Ritalin 1.6 - New features

What is the single most time consuming part when doing polygon modeling? Selecting the components you actually want to edit! Selections are precious, you don't want to loose them once made, unless you deliberately choose to.  For this reason, most 3D packages remember the selected components on an object when changing selection filters, for example from edges to vertices. If some vertices were selected upon changing to the edge selection filter, they will be reselected for the user automatically when switching back to selecting vertices. Very intuitive to use, easy to understand, non-intrusive, and a real time saver for people who want to (or have to) work non-linearly on many things more or less at the same time. Fortunately, almost all programs have adopted that paradigm, except Maya. 10 years of waiting for that feature to finally get implemented by the developers, countless hours lost in production creating Quick Selection Sets manually or even more time lost because I simply forgot to do that, forcing me to painstakingly reselect something I already had selected at some point in the past, I finally ended up implementing that feature myself.

Here's a short video on how it works:


Ritalin preferences are also now saved with you Maya user preferences, so if you want to enable or disable some functionality permanently you don't need to set the corresponding flag in the menu each time you start Maya anymore.

Downloads:
RitalinForMaya_2011_1.6.zip
RitalinForMaya_2008-2010_1.6.zip (Untested. Volunteers?)

Known problems and limitations:

When changing topology of a polygonal primitive object (e.g. a Sphere, Cylinder,...) without having deleted its history first, selections of components are stored but not properly restored when changing component selection filters. That's a bit annoying but not a show stopper.
I haven't found an easy way of working around the problem in code, the best you can do is to make sure you delete the objects history.

If you find anything else that does not work please let me know.

For TDs: 
There are two scripts replacing one of Maya's default script functions, namely doMenuComponentSelection in ..\scripts\others\dagMenuProc.mel. These scripts, Ritalin_doMenuComponentSelection.mel and Ritalin_doMenuComponentSelection_default.mel get sourced automatically at the right time depending on whether the "Remember Component Selection" feature is enabled or not. If you are using a modified version of that function in your location/pipeline you will have to merge the changes of these customized functions back into your version or not use this update altogether. Simply deleting the scripts might prevent Ritalin from initializing properly. In that case it's probably better to not use this update in the first place.