumbsup:

Mooncalf

10-01-2003, 10:36 PM

Thanks Jozvex... that does make a little more sense. :)

- M

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