hiya all, I’m trying to re-learn maya...again. Great software but really steep learning curve. I’ve only stopped using it for about a year and I have pretty much forgot everything. I obviously remember the concepts but not how to operate it.

My questions are;

1. I simply want to select a group object (ie use the Select by Hierachy:root) but since this is such a common action, I wanted to map it to a hotkey. The problem is, Maya doesnt seem to have the command in the hot key editor.

I have managed to set up the command using the hot menu (sorry, forgot the proper term - the menus that appear when you hold down ya spacebar). This command is:

setSelectMode hierachy Hierarchy

This solution isnt too bad but hotkeys would be much faster for me.

Surely there must be a way to map this command to a hot key cos everyone must want to use this right? I have managed to do it for the vertex, face, edge masks etc.

2. second question. I simply want to have the viewport render texture at a slightly higher quality than the default setting. Currently, I am using the

. This did the job (though slows down the viewport alot even though I have only up-ed the texture map to 512 on a box!! 3ds seems to handle this with ease so I must be doing something wrong). The problem is it doesnt seem to like layers.

When I use the default viewport render setting, I have no problem. The layer that has the visibility turned off, does not show objects in that layer. However, with high quality render, the objects in the invisible layer refuse to disappear! It obeys the template properties but not the visibility ones!??

What am I doing wrong or mis-understanding.

Cheers.

3DS Max 6 to 2009, Maya 2010
Windows XP Pro x64 SP2
NVIDIA Quadro 1700, Quad Core 2.67GHz, 4Gb RAM
http://www.beanboxanimation.co.uk

Alright,
All sorts of things to say here...feel free to ask for clarification if a rush over something.

For the selection hotkey:
The commands that I would suggest mapping to hotkeys would be these two;
setHierSelectMode -leaf
setHierSelectMode -root
I couldn’t find them in any of the hotkey categories...so I created User defined hotkeys.
Just go to the User category and click New...name it and enter the command and then click accept.
Then just select the keys you want to assign and click [Assign].
You can find out which keys are not assigned by clicking [List All...]

A good trick that you probably already know is using the Arrow keys to walk up or down a Hierarchy.
I find this an effective way to move up and down without worrying about what selection mode I am in.

As for the Texture Display Resolution;
There are a few things you could do.
On each Shader you can go to the Hardware Texturing tab and up the Texture Resolution...as well as change which texture channel is diplayed (which you may or may not find helpful).
This should give you what you are looking for in terms of quality texture display.
Going to the Window - Settings/Prefences - Prefereces - Display will give you some options that can be helpful as well.
Depending on what you need at the moment (speed - quality).

High Quality Display mode is the last thing I would suggest as it can be buggy and slow...as you have found.
It has it’s uses...but depends completely on an OpenGL graphics card and it’s capabilities/settings.
The performace you see in 3dsMax is due to it using Direct3D instead of OpenGL.

Hopefully this info gets you moving in the right direction.
All the best.
~Ben

Cheers Foxy!

I will try them all out tonight. Hopefully I will get to do some modelling instead of trying to sort out the UI!

Talking of which.... I dont suppose anyone knows if it is possible to tear the attribute editor/layer/tool panel and put it onto a second screen? At the moment, every time I switch between 4 viewports and one (which I do alot), the attaibute/layer/tool panel needs to keep on resizing. Ideally, I want to have just my viewports on one screen and tools, panels, other windows on the second screen.

3DS Max 6 to 2009, Maya 2010
Windows XP Pro x64 SP2
NVIDIA Quadro 1700, Quad Core 2.67GHz, 4Gb RAM
http://www.beanboxanimation.co.uk

You can do this by going to WINDOW - SETTINGS/PREFERENCES - PREFERENCES - Interface;
Here you can change the option for Open Attribute Editor to [In Separate Window]
You can do the same thing for Open tool settings and Open Layer Editor

This should get your interface in good working order.
~Ben

On each Shader you can go to the Hardware Texturing tab and up the Texture Resolution...as well as change which texture channel is diplayed (which you may or may not find helpful).

When I change the resolution, the maximum it allows me is 512. How do I get it to be higher and what is the reason for restricting so low? You could have a single object in the scene using a massive texture (say) 2048. Surely that should not slow any flairly modern computer so why not allow maya users to display higher than 512 textures?

3DS Max 6 to 2009, Maya 2010
Windows XP Pro x64 SP2
NVIDIA Quadro 1700, Quad Core 2.67GHz, 4Gb RAM
http://www.beanboxanimation.co.uk

I will give you my thoughts on your past two postings...so here we go.

About getting a RMB marking menu option for the selection Hierarchy/Root stuff…
I think this would have to be something on the Plug-in/Scripting end. I am not positive...but I think. You can enable the PA_Stlye_LMB option on the Marking Menu editor and map that to a hotbox region...or change the “Use marking menu in” to Hotkey Editor the menu will apppear for assigning a hotkey under User Marking Menus in the hotkey editor.
Possibly this will help...but I know it is not exactly what you are looking for.

As for my workflow. Everyone uses a very specific workflow...I personally never use the Select by Hierarchy/Root. If I need to move around I will use the arrow keys to pickwalk or the Outliner.
But again...everyone uses what works for them. Do whatever works for you.

As for the Display resolution options.
I don’t think there is a way to raise the maximum display rez of the Hardware Texturing tab on a shader past 512k. Maybe you can get some more quality using the Display Prefs that I mentioned in a earlier post...but I wouldn’t drive yourself crazy with this.
I know it feels cool to have a great looking viewport...but since there are so many limits to the stuff you can see in the viewport, I choose to have a snappy interactive viewport over nice texture display. Yeah, it helps if you need to make an exact placement of something...but 512k should be fine for just about everything.

When you are starting out, your scenes will be so light, sure your computer could handle much higher rez textures...but once you start getting more advanced, you will see how many ways your scene will slow down.
Also, when you use more advanced Maya and Mental Ray shaders you won’t get anything useful from the viewport display...so it is best not to rely on it.
I find perfect viewport texture display is something I can live without if it means better performance for animation and navigation.
This is only my opinion...again it comes back to everyone works differently.

Hope the learning is going well.
~Ben

I understand all your thoughts.
Each program has it’s quirks.
I would suggest re-exploring image planes, as they can be pretty easy to move around and get to where you need once you learn which attributes to change.
I have used very large images on an image plane without much of a performance hit...and the image displayed very well.