Setting up the course project

We will need to set up a project folder for this course, and in fact, basically you will always need to set up a project folder in Maya. And the reason that you need to do that is so that all the links to the various files, such as textures are preserved, regardless of where your files are. Maya relies upon the project folder structure at all times. So you need to observe that procedure always. If you don't have access to the exercise files and you're not a premium subscriber to lynda.com, then you'll need to create your own project folder.

Let's do that first, I will show you how to create a project folder. Go into the File menu and choose Project Window. This will tell you what your Current Project is and where it is. I have just got the default project in the current users documents Maya Projects folder. I'll create a New Folder by clicking on New. And I will just put it in the same location here, just in that default location on the C drive, but I will give this a new name here. And let's call it shader_networks_Project.

Then we'll simply click Accept. Two things have happened now; a series of folders have been created for the various types of assets; and Maya is now pointing at that folder as it's sort of root or home-base. So let's take a look at that. If minimize Maya, you'll see here is the folder that I just created. It's in My Documents maya projects. And there is shader_networks_Project. As you proceed through the course, you will want to save scenes into scenes.

When you build textures, you will need to put your images inside of the source images folder first, before you build the textures. So that's if you need to create one from scratch. If you are premium subscriber and you can use the exercise files that come with the course, then I've already set that up for you. Here is the exercise files folder, I have just got that on my Desktop here. And you can see if I open up Scenes, there's a whole bunch of scene files inside there.

And if open sourceimages, likewise, you will see that there's a lot of texture files inside there currently. So I will go back to Maya, just hitting Alt+Tab to go back to Maya. And if you just want to point to an existing project folder, go to the File menu and choose Set Project. And then you just need to navigate to wherever that project is. That's going to be, in this, case on the Desktop. Click on that and just select the root of that exercise files folder and click Set. And now, if you choose File>Open Scene, it'll take you directly to the current project scenes folder, and then you can go ahead and open those scenes. I will close that.

One last thing I would like to mention is you might notice that I'm using a different interface in Maya than the default user interface. The default user interface in Maya currently is white text on a black background, and I'm not a big fan of that, frankly. I think it causes eye strain and it's harder for me to my work done. I really prefer the old-school black text on a white background. And you do that by modifying the shortcut to Maya. I am not going to cover how to do that in this course. If you're interested in using a Maya interface other than the default, you can set that up.

I covered that in a different course, which is Maya 2011 Creating Natural Environments. And I talk about how to do that on both the Mac and on Windows. We have setup our project and we are really ready to begin now with Creating Shader Networks in Maya.