heads up display
The maya "heads up display" or HUD provides useful information right there in the viewport so you dont have to look away from what you are working on. Like most things in maya, the HUD can be customized using mel. Here are two little mel scripts that I use regularly: frame-counter and memory-spy.
frame-counter puts the current frame number into the bottom left corner of the viewport so that it is burned into playblasts.
memory-spy shows your system free-ram value in the top right corner. If I'm working on something where maya keeps running out of memory, this heads-up is a visual reminder that I need to exit and restart, or save the scene before I lose work to a crash.
To install these just download and extract into your scripts folder then add the following lines to your userSetup.mel...
source djFrameCounter.mel;
source dj_memSpy.mel;
When you restart maya you will have two new additions to your "Display|Heads Up Display" menu.
I have set mem-spy to be active by default, and frame number hidden by default. (You can change this behavior by editing the relevant mel file. Look for the lines with "-vis 1" and "-checkBox true" and change them both to "-vis 0" and "-checkBox false".)
- Thanks and Credit to the coder's from whom I copied these techniques. memSpy was based largely on code by Alin Sfetc, and frameCounter by someone whose name eludes me now. Thanks to both.