How to Change Maya 2011 Interface Color and UI Style

As Maya 2011 users may know, in this release of a popular 3D software packet user interface was almost completely rewritten and now is based on widely known in some circles Qt framework. Along with this default color scheme is changed to dark grey, which is likely pretty well accepted by users, but still some of them may like to have good old white color scheme. Fortunately developers provided us possibility to tweak this and have old-style color scheme for those who want it.

Additional Maya Interface Styles

So, in addition to default dark gray UI style there is some other ones:

• plastique
• cleanlooks
• motif
• windows
• cde

To enable selected style just create a Desktop Shortcut to maya.exe and add to "Object" field additional string -style [style name] . For example, for Plastique style Object text field will look like this: "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011\bin\maya.exe" -style plastique


And some pictures of how UI will look with those styles, from left to right they are ( move mouse cursor over image to see full-sized version ): Plastique, Cleanlooks, Motif, Windows, CDE.

Personally I like Plastique style as alternative to default dark gray UI — it's sexy and smooth looking. It's maybe a good idea to have two shortcuts on your desktop and select UI style by your mood. :)