Hi everyone. I’m curious to know your thoughts on shortcuts/hotkeys in general and Maya’s in particular. How do you have your hotkeys setup, Do you switch hotkey sets a lot in your daily work?
I’m pretty interested in optimizing my workflow and maybe thinking about it more than I should, but I personally never been happy with Maya’s hotkey editor.
I used to have these long scripts, one for each set that I would run, but maintaining it and editing them, not to mention getting a clear overview was a bit of a pain.
The problem:
My main problem is that if I have a set and want to create a new one, I get a blank slate. Fine, I put in a few hotkeys for UV-mapping that share the same combination of keys as my PolyModeling set. The problem is that all the rest of my hotkeys from the PolyModeling set or any other set are not active anymore. I understand the idea, but I think this is a bad design. It means I need to type in all the hotkeys again. And if I make yet another set, I need to do this again. And what if I want to change a hotkey…I need to go through all of my sets to change that same hotkey to stay consistent. This is frustrating.
The solution:
I’ve been toying with an idea of creating a new editor that would be faster and more powerful. But I’m not sure if it’s only me who’d be interested in something like that, that’s why I’m asking. Do I make this for only myself or would other people find it useful too?
The idea is for it to look like a spreadsheet. First you have the command and you can freely add to this list. It should come with all the native commands and their assignment though. Then the following are for your own sets. I propose to create a base set and put all of the hotkeys that you most commonly use and then create specific ones for modeling, uv-mapping, animation, etc.
The idea is that when switching set you only switch the hotkeys that are in that set. all the rest stay the same.
Obviously saving, loading and sharing sets should be as easy as it can be.
