i truly like maya, but the one of the more annoying limitations in an otherwise very flexible application is that it is not possible to change the order of channels. whenever i wanted to add a new attribute in an existing set of well-organized ones, it will just be added at the end of the list (therefore sorting by creation time). it would be so advantageous if changing the order would be possible like it is with the layers. until autodesk will add this as a new feature i finally found away to do this: simply open the maya ascii .ma file (close the file in maya!), search for the attribute you want to change the order of and simply cut and paste it to the place you want it to. ha! one more reason to stick to the good ol’ ascii file!
scared of doing this hack? then try out david walden’s attribute manager which is freely available on his site. just source the script, type attributeMan in order to let this window appear:
now play with your channel order at your heart’s content. as stated before, i really hope this functionality will be included in an upcoming version!
in newer versions of maya you can ‘edit attributes’ via the channel box;
if you rename an attribute it gets send down to the bottom of the list, thus an effective method of reordering attributes does exist!
Beware though! there seems to be a serious bug in the ‘file | save file’-command: if you rename attributes and then hit ‘save file’ maya is likely going to crash (hard!); better use ‘save As’ instead in this case.
HIH
b.
thanks for this addition!