Saturday, February 18, 2012

Some (very!) useful hotkeys for Maya

I was wondering today what hotkeys might be useful in Maya that I'm not aware of... After all, as you become more proficient with any given tool, you will be able to deliver faster results. And Maya is a tool for animators.

So, a Google search got me to this amazing hotkeys that are not common knowledge (at least not to the animators that I know). Here are some really good ones:

Note: Since Maya is case sensitive, I'm adding the hotkeys in lowercase. If there is a hotkey that is uppercase, then I'll add SHIFT to the command.

Playback
  • Alt + v : Start/Stop playback 
  • Hold k + left-click drag : scrub time slider (also works within the graph editor)
  • Hold k + middle-click drag : move frame counter without updating position of objects (this has the same effect as if middle-clicking on the time slider to copy the translations of one object in the scene to a different frame)
  • Hold k + left-click in graph editor : change the position of the slider to where you clicked
  • Alt + Shift + v: Go to the first frame

Keys
  • Shift + w : set key for translate attributes only 
  • Shift + e: set key for rotate attributes only 

UI/Viewport
  • Ctrl + Space : show/hide all GUI elements (equivalent to the Expert Mode in 3ds Max) 
  • Alt + b : toggle background (gray, dark gray, gradient or black) 
  • [ : Undo view change
  • ] : Redo view change

Tools
  • Hold w + Left-click : open Move Tool Hotbox (allows to switch between local, world and other translate options)
  • Hold e + Left-click : open Rotate Tool Hotbox (allows to switch between local and other rotate options)
  • Hold r + Left-click : open Scale Tool Hotbox (allows to switch between local and other scale options)
There is a nice pdf file with a lot more hotkeys. Click here to have a look at it.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Rotate tool box - that's what I was looking for! Thanks!

Fran said...

thanks!!