Creating and Customizing Shelves                                                   Tutorial By: Srijesh

                      In Maya there are hundreds of tools and techniques. So during modeling and animation process it is little time consuming to access them through menu bar. And if you have to repeat the same process again and again, that becomes tedious. Hence creating and customizing shelf in Maya can greatly assist in modeling, animation and other processes. It is like a shortcut method in Maya as shortcut keys in Photoshop.

                                                Like Maya’s predefined shelves in shelf bar you can create your own shelf, add tools that you use most and customize it. You can also customize Maya’s predefined shelves. It is very simple and easy process. But this simple and easy process can be helpful hugely in other important processes like modeling, animation, texturing etc.
                To create shelf, click on the small black triangular shape beside shelf bar. At the position a shelf popup menu will be displayed. In the popup menu select New Shelf.

Fig. 1

Then in create new shelf dialog box you can put any name you want. Then hit Ok. I’ve created shelf named MyShelf. Then new shelf tab named MyShelf is added in shelf bar. Right now that shelf is empty. We have to put tools in it.

Fig. 2

It is recommended that put only those tools which you use most. To put tools from menu bar in the shelf, holding down both control and shift key in your keyboard click on the tool in menu bar. For example to add Split Polygon Tool in polygon menu set (Modeling menu set in Maya 7.0 or earlier) go to edit mesh (Edit Polygon in Maya 7.0 or earlier) then holding down both control and shift key in keyboard click Split Polygon Tool.

Fig. 3

Then Split Polygon Tool will be added to your shelf.

Fig. 4

In the same way you can add more tools in the shelf. To delete tools from shelf, simply drag and drop that tool in small bin icon just above shelf bar at right side by holding down middle click button.
                Similarly you can customize i.e. create/delete shelves, add/remove tools, change position of tools, change image icon of tools etc. from Shelf Editor. To open Shelf Editor, click on the same small black triangle beside shelf bar and select Shelf Editor.

Fig. 5 Shelf Editor