Breaking Down Tools for Display in Maya’s Bonus Tools

Autodesk’s Steven Roselle offers a look at a few of Maya’s Bonus Tools that are extremely useful for visibility and display information. Interestingly enough, some of these tools go back to 2012, so these are not really new tools in the Bonus Tools suite, which was a surprise to me as a couple of them I have not even heard of.

All under the Display and View section of the tools, Steven covers Toggling faces, layers, measuring and adjusting for camera clipping – which are all tasks that will come up quite often in any Maya project. Here Steven shows how each Bonus Tool is used, and some of the options available.

Bonus Tools: Measurement HUD’s and More Object Information

There are a couple of tools that offer new information about objects in the Bonus Tools suite. One is a Vertex Distance HUD display, and the other is an Edge Length HUD display. Both handily will offer world space values for your selection.

As an example, if you have objects stacked end to end, you can select the edges from object to object and the Heads Up Display for the Edge Length HUD Bonus Tool will show the total length of your multiple selected edges. This can be really handy for measuring objects that have to fit within a certain distance easily. The Vertex Distance HUD display works much the same way, only on a vertex level.

There are two Tools that will offer a calculation of an object surface area and volume with the Print Object Surface Area and Object Volume Bonus Tools. Although these two are not heads up display driven, they will print the value to the results line.

Bonus Tools: Toggling Selected Face Display

Maya has always had a viewport “Isolate Selected” which will hide everything other than your current selection. This can be really handy when you are modeling or sifting thought portions of your scene. Sometimes, you may want to do the opposite, which is hide the elected object rather than isolate it. This is where the Toggle Selected Face Display Bonus Tool comes in.

This will let you hide the object selection or the face selection of an object, making it really easy to hide certain part of the same object.

Bonus Tools: Layer Viewer

The Bonus Tools Layer Viewer has been around since 2012, but recently has been rewritten to be much more functional. The Layer viewer will five you a stander Maya viewport and a layer list which can make viewing specific layers much more easy that using the standard display layer toggles.

Simply selecting a layer in the list will isolate it from the others and set the focus to the contents of that layer. It is a great way to get into how the scene is organized. You are even able to drill down to the objects are the on the layers and isolate the items in scene on an object level.

Bonus Tools: Adjust Clipping Plane

One of the things I find most frustrating is chasing after a camera’s clipping planes. It always seems to need constant adjustment as I am working. The Bonus Tools “Adjust Clipping Plane” tool was made for this and will allow you to set the near and far clipping planes on the active viewport.

You can interactively control both the near and far clip planes for the active view using two handy sliders – a real time saver!