Over a decade ago I spent hours to make my own icons for my own MEL tools. You get 6-7 characters to describe your tool under an icon????? What is the logic here? How does this make it easier to use the tool?
Incidentally from the shelf editor you CAN change the shelves to have icons listed with custom names or strings beside or below the icon. You can even list just text. But the implementation of these features lacks separators and lacks multi-lines making it impractical with the exception of icons with short names. For example, see the FUR shelf vs the RENDERING shelf with ICON/Text Below set on. It's a valiant attempt, but it's an unfinished feature. RENDERING looks like one long word. The FUR shelf looks pretty decent. Who did the Q&A on this? Same with text only. Its unusable because it's not readable. ICON/Text Below implementation on custom shelves with MEL scripts is just mind boggling. It will try to list multiple lines under the icon if you let it display the code, but if you rename it will only list about a thirty characters on a single line pushing the icons far apart and making the shelf go to multiple rows if you have a lot if scripts on the shelf. How is that easy to use? -- Joey Ponthieux __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Martin Yara Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 12:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5 Now I see the point. I have those problems with my scripts. You can already put text over your icons but 4 letters aren't enough for some cases so I guess it should be easily fixed by adding a width option to the shelves icons, and a 2 lines text option. Months later after a non-Maya project, and I can't remember what were those 3 or 4 letter icons on my shelf :D Martin On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 1:32 AM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES] <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I think what he is trying to say is what was a common complaint over a decade ago. Some people like shelves, but don't like the icons. They want the icons in the shelves to be replaceable with TEXT. Just like some people see art as 3d and others see art as 2d, for some people deciphering complicated icons is time consuming compared to reading. Too many of the icons are too similar. Further old people who depend on glasses might not be able to see every miniscule 3-5 pixel differentiation in some icons that are similar. The argument is not to replace the shelve and use menu commands, but to replace the icon on the shelf with text on the shelf. -- Joey Ponthieux __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 12:25 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: humanize maya, SOFT top 5 > Text not icons I don't understand this one. Which part of the UI is this a problem with that it isn't in Softimage? You have the shelf at the top of the UI, but that's just shortcuts to things that are already in the menu. Hide the shelf if you don't want it (there is also a shelf in XSI) For the viewport ("panel") toolbar, if you don't use it, you can hide it (shift+ctrl+m) - these are all shortcuts to the items also in the menu. It certainly would not make sense to turn that into text buttons, although they should be generally fewer and bigger buttons there. But again these are shotcuts to the text menus. Everything is menu-based in Maya.
