Custom Menus

TheKeyMachine allows you to create your own menus where you can add shortcuts to applications and run third-party scripts.

There are two distinct and configurable menus:

• customTools

• customScripts

customTools is designed to add shortcuts to the tools of the pipeline of the studio you work for. Depending on the studio, there will be a shelf, a menu, or a toolbar from which applications that perform daily tasks are launched, such as publishing scenes, loading assets, publishing caches, or sending animations for review.

Sometimes studios use a simple shelf to open tools, but other times they are windows or tabs, which makes accessing these tools difficult and slow. On other occasions, we only have 3 or 4 tools, which are on a shelf, forcing us to keep all shelves visible just to use 4 buttons.

Please be careful when using these tools; they are designed for advanced users with some knowledge of coding. Misusing this tool can cause an error in TheKeyMachine.

If you know the commands that open the pipeline applications, you can add those commands to TheKeyMachine and create a custom menu. The advantage of doing this is that you can have very direct access to those tools and organize the menu a bit to your liking according to your needs.

If the tools are on a shelf, you can usually see the command by simply viewing the button's content. If you can't find the code anywhere, you might ask the Pipeline team

customScripts works exactly the same way and is configured in the same manner as customTools, but in this case, it is intended for adding tools and scripts, such as StudioLibrary or any script that we use frequently.

Customizing icons: You can use any of Maya's internal icons. To view the internal icons, you can use a tool like 'Icon Browser,' a free script for visualizing Maya's icons

You can use internal Maya icons

My goal is to simplify and make this tool much more user-friendly, but for now, the way to configure the menus is by editing a configuration file. Each menu has its own configuration file, which is accessible from the menu itself. The configuration is done in a file where there are a series of 'blocks' representing entries in the menu. Each of these blocks has a number of options that need to be filled out: name, image, type of code, code to execute