Hacking is perhaps a bit too strong of a word. But it is defeniately possible to edit maya`s user interface to your own liking. A while back, I was annoyed with painting skin weights on a model with loads of influences (joints). Balancing the skin weights meant scrolling through the influence list and picking the joint I needed to paint. After some research on the net I found that it is possible to edit the user interface and add functions to maya. The entire GUI is constructed through MEL. So, finding and editing the appropriate scripts will change maya. I used it to build in a filter, which can shorten the length of the list considerable and make painting skin weights a lot faster and less cumbersome. I also added "lock all" and "unlock all" buttons.
I edited the artAttrSkinCallback.mel and artAttrSkinProperties.mel scripts found in the scripts/others directory. If you want to try and edit these yourself I`d suggest copying those to the scripts directory found in "my documents" and edit them from there. Any script in that dir will take precedence over the one in the maya folder.
I edited the artAttrSkinCallback.mel and artAttrSkinProperties.mel scripts found in the scripts/others directory. If you want to try and edit these yourself I`d suggest copying those to the scripts directory found in "my documents" and edit them from there. Any script in that dir will take precedence over the one in the maya folder.
