From the course: Modeling an F1 Wheel in Maya

Customizing shelves - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Modeling an F1 Wheel in Maya

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Customizing shelves

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In this video, we're going to discuss very quickly how to customize a shelf in Maya. If we open up a file in Maya, you'll notice this the standard array of shelves that Maya supplies. At the very end, we have one called Custom. Now Custom is blank, so it allows us to add our custom commands into this particular shelf. We can have a shelf for different flows for example, we can have a shelf for rendering, we can have a shelf for modeling and we can also have a shelf for animation. Let me show you how to create a brand new shelf. On the left hand side here if we just hover over this little triangle, hold it down, I'm going to say new shelf. Let's give it a name. And in this case, we'll just call it F1. You'll notice that F1 appears, but it's blank, so we haven't actually inserted any commands into that shelf. To do that, let's go up to Windows, Settings and Preferences, and choose commands that we use commonly. I'm hold down my ctrl and shift, and I'm going to click on preferences. I'm going to click on Plug in manager, and also Hotkey Editor. You'll notice those three commands now appear in that shelf. I can move the location of those commands by simply using a middle mass button and sliding them to a new location. I can also use my middle mouse button, drag them straight to the trash, to delete them. Now once I have my commands in there, I can customize the icons to make them more distinctive. Let's go back to the same location over here to shelf editor. Now you'll notice I've got F1 selected here, and under F1 I have two commands currently, plug-in manager and preferences. Let's change the characteristics of this icon. We can go to the icon label color and let's make that red. Now you'll notice it gives you a preview immediately of how that will look. You can change the background color as well. So we can completely customize these icons to make them more distinctive. Once we've done that we can say, Save All Shelves and that saved that particular shelf. If I wannna load the shelf I go back to the same location and say, Load Shelf. The shelves are located in the default installation path on Maya. Which in this case will be Documents> Maya> 2014> Preferences and then Shelves, there's our shelf F1. There may be a time when we want to delete a shelf completely. In order to do this let's go back to the same location on the left hand side, and go to delete shelf. And once that shelf is deleted, let's try to reload it again. Let's go back to Load Shelf, let's go back to the Default Installation Path. And you'll notice that F1 shelf has disappeared. So, deleting the shelf will delete the mel script as well. So again, it's worthwhile starting to populate a custom shelf because it will really help speed up the workflow as we move through this F1 project.

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