Using the exercise files - Maya Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files I've created for this course, you can go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location. I've placed them here on my desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files, then in some cases you can use your own assets to follow along with the lessons. However, in some cases, you may find it difficult to do so because the lesson relies upon a compound or a bifrost asset that I have provided, and we'll see that in the exercise files I've got a standard Maya project here. And inside that Maya project, I have a custom folder, which is labeled bifrost. Inside there, we've got compounds, LinkedIn, and then a json file of a Simplex Noise Deformer. So if you don't have the exercise files and you don't have this json file, then you might not be able to follow some of the exercises. But even so, you can still learn by observation, and that would apply also if you had no access to Maya, for example if you're on a mobile device or just simply didn't have Maya in front of you at the time. If you are planning to follow along with the exercises, then you'll need a Maya project folder, either this exercise files folder that I've provided, or a custom project that you've created for the course. Let's talk about creating a project first. In Maya, we can go to the File menu to Project Window, and we'll want to create a new project, so we'll click New, and give that a name. We can just call it bifrost, and want to place it somewhere, such as in the current user's documents Maya projects, or maybe on the desktop. We can browse by clicking on the folder button, and I'll just choose Desktop and Select. We can leave the rest of this stuff as it is and just click Accept, and that creates the folder. Here it is, bifrost. You can open that up, and we'll see that we've got a Maya project folder structure with nothing in it yet. If you are going to use the exercise files I've provided, you want to set Maya to that project. Back in the Maya file menu, go to Set Project, and then browse in this case to the Desktop. Select the root level of that folder, in this case Exercise Files, and click Set. And now if we go to the File menu and chose Open Scene, we're taken to our current project's Scenes folder. And you'll notice that these are tiny, tiny files. Look at this. Each one of these is on the order of 100 kilobytes. We can fit 10 of those on a floppy disk, if you know what a floppy disk is. The reason these are so small is because they are bifrost files that are merely instructions on how to generate procedural content. These are not heavy polygon meshes, or animation with many key frames. That can take up a lot of space on disk. But as we'll discuss later, these are really just the recipes for creating things and not the things themselves. You'll see that some of these Maya scene files have the words Finished Example upended to the end. That indicates that the file represents the end state of that particular movie. Usually it's the begin state, so for example, 02_02_install_compound is the begin state for that movie. If there is no finished example, then the end state of that movie is the begin state of the next movie. So, in other words, 02_03_construct_graph is the begin state for 02_03, but it's also the end state for 02_02. So these follow in kind of a sequence until we reach a finished example, and that's kind of the end of that line. All right, so that's how to set up the exercise files for the course.