Using the new Navigate Graph Bonus Tool (or Deleting it)

Bonus Tools always holds a chest of helpful tools that are updated every year. Some serve as experiments for future native tools in Maya. Others are simply workflow enhancers. You might have noticed that after installing Bonus Tools for Maya 2017, that a new marking menu item appeared. This is the new Navigate Graph bonus tools, and is one of the few that doesn’t install itself under the Bonus Tools menu item.

Instead, Navigate Graph gives you a marking menu that lets you access all of the nodes associated with an asset in the scene, directly from the object. The marking menu can easily move you through groups and subgroups of nodes, rather than using an outliner, node editor, or hyper-something.

If you want to see how it all operates, Autodesk’s Steven Roselle walks through how the bonus tool can save you some time. It’s an interesting premise to be able to traverse through object’s nodes without cluttering the scene with panels and other UI elements.

Still, If you find the new Navigate Graph marking menu intrusive, there is a way that you can disable it. Luckily Bonus Tools gives you a way to modify or disable any tool with a help menu item that will take you to the bonus tools install location. From there, finding the buildTraversalMM.MEL and renaming it. This will remove the marking menu item when you restart Maya.