Let's take a quick look at how to customize the Maya interface. Now, by default, Maya has a lot of tool bars and a lot of stuff surrounding the viewports. Now, if you want to buy yourself more real estate or want less clutter you can actually turn things on or off. We can get to this by using the Display menu. So, if I click on this, you'll see I have a number of different options for how to display things. Now, one of the things in Maya, is that we can actually tear off menus. So, if you go into the very top here, you'll see this dotted line.
Now, with any menu you can just click on that and it will tear off. Which is nice, because then we can just look at this menu. Now, we can display the grid. We can turn it on or off. And you can see here. Or, the next option here is for what's called a heads-up display. Now, this is just a lot of different types of things that you can put into your viewport so you can see things. So, for example, if I do Object Details, it will give me all of the details of any object I select. So, you can see how these change a little bit, just depending upon the type of object.
And we can always toggle these on or off. Now, more importantly are the UI elements. So, if I want, I could turn off different types of UI elements to make the interface less cluttered. So, for example, this MEL script line here, I'm not going to really be typing in commands in the near future. So I can actually turn that off. So I can actually go to the command line here and turn that off, and notice how that buys me a little bit more real estate.
If you're not going to animate, you might want to turn off the time slider and the range slider or you could just leave the time slider on. It really just depends on how you want to work. And again, you can always turn these on or off very quickly. So, for example, if you don't want to see the cells, you can do that. And again, the interface opens up more and you have more viewport space. Now, I'm working on a very tight screen so I need a little bit more space, so sometimes I may turn things on or off.
Just to get a little bit more screen real estate, so don't be confused by that. Now, in addition to all of this, we have things in the Display menu that allows us to hide and show objects. We can also make things visible only to certain cameras. There's really a lot of power in this. Now, I'm not going to get into all of this. Now, in addition to this, we also have what are called our Preferences. So we go into Window > Settings Preferences, and we have a number of different menu options here.
Probably the most important one is the Preferences window. So if I click on that, you can see this is my Preferences window. So we can go through and we can set preferences for just about anything in Maya and there's no way I can go through all of this but let's go ahead and take a look at some of them. So, for example, we can turn on or off our interaction mode. Basically, we're going to keep it to Maya. We also have UI elements and this again is just exactly what we have in the Display menu here. We can actually turn on or off our range slider or our command line and then we can also hide or show things such as our attribute editor and so on.
We can also turn on what's called the view queue. Another one is help. How much help do you want Maya to show? Now, one of the things that I'm noticing here is that when I'm in this window here and I'm hitting five and four, this menu keeps coming up. Now, I really don't like that interrupting my flow, so I like to turn that off. So, if I go to Interface > Help, I can turn off In-view Messages. So if I turn that off, then I go back over to my viewport just by left-clicking on it, you could see now, I don't get that menu.
If I turn it on, again, click over there. I can turn it on or off. So, this is really nice, and then you can also have your Popup Help here turned on or off, so if I hover over something and my Help shows up, I can turn that on or off as well. And then you can also determine the language of your Help, and whether or not you're going out to the web for the Autodesk Help web pages. Now, in addition to this, we have some other options here. We have our display options, so on and so forth.
Kinematics, we have what are called settings. Now, this actually is real important, if we go to Settings here we can set the units that Maya is using. In this case, we're using centimeters, but we can change that to inches, feet or yards or whatever we want. And we can also set the timebase for our animation. So if you want to animate at 24 frames a second, that's the default, but you can change it to 30, 25 or really whatever you want. So now that we understand some of the basics of the interface, we can start diving in to actually navigating our scenes.
Author
Released
6/26/2014- Getting familiar with the Maya interface
- Creating hierarchies and layers
- Creating polygonal objects
- Working with subdivision surfaces
- Extruding a mesh
- Smoothing geometry
- Lofting and extruding with the NURBS curves tools
- Converting NURBS to polygons
- Creating and applying texture maps
- Applying UV mapping
- Adding lights and cameras to a scene
- Creating realistic effects such as depth of field
- Batch rendering
- Animating in Maya
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
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Introduction
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Welcome1m
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1. Getting Started in Maya 2015
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Navigation3m 20s
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Selecting objects4m 59s
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Using the Move tool5m 14s
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Rotating and scaling4m 54s
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Manipulating pivots2m 56s
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Using the Grease Pencil tool3m 43s
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2. Organizing Maya Scenes
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Creating hierarchies5m 4s
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Grouping objects4m 6s
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Using groups as pivots2m 54s
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Hiding and showing objects4m 18s
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Creating layers5m 16s
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Working with selection masks2m 38s
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3. Creating Polygonal Models
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Creating polygonal objects7m 41s
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Using the Sculpt tool4m 4s
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Boolean tools5m 37s
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4. Editing Meshes
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Using the Modeling Toolkit1m 53s
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Using the extrude tools6m 15s
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Extruding along a path2m 52s
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Using the bevel tools2m 42s
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Merging vertices and edges6m 29s
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Poking and wedging faces2m 43s
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Managing object history3m 30s
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5. Refining Meshes
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Working with edge loops2m 50s
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Mirroring geometry5m 4s
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Modeling with lattices2m 31s
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6. NURBS Modeling Techniques
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NURBS primitives5m 24s
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Using the NURBS curve tools6m 38s
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Using NURBS Revolve4m 31s
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Using NURBS Loft3m 48s
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Using NURBS Extrude2m 50s
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Using NURBS Planar2m 47s
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7. Refining NURBS Models
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Creating curves on a surface6m 49s
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Trimming NURBS surfaces3m 39s
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Converting NURBS to polygons3m 14s
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8. Creating Materials
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Overview of Maya renderers6m 48s
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Creating and applying maps5m 43s
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Using bitmaps as texture3m 25s
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Using the Ramp material5m 26s
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mental ray materials6m 7s
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9. Applying Textures
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Applying UV mapping6m 31s
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Using the UV Texture Editor6m 22s
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10. Rendering in Maya
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The Render Settings menu7m 4s
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Creating shadows5m 22s
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Adding depth of field5m 9s
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Using Motion Blur3m 17s
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Batch rendering3m 12s
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11. Animating in Maya
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Creating breakdown keys1m 58s
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Ghosting animation3m 44s
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Animating with constraints7m 51s
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Creating animation cycles4m 35s
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Adding sound to animations2m 33s
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Conclusion
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Next steps16s
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Video: Customizing the interface