Finding Things in Customize User Interface

I'm a character modeler, I'm trying to set up a customized quad menu to speed up my workflow. The problem I'm running in to is that it's incredibly difficult to find things in the Customize Interface menu.

For example, right now I'm trying to find the functions that convert a spline vertex between corner, bezier, and smooth. For the life of me I cannot find it. I started my custom quad menu with a new blank set. It took me forever to figure out that the Graphite Modeling Tools were under PolyTools. I was looking for "Graphite Modeling Tools" because that's what made sense to me. If what makes sense to you isn't what made sense to whoever decided on the Group and Category names, you're screwed. Compound that with the fact that you often run into duplicate versions of modeling tools - one for Edit Poly and another for Edible Poly. It's INSANE! I really hope AD puts some time into cleaning this up. A search bar would be really helpful as well. I can tell that they tried to put things into logical catagories for organizational purposes, but it just isn't enough. Unless you happen to know exactly what they named the group and category in which the action you're looking for is nested, you're going to be sifting through this menu for a long time.

Is there any sort of resource out there that is useful to help people find specific tools they're looking for in this menu?

Well:
Max 2014 has the new search menu, which should help for that

Another option is this little goodie
http://www.listary.com/

It has the nice sideffect of providing "Search by typing" in any standard windows listbox. And as the categories/commands in the UI config dialog all happen to be standard listboxes, you can simply start typing and the Listary popup displays the existing entries matching your typed sequence. A very helpfull tool for exactly that purpose...

This is probably because the mentioned are hardcoded in the quad. If you check the respective default quad for spline editing, you'll see that these aren't listed in there, either.

@spacefrog: Thanks a lot, this is really helpful, I appreciate it. Also, glad to hear they added a search feature in 2014.



Awesome, nice work Autodesk.

Gees be kind, that stuff was written like twenty years ago!

BTW:

Haha, sorry, I just spent the last hour digging through that menu and frothing at the mouth like a rabid honey badger trying to get to some buried food. Cool Maxscript tip, thanks!

Yeah it's a nightmare trying to find stuff in that window. I've asked for search for years now. I tend to save out the keyboard chartfile and search it in windows. But that doesn't help if it turns out to be called something completely different to what it is in the interface.

I think a lot of the spline stuff is hard coded. I don't think it's been touched since the quads and other macroscript interfaces were added in max 4.

np, I hope it was helpful



I totally agree, with such tall drop-downs in the CUI it would be nice if they were keystroke sensitive. Search would be cool to, you can psuedo search with the global search but you still need to know what you are looking for in the first place!

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