Well it's GDC time again. This will mark my 10th consecutive GDC and in turn my 10 year anniversary with Autodesk/Alias. GDC is always a good time. It's fun to get to see all of the great people I've met over the years gathered together in one place. It's also one of the few conferences that starts at a perfectly reasonable 10am. They apparently know their audience :) I just hope I can get all of my prep work finished and out of the way today so I can actually enjoy some of the nightly "socializing" that goes on. It's no fun to be stuck in a hotel room prepping demos when everyone else is out painting the town various colors.

This year will be extra exciting for us because we are announcing a ton of new stuff this week. As I'm sure you've seen by now Maya 2011 was announced yesterday. It's a huge release with tons of new features. I've been given the green light from Cory to start posting some demo movies of the new features. So I'll be spending the next few weeks here on the blog covering various topics related to "what's new in Maya2011".

For starters, this week I'm going to cover the basics of the new QT user interface. I'll also discuss how QT Designer can be used to create UI for your own custom tools. One thing I fail to point out in the demo movie is that all of your old MEL based UI should still be fine. You can still use the traditional MEL UI commands to create windows, buttons, sliders, etc... just as you always did. But now you have to option of creating your UI directly with QT as well. 

BTW - let me also say that I am by no means a QT expert (still learning) so no low level QT specific questions please :)

BTW2 - you may notice at the end of the demo I show a QT-ified version of LayoutTools.  This is something I'm still working on but hope to finish up soon.  I'll posted the 2011 version of LayoutTools in a few weeks.
 

Note:  Accidental F$%# tab has now been replace by the new Frack/Darn/Dang/Shoot/Shucks tab :)