Introduction to Maya 2013

OK. In this first lesson, we're going to take a look at the process of moving around within Maya's 3D workspace. So we're going to spend the next probably dozen or so lessons just talking about the basics of moving around within Maya, and how we can perform a lot of important functions and getting familiar with a lot of really important areas of Maya's interface. Now, whenever you first launch Maya, one of the first things you'll need to do is to get familiar with the process of moving around within the 3D workspace. Now before I do this, one thing I am going to do is to change my background color. So this will make some of the things that we're going to show on screen a little bit easier for you to see. So I'm going to change this background by pressing Alt B on my keyboard. Just remember B for background, so Alt B. And we can start to cycle through different background colors. I'm going to cycle through until I reach sort of this light grey. There we go. That'll make things a little bit easier to see for you on screen. So let's talk about the process, like I said, of moving around within Maya's 3D workspace. So to do this and to illustrate this, I'm just going to drop in a couple of really, really simple objects. So let's start by going to Create, NURBS Primitive, and let's start with something like a NURBS sphere. Now Maya's going to ask us to go ahead and drag this sphere out. Let's go ahead and click and drag. There we are. Now, let's make another object over here. So once again Create, NURBS Primitives. And let's do something like maybe a torus. So once again, it's going to ask us to drag this torus out on that grid. Once we let off our mouse, it's going to ask us to now click and drag again to change the radius of this. There we go. So now we have a couple of objects here. Now the process of moving around within the 3D workspace is done by pressing and holding the Alt key on your keyword, and then using your left, middle, and right mouse buttons. So Alt left click, you can see will orbit the camera around. If we Alt middle click, you can see that will track or pan this camera from side to side. And then if we use Alt middle and the left mouse button together, we can basically dolly this camera in and out. We can also do this same dolly function by using Alt right mouse button. So once again, Alt left to orbit. Alt middle to pan or track from side to side. And then Alt left and middle together to dolly in and out. Now when it comes to selecting and focusing your camera on certain objects, we can do that with a simple keyboard shortcut. So let's say I'm moving around and I'd like to have this sphere right in the middle of my view port and actually have my camera orbit around this particular object. So we can select any object, and then you can press the F key on your keyboard. Just remember F for frame, or F for focus, whichever helps you remember. So we'll press the F key to frame that object. You can see that will put it right in the center of my view, and it will also have the camera orbit perfectly around that object. Now, the same goes if we wanted to have maybe the camera now loop around this torus, just select that. And again, press the F key to frame in on that or to focus in on that. And now, you can see the camera is focused on this object. Now if we have a couple of different objects selected, we can do kind of a focus or a frame on both of these. So let's say I click and drag to select both of these objects. And if I have more than one object selected and press the F key, what it will do is sort of focus on the average between these two. So in this case, it's kind of focusing on this area right in between these two objects that I have selected. Now there is another keyboard shortcut that can help us out that you will probably find yourself using. So the F key is one. We also have the A key. Just remember A for all. If we press the A key, you can see this will basically take all of the things that are in our scene and try to bring those into the camera's focus. So as you start to work within Maya, you'll be definitely using these two keyboard shortcuts very, very frequently. Now let's talk about the process of moving between the different viewports. So you can see right now, we're looking through just one simple viewport, that's the Perspective view. Now if I quickly tap the space bar on my keyboard, I can pull up this four panel view. So you can see now we have our Perspective view, but we also have a side view, a front view, as well as a top view. Now what if I wanted one of these views to be full screen? Well, I simply take my mouse. Just move it into any of these viewports, and then tap my space bar again. You can see now it brings this side view up in a full view. If I want to go back to a four panel, again, just quickly tap my space bar. Move my mouse into the view that I want to maximize and tap my space bar again. Now, as I press and hold my space bar, you'll probably notice a little flicker of something that happens here. You'll notice this little menu that starts to pop up. If I press and hold the space bar, this brings up a menu called the Hot Box. Really this is just a quick and easy way of accessing pretty much all of the different tools in Maya. Now we're not going to really talk too much about this at this point. Here in just a few lessons, we'll have an entire lesson dedicated just to the use of this Hot Box. So for now, we're just going to ignore this. Just remember, if you quickly tap the space bar, you get the ability to switch between viewports. If you press and hold the space bar, you get the Hot Box. Now with these different orthographic views, it's really the exact same process of moving around that we looked at in our Perspective view. So in these top views, if I press Alt and then middle click, so Alt middle click, you can see will move us from side to side or up and down. If I press Alt as well as the left and middle mouse buttons on my keyboard, I can zoom in and out. So again, the exact same keyboard shortcuts that we used to track and zoom in and out will work in any view. Now, you notice in these other viewports using the Alt left click has no effect, because these are what are called an orthographic view in that these are not a perspective view, where we can actually look at a 3D representation of our scene. You can sort of think of these as a schematic, sort of a side, top, and front view. So these are really just sort of allowing us to sort of see our scene from all different angles, but the Perspective view is the only one that we can actually orbit around in 3D space. Now, one last thing that I want to talk about before we wrap up this lesson is the View Cube. So that's this little widget that we see in the upper corner of our viewport. You'll see it actually becomes active for any viewport that we currently click inside of. Now the view cube is sort of a quick and easy way of getting really to almost any different view. So if we were to, let's say, click on this front icon, you can see it will quickly snap us to sort of a front view. If I click on some of these other views, I can quickly jump to maybe a left view, a top view. I can spin my camera around. If at any point I need to get back to my original view, just click on this little home icon, and that'll take me right back to the default perspective viewport or the viewport position. This is essentially the same camera position we would have any time we make a new scene. Now something really important to keep in mind is that this view cube, whenever we switch this to something like a front or maybe a top view, this is not the same thing as going to the top orthographic view. If you look very carefully, you'll see that in something like this top view, if we looked out at this sphere, you can see there's no perspective whatsoever. But over here, you'll notice that this sphere still has sort of a little bit of perspective distortion. So even though we're in a top view, we're still looking at this with some kind of a perspective or a vanishing point shift. And in addition, any time we jump to the top view, we can still orbit around and break that position and get back to any sort of a 3/4 view or anything like that. So just keep in mind that at first glance, you may think that by clicking on top view that you're doing the same thing as going to your top viewport. But again, it's not quite the same thing. So that's a look at how we can start to move around within Maya's 3D workspace.