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Sorry to be so application specific, but I noticed another well answered post about Maya development.

I've just written a plugin node for Maya. It just kills a bunch of particles according to a turbulence function. The turbulence is driven by a number of attributes that are adjustable in the attribute editor.

In the attribute editor there are a couple of other attributes called "Caching" and "Node State" which are placed before the turbulence attributes. This doesn't look too pretty for the user.

What I'd like to be able to do would be to place dividers into the GUI to separate them off. If you look at most other Maya nodes in the attribute editor, they do exactly that. They have horizontal collapsible bars across the panel which separate unrelated attributes from each other.

My simple question is, how do I tell Maya to create these collapsible bars to split up the attributes?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Andy

Andy
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  • Hi Andy, although you've solved this problem, this seems type of question would be ideal for the proposed 3D Modelling Stack Exchange site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/5022/3d-modeling-techniques-and-software If you're interested in that, please sign up and help spread the word, so to get the site created sooner. :) – Peter Boughton Jul 07 '10 at 12:44

1 Answers1

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Answer was provided from another source. Apparently you can write a MEL script to provide layout information called

AE<pluginname>Template.mel

where <pluginname> is the name of the *.so (or *.dll) file.

I think there are examples in the Maya install.

Andreas Haferburg
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Andy
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  • For others looking for more info on this, Autodesk has a page on the topic of creating Attribute Editor templates, which determine how attributes are displayed in the Attribute Editor: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-592870D2-92E6-44CC-AE54-2F79EC43076A-htm.html – Justin Tennant May 14 '17 at 08:00
  • For the same people looking for more info, that topic concerns the *xml* Attribute Editor Templates, which are both (1) entirely different and (2) without examples. They are how you define "views" which must be explicitly picked by the end-user in the AE. There is currently no alternative to the .mel templates which is what defines the default layout for custom nodes. – Marcus Ottosson Jan 11 '21 at 07:19