Maya Programming: Separating attributes into sections in the attribute editor

Question

Hi, Sorry to be so application specific, but I noticed another well answered post about Maya development.

I've just written a plugin node for Maya. It just kills a bunch of particles according to a turbulence function. The turbulence is driven by a number of attributes that are adjustable in the attribute editor.

In the attribute editor there are a couple of other attributes called "Caching" and "Node State" which are placed before the turbulence attributes. This doesn't look too pretty for the user.

What I'd like to be able to do would be to place dividers into the GUI to separate them off. If you look at most other Maya nodes in the attribute editor, they do exactly that. They have horizontal collapsible bars across the panel which separate unrelated attributes from each other.

My simple question is, how do I tell Maya to create these collapsible bars to split up the attributes?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Andy

Answer 1

Answer was provided from another source. Apparently you can write a MEL script to provide layout information called

AETemplate.mel

where is the name of the *.so (or *.dll) file.

I think there are examples in the Maya install.