Alex Cheparev, the designer of the icons in the SurfaceProArtist ArtDock, is a big Mudbox user and he sent me his improved toolbar for that software back when Autodesk released the 2015 version.
I took that opportunity to begin to create a more compact layout for the docks, starting with the program picker and Mudbox and I even had a go at creating a new dock for Softimage.
Unfortunately, that was when we both discovered that the program's paintbrush was not behaving properly with the Surface Pro's display drivers.
So I shelved the project until a fix for Mudbox was released, never expecting the resolution to take many months. As I wrote yesterday, a new Intel HD update corrects the issue.
I also promised yesterday to release this new ArtDock today, but I realize now that it's in pretty rough shape.
Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, Maya and ZBrush are unchanged and should work as before. The 3DS Max and Sculptris docks are placeholders (most of the keystrokes are not mapped correctly).
The Softimage dock is very much an alpha version. I went a little nuts putting down all my favorite keyboard shortcuts, but I think it's working well.
Alex's new Mudbox dock works great In addition to adding multiple columns of icons, I moved the starting position of the new docks to locations where they were less likely to interfere with important menu items.
Download the SurfaceProArtist ArtDock 2.5 beta here.
To use the ArtDock, you'll first need to download Autohotkey from http://ahkscript.org/download/1.1/AutoHotkey111403_Install.exe. When the installation is done, make sure to run the Autohotkey script. Unzip the SurfaceProArtist ArtDock and copy the Artdock folder to your C:\ directory. Double-click the ArtDock shortcut to run (you can copy this to your desktop or taskbar).
I'm not sure how much time I will have to invest in getting the other ArtDocks fixed in the near term, so if you have time to make them work, please let me know so we can share your efforts with the rest of the SurfaceProArtist community.
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