Maya Tool - Hotkey Manager

[david-cattermole]

This tool is designed to help users setting hotkeys.

The difficulty in this task will be working with Maya's hotkey setting mechanisms, and creating a tool that can work with-in a studio's pipeline.

For hotkeys, the logic will be that users need to set them, but will have recommended defaults. Hotkeys are a user's choice.

Needed features:

• Allow user to disable hotkeys or not.
• Allow users to set hotkeys on current custom hotkey set, or make a new one called mmSolver.
• This tool will require a "manager" UI. The UI will query and set hotkeys for mmSolver only, and will list all the allowed hotkeys in mmSolver.
• Each hotkey will have a default value, but a user can override it.

Ideas:

• If a user has no hotkey sets, we'll create one named "mmSolver".
• If the user is already using a custom hotkey set, we'll create it in that.

Open questions:

• How do we add hotkeys in Maya with scripts (runtime commands and name comments)? (ideally this would be wrapped in function.)
• Should we write a config file for the hotkeys?
• How would a config file be distributed with mmSolver? Perhaps stored in <project root>/config/hotkey.json?

[david-cattermole]

I believe that the new Hotkey sets are only supported by Maya 2017.

We should either support the older hotkey system as well as the newer, or simply not support it at all.

[david-cattermole]

As an intermediate solution, rather than using a complex GUI for maintaining hotkeys we could create a Hotkey Set (for Maya 2017+), export the file out and distribute the file along with mmSolver, so users can import the set and use it as they wish.

[david-cattermole]

A Hotkey Set has been created as "mmSolver" and may be automatically created if the .mod file contains "MMSOLVER_CREATE_HOTKEY_SET=1".

A new shelf button has been added labelled "Hotkey" to allow the user to switch the hotkey sets quickly.

A marking menu has also been created, with many commonly used tools.

Some hotkeys have been created in the Hotkey Set.

• "a" key = Hold down to activate the mmSolver Marking Menu.
• "c" key = Centre 2D on Selected
• "z" key = Zoom / Pan tool (the same one with Maya)
• "m" key = Swap Marker / Bundle Selection
• "n" key = Select both Markers and Bundles