Let's be honest, Maya is hardly the best looking program in the world, is it? That horrible shade of depressing grey can really start to get to you after a while, especially when it's the only thing you see for 12 hours straight... So how can we make it look like this instead?

You can customise some colours by going to "Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Color Settings", but this doesn't let you change interface colours like font colour, or that bloody awful grey. Windows users can theme their programs through the control centre the normal way. Mac users get an Aqua-themed version of Maya, so they have nothing to complain about. But what about poor Linux users?

Well, here's a little-known Maya feature to solve our woes. Create a folder called "app-defaults" in your home area. Then, download this file and save it there as a file called "MayaScheme". Restart Maya, and admire it in all its moodiness!

Maya default colours - yuck...

Creating your own theme

So how exactly did this black magic work? Well, it's nothing particularly special - try opening this "MayaScheme" file you just downloaded with a text editor, and have a look at it. Inside you'll find a series of lines of text that set the colours and fonts of the Maya interface, like "*radioColor: #000000". A list of available fonts can be found by running "xlsfonts" in a shell, and all colours are specified just like in HTML; each two letters specify R,G, and B values. So, for example, #FF0000 is pure red, #0000FF is pure blue, and #FFFFFF is white. This might seem like a bit of a pain to work with, but programs like Gimp and KColorEdit let you pick colours on a colour wheel, and then show you what its HTML notation is - no need to learn lots of colours off by heart, you'll be pleased to hear!

So, the theory goes that if we modify this MayaScheme to suit our tastes, save it and then restart Maya, we should have something that looks considerably better than before.

So how exactly do we put this into practice then? Typically I'll open Maya first, then I'll open KColorEdit or Gimp, and use the colour dropper to find the HTML colour of the part of Maya's interface I want to change. For example, let's say that I find a particularly nasty shade of grey in Maya that I want to change, which according to Gimp has the HTML colour code "EFEFEF". I'll then open my MayaScheme file in a text editor, and search for "EFEFEF". Once I've found a line that contains the colour I'm looking for, I'll jump back to Gimp/KColorEdit and I'll use my colour wheel to pick a new colour I want to use instead. Let's go for a moodier, darker grey - "555753" looks good to me. So then I'll replace all instances of "EFEFEF" with "555753" in my MayaScheme file. Once I'm happy, I'll save the file and restart Maya - things should start to look very different! After a couple of tries, I've normally found something I'm happy with.

So, give it a try yourself - don't be scared of messing up, as if you delete your MayaScheme file then Maya will return to its normal defaults. So, have a play, go nuts! Restart Maya when you're done, and marvel at your handiwork