2008 to 2011 - Significant AE modifications?

[rgkovach]

We are porting a plugin from 2008 to 2011 and encountering some formatting issues and errors with the Attribute Editor.
Are there any significant changes in 2011 to be aware of when porting AE templates to 2011?

Thanks.

[joojaa]

Well all my ae templates work as is maya 7 - 2011 however since your free to do whatever you like theres allways a possibility of this. Especially if you tend to call factory scripts that are not inthe command reference, because quite obviously noone guarantees they will stay intact. Also some slight cumulative change to mel has happened but very rarely have i seen it break the bank.

[rgkovach]

After digging deep through someone else's AE spaghetti code, I've determined that the AE Template creates every possible attribute as a Dynamic Control and basically hides/unhides the controls as necessary.

The problem I'm running into is the Dynamic Controls that are hidden still take up some amount of screen space, which is causing large amount of empty space to appear in the layout.

Has anyone else seen such behavior before? Hidden Dynamic Controls taking up a few pixels of empty space?

edit: it si worth noting that in maya 2008 i don't get any extra empty space in the AE editor, just Maya 2011 seems to be padding Hidden Controls.

[joojaa]

You can make your custom control delete the entries and then recreate when needed if you really need to. However sound to me your hiding the wrong control. You probably want to hide the layout instead. But yes the whole ui engine was changed, so what you think you are doing is nolonger what you ARE doing.

Maya 2011 seems to be padding Hidden Controls.

Not seen this yet but no chance you have actually changed the qt style template?

[rgkovach]

I haven't changed the QT style template.

The code I'm working with is licensed third-party game exporter templates, which seems overly complicated for what its supposed to do. I haven't even been able to determine how the AE template manages the visibility of the controls

I'll keep digging, most likely there are some bad architectural decisions that are manifesting in 2011...

thanks for the help

edit: oh as a side note, ALL the controls go into 1 big layout, so i don't think i'll be able to manage layout visibility

edit: Is it possible to flush the contents of an "editorTemplate" so i can re-populate it?

[joojaa]

Yes but keep one thing in mind, some maya controls are actually layouts. Even tough they are controls aswell.

The code I'm working with is licensed third-party game exporter templates,

Well its amazing how one can sell stuff thats broken and its amazing how much one can get for free. Weird.

[rgkovach]

FYI - I tried a little experiment, I added 5 dynamic controls to the AElambertTemplate.mel file.

Sure enough, each Dynamic Control for an Attribute that DOESN'T yet exist takes up 2 pixels of the Attribute Editor.

I added and deleted Attrs that matched the dynamic controls and, as expected, the Attrs were correctly formatted in the correct layout - they just happen to eat up 2 pixels of screen space when the Attr isn't present.

Time to get on the Autodesk Support Forums....thanks for the help.