Quirky Qwerty
September 13th, 2005 by Luc-Eric - Viewed 2892 times - Popularity: 6% [?]XSI 5 has a keymap that remaps many keys to location more familiar to users coming from Maya. What’s in it for you if you’ve never used Maya?
The most obvious benefit is that it is that changing the keymap is a great way to freak out a co-worker. However there are also cool new tools that are available to help you make your own keymaps and shortcuts.
The biggest one is scripting access to the viewport under the mouse, which is necessary to implement keyboard commands that switch the viewport to wireframe, shaded or textured. I’m dropping this as just one line of text here, but there are tons of things you can do with this.
One of my favorite new command is “nudging” the selected object or components with the keyboard. This will also be available in the XSI default keymap. It translates the object in view coordinates.
There is a Time Slider Tool which you can map to a key which allows scrubbing the time with the mouse in the viewport (instead of using the time line). (Mapped to the “K” key in Qwerty)
There is a new “Shrink Selection” command in the Selection menu which complements the existing Grow Selection command, accessible with shift-minus in the XSI keymap.
Finally, there is also a new scripting command to change the current keymap in XSI, a new command to enable the last auxiliary tool (“Y” in Querty) – which is cool because it allows you switch between two tools without having different keys assigned to them – a command to activate the selection tool without resetting the selection filter, and no doubt a few more gems that escape me at this exact moment.
In 5.0 keymap files will now be .xml files, so it’ll be easier to keep track of changes.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Hurrah! This is very exiting Luc-Éric.
It’’s great news that the access to viewport under the mouse made it through v5.
Nudging sounds great also, can you tell wich key it”ll be mapped to?
How come the Time Slider Tool doesn”t conflict with the SaveKey shortcut?
Cheers
nice to see you here Luc, it’’s cool to see some of you guys being so active on comunity sites.
docs only go that far with the need to formalize and everything. Sites like this offer such a cool way to distribute random snippets, ideas and tricks that often save more lives then the red cross.
keep it up.
The time slider is not mapped to anything in the default XSI keymap.
Since the XSI default keymap has pretty much all keys mapped to something, nudging was mapped to Shift+Home/End/PageUp/PageDown
Will the new navigation (”alt” instead of ‘’s”) also cover the editors such as the Animation Editor and the Texture editor? What I mean by this is, in the current version, the alternative navigation in the viewports with the ‘’s” key is different than that in the editors, zoom in-out and pan is totally different and that disorients the user when he or ahe jumps from the viewports to one of these editors and visa versa… I”m looking out for a unified style of alternate navigation, i.e. alt+mmb = pan in all viewports and editors and alt+mmb+lmb = zoom in all viewports and editors. This is what id ergonomically efficient and useful IMHO…
hurrrah! xml! bravo! xml for all!
Yes in V5, the S key works in a consistent fashion in the texture editor, animation editor, and 3D viewports.
That’’s great! I was getting sick of Maya people asking about the alt-key. Now I don”t have to respond with “no really…it’’s a feature!” ; )