Custom Maya splash screen

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

A lot of people like to customize their UI’s to fit their specific tastes. While the following tutorial certainly falls into a rather unproductive category, it’s still a neat little trick.

To do this you’ll need:

- Maya (I’m using 2010)
- Resource Hacker (link)
- An image editing program (Photoshop etc.)

So first things first. Make sure Maya is closed, if it’s open, bad things can and will happen. Next, we need to make a copy of the file we’re going to edit, just in case things get borked. So, point your clickin’ fingers over to your Maya\bin directory. In Windows it will be something like:

- C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin -

In there you’ll find a file called MayaRes.dll, make a copy of this file and keep it in a safe place.

Next, download the program “Resource Hacker” from here. Unzip it and run ResHacker.exe.

Go to File>Open and navigate to …Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\MayaRes.dll.

Expand the “Bitmap” column in the left pane and navigate to MAYASTARTUPIMAGE.XPM. Expand it and click on the icon, you should now see the default Maya logo in the right pane. Right click the bitmaps icon and select Save [Bitmap MAYASTARTUPIMAGE.XPM:1033]… You’re only doing this so you can use the dimensions as a reference and back up the file if you like.

Open the newly saved bitmap in Photoshop and customize it to your hearts content. There are no naming conventions to follow, but you need to save the file as a bmp. Once you’re satisfied with your new image, go back to Resource Hacker and right click on that 1033 icon again. This time select Replace Resource and navigate to your new .bmp image

Once you’ve done all that save the MayaRes.dll by clicking File>Save in Resource Hacker. Close Resource Hacker and open Maya. You should now see your new splash screen at start up! If you want to change it back you can always replace the new MayaRes.dll file with the one you backed up earlier. Or you can use Resource Hacker to simply replace the bitmap image.