I really hate Maya sometimes.

I really hate Maya sometimes. Maya is the 3D application I use at work and it’s got some great features, but sometimes portions of the program are so fucking stupid I want to smack the programmers upside the head.

Imagine if you wanted to draw with a pencil and paper. Conceptually simple, right?

Now imagine that every single time you set the pencil lead to the paper, your nice, sharp little pencil immediately unsharpened itself, leapt out of your hand, scampered across your desktop and took a nosedive back into the pencil box, then the pencil box scooted off the side of your desk and into your desk drawer, then quickly clambered to the very back of the drawer as it slams itself shut.

That’s what Maya is doing to me right now when I try to rig this character. All I’m trying to do is adjust the value of a single weight by entering a number like 0.5, and usually, when I hit enter to accept the change, Maya keeps that text entry field highlighted so I can type another number if I need to adjust it again immediately. But in the new and improved version of Maya, it DESELECTS the text field so that I have to take my hand off my keyboard, move my mouse cursor over to the tiny little text entry field, click on it, THEN type a new number. What used to take 1/10th of a second now takes two seconds or more, and for absolutely no reason.

What makes it worse for me is that I have a reportedly AWESOME custom script that’s supposed to make this entire process simple and intuitive, but some other obscure bug Maya has breaks the script so I can’t use it.

[UPDATE]
Oh, I found out what the problem was and how to fix it! I’m SO happy I managed to fix it… and yet, I’m SO pissed at how pointlessly stupid it is. Want to know what the problem was?

I was using the big Enter key instead of the little Enter key.

Thanks, Alias. Way to arbitrarily change the most incredibly basic input scheme that’s been in place ever since the typewriter was invented, and then not document it at all.
[/UPDATE]

Also, Maya is the only program I’ve ever used that doesn’t actually save files when I click ‘Save.’ Maya crashed on me four times in a row yesterday and I lost 20 minutes of work each time, despite the fact that I saved the file every two minutes each time. I had to set up a custom script to forcibly save the file three consecutive times every time I clicked ‘Save’ once.

BAH! Fucking annoying day.