[update, I have a new post related to my Maya hotkeys with a great downloadable hotkey map over here
http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/2013/05/25/rethinking-mayas-hotkeys-for-animation/]

Out of the box, Maya is probably the most animation unfriendly software ever so every animators have their own set of scripts and hotkeys to palliate for Maya shortcomings and speed up their workflow.

To be fair, I don’t use many but the following ones are true “life saviours”. Some of them are shelf script, others are triggered by Hotkeys.

my Animation Shelf

I haven’t cleaned up my Maya animation shelf for a while, the two first buttons were customized windows layout but I don’t use them anymore. LLuis Lobera’s make button, Justin Barrett’s Tween Machine, Zoomerate and Xsheet are the ones I mostly use. Michael Comet’s Auto-tangent is now a Hotkey as follow (bare in mind this is with my french keyboard, I use A on english keyboards).

Auto tangents and other scripts triggered by Hotkeys

As I have been travelling a lot lately, I can only carry a 17 inch equipped laptop with me so full screen viewport and Hotkeys are a must.

Here is my current full screen viewport when in Blocking and first pass spline, I would normally create an other set of selection buttons for the eyes and facial controls when polishing. As you can see I don’t use any GUI but instead I toggle the Nurbs controls (avars/movers) with a hotkey (alt+c)

Full screen viewport

This is the script I use for Full screen switching by the way, the Maya built in hotkey (CTRL+spacebar) has been buggy on all the Maya versions I have used so far. The Hotkey is alt + z on french keyboard, alt + w on english keyboard.

Full screen script

This is my working window layout on a 17 inch screen in 1440×900 (yep it is a cheap laptop, no HD res here ;-)). Camera view on the top left, Graph editor top right and perspective view underneath. The TweenMachine window is taking a bit more space than required but hopefully Justin will soon post a leaner version or maybe Autodesk will pay Justin to integrate his script to the next version of Maya 😉 The graph editor channels column is also taking more space than necessary, Maya doesn’t allow dragging the divider further (antiquated Unix legacy….).

Right, that’s all I have time for today, I will add a Hotkey description in few days.

update with some of my hotkeys

Related posts:
Rethinking Maya hotkeys for animation
Maya, Mel scripts for animation
Wacom settings
Animation hotkeys