djx blog

Maya 2012 came with a nice looking dynamics plugin called physX and it creates a shelf when it loads.

However I don't like the way this becomes the active shelf every time I start maya. I suppose I could unload the plugin, but then I'll have to reload it every time I need it. Fortunately physX uses mel scripts to initialize the plugin and create the shelf, so I modified one called physxUI.mel and added some code to re-select the shelf that was active before physX loaded.

If you are fussy about your active shelf and want to give the mod a try get physxUI.mel from my downloads page and drop it in your local scripts folder.

update: I tried this fix on another computer and it did not work. I'm not sure if I got lucky with the first one or unlucky with the 2nd. I think that success or failure has something to do with the order that maya does things at startup. Based on that theory. I've changed my modification slightly, so you'll need to download it again. And there is now an extra requirement: In addition to dropping the new physxUI.mel mod into your local scripts folder, you must also add the following line to your userSetup.mel

source physxUI.mel; storePreviousShelf();

This is now working on every computer I've tested it on. Yes. Both of them!

The attribute editor in Maya 2012 keeps expanding the Notes roll-out. I'd never noticed this being quite so annoying in previous versions. I'm pretty sure that previously, once I closed it by dragging the divider bar to the bottom of the window, it stayed like that until I pulled it up again. Now, in maya 2012 it seems to jump up again as soon as I deselect anything. Most of the time this is a waste of space for me.

Fortunately I recently read a simple solution posted on cgtalk by ginodauri. To hide the notes roll-out you can use the following mel command

layout -e -vis 0 AEaddOrEditNotesLayout;

To make this even easier I thought it would be good to add a menu item to the List menu in the attribute editor.

So you can turn it on and off and maya remembers your last choice between sessions.

This functionality is added by modifying a copy of one of the maya installation files called showEditor.mel which can be placed in your local scripts folder to avoid messing up the maya install. You can get the mod for maya 2012 from my downloads page.

I've updated the rar files on my downloads page to include maya 2012-x64 (windows) versions of Michael Comet's Pose Deformer and the Sony Pictures Reticle (aka spReticle).