Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll take a little bit of time to get familiar with some of the major areas of Maya's user interface. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about some of these major areas that we have within the user interface and how we can start to work within these areas. Now, we will be giving a chance to work with a lot of these areas one on one in some of the later lessons of this course. But for now I want to give you just sort of a very, very basic overview of some of these areas and what we can do within these. Now, if you already have sort of a basic idea of what these different areas are and how they work, I would still encourage you to not skip ahead through this lesson. Because in addition to talking about these different areas we are going to be sharing with you some keyboard shortcuts and a few other really, really useful bits of information that you won't be finding in any of the other lessons in this course. So, again, I would encourage you to go ahead and stick through this lesson even if you already are familiar with some of these major areas. So let's start by maybe just turning all of these different areas off, and we can start to talk about these one by one. One of the great things about Maya is the fact that it does give you the ability to very, very highly customize your user interface. So we can start to turn areas on or off that we don't need. So to begin, I'm going to start by going up to Display, down to UI Elements, and let's talk about some of these different areas. Now, first thing, you'll notice that a lot of these menus have this little dotted line up toward the top. Basically, this indicates that this is a menu that could be ripped off into a free-floating window. So if I go to this UI Elements and over to this menu, I'll just click on this little dotted line up here and break that menu off into a little free floating window. That way we can turns some of these areas on and off as we need. So let's start with a very bare bones interface. We'll go to Hide All UI Elements. And that'll take us into this really, really sparse, sort of professional-looking version of Maya that really has none of the UI elements on. And let's start by turning these on one by one. So let's start at the top with the Status Line. So if I turn the Status Line on, you can see that it's essentially this row of buttons right up here along the top. Now, these are a lot of the buttons that have to do with a lot of Maya's really, really common functions. But at the same time, you'll find a few functions up here that you really can't find anywhere else. So to begin with, we have these very, very simple options-- things like the new scene creation, loading of a new scene, saving of a scene. But we also have a few additional things-- a few rendering controls over here, a few snapping controls so we can start to snap objects and object components to certain things. And then over here, we have a lot of control over what is going to be selected at any point in our scene. Now, we'll have a chance to talk a lot about these different features as we start to progress a little bit further in this training. But for now, I just want you to be familiar with some of the different buttons that you'll be seeing. Now, one of the great things about Maya is the fact that it does give you the option to hide some of these user interface elements that you may not want. So for example, if I know that I'm really not going to be using any of these snap tools and I really don't want these in here causing a sort of visual clutter, what I can do is go to one of these dividers. You'll notice I can hover my mouse over that little divider and it becomes active. As soon as I click on that, we can basically collapse all of those button groups that were contained within that divider. So the snap function, or the snap tools, are still there. They're just hidden. And you see that it kind of switches this divider to a little bit of a line with an arrow pointing out, meaning that there are some hidden buttons inside of this group. Again, if I click it re-expands those, and now here's those little hidden buttons. So again, this does become sort of a nice way of going in and hiding some of these different features that you may not ever use. But one thing I will say is that I would recommend for you to go ahead and leave all of these turned on, at least as long as you're getting started with Maya. Because what can happen is you can maybe go in and turn one of these features off. And then at some point in time, you may completely forget that button even existed there at all. So until you start to get really, really familiar with all of these different buttons and what's contained on here, again, I would recommend leaving all of these different buttons turned on and fully ungrouped. Now, one of the things that you'll also notice is above here we have common menu items-- File, where we can make a new scene, open a new scene, Save, so on and so forth. We have File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, Window, and Assets. Now, all of these menus will pretty much stay the same all throughout Maya. As long as you're working, these should never change. Now one thing that you will notice is pretty much everything that is on the other side of this Assets menu-- things like Lighting and Shading, Texturing, Rendering, and all of these other guys-- these have the ability to actually change depending on what module we're using. Now the module is this little pull-down menu right over here. So at the moment, things like Lighting and Shading, Texturing, Render, Paint Effects-- these all have to do with rendering functions. Now if I pull this down and switch it to something like Animation, watch what happens to these menus. As soon as I click Animation, you'll notice these little menus-- everything from Assets on-- has changed. And now we're looking at all the tools and all the menus that have to do with animation functions. And again, Maya refers to these as a module. So this becomes a really nice way of, if you're working with dynamics and you only need to worry about dynamics tools, you have only the dynamics tools to have to worry about. Now, there are some keyboard shortcuts that we can use to jump through these different modules. So F2 will start us all the way at the top-most module, which is Animation. F3 switches us to the Polygons, which is what will do a lot of our modeling work. F4 is Surfaces, again another set of modeling-related tools. And F5 takes us to Dynamics, where we can start to get into particles, gravity, hair, shattering effects, things like that. Now, below this UI Elements here in the Status Line, we can also turn on a feature called the Shelf. Now the Shelf is, again, sort of this large grouping of icons. But the Shelf is really just a way of accessing a lot of the tools that we can already access through these different menus. Now the Status Line button has a lot of tools, again, that really can't be found anywhere else. Or at least for the most part, a lot of these tools can't be found anywhere else. But everything that exists down on the Shelf is a tool that exists somewhere in one of these menus. We're essentially just looking at a visual shortcut to some of those tools. And within the Shelf, we can start to go between these so we have a lot of different polygon-related tools, a bunch of different animation-related tools. And the nice thing is we can come in and actually start to build our own shelves to hold our own custom shortcuts for a lot of the tools that we like to use. We'll talk about shelves in its own lesson here in just a little bit, in one of the later lessons of this course. Now, below this we have the Time Slider. Now the Time Slider is where we start to get into our animation controls. So this is where we start to have controls for playing through our animation. So you can see here is our timeline, where we can see the time of our animation. This is measured in frames. By default, 24 of these individual frames equals one second of time. So what we're seeing right now is, basically, one second worth of time as far as Maya is concerned. Again, we can play through, stop our playback, rewind, and so on. Below this we have the Range Slider, which controls the amount of time that is actually displayed on our timeline. So we can start to expand and contract that amount of time. Again, we'll talk a lot about these different areas of Maya as we start to get into the animation section this training. Below this we have the Command Line. This is where we can start to type in our own custom scripts. These are referred to as a mel script in Maya. So we can type in our own custom commands and start to receive feedback from those commands over here. Again, we'll start to talk a little bit about mel scripts in one of the later lessons of this course. Below this we have the Help Line. Now, this is actually a really useful little feature because this is sort of a visual way of getting some help on different tools, different icons. So as you start to hover over certain icons and things like that, you can start to see some feedback as far as exactly what that tool is going to be doing. It also is really, really useful as we start to get into modeling tools, animation tools. If you use a tool that you've never used before, sometimes this can give you some help and some information about exactly how that tool is supposed to be used. Now we also have the Toolbox. Now, this is an area that we're going to start to become really familiar with as we start to get into Maya. This is where we can start to choose our selection tools, move tools, rotation, scaling, and so on. Again, we'll be talking a lot about these as we start to get a little bit further. And below this we have the Attribute Editor. Now this is an area that is going to become very, very familiar with you as you start to get into Maya. So this is where we can start to control pretty much every aspect of pretty much everything in our scene. Again, you're going to start to become very, very familiar with this Attribute Editor. And then finally, we have the Channel Box. The Channel Box is where we can start to have a little bit more control over object position, object scale. We can start to type in values. Again, we're going to have a whole set of lessons dedicated to the Channel Box as well as this Attribute Editor. But for now, I just want you to understand sort of what these are and where they live. We can click on these little tabs to go back and forth between these. Now, while we're on the subject of where things live in Maya, one of the nice things about this is the fact that we can customize the layout of our user interface. So you've already seen where we can start to turn off certain user interface elements that we don't want. So if we decide as we're working that we really don't need the shelf, it's just sort of getting in the way, we can always just turn that off and now it's no longer there. And we can do the same thing for any of these user interface elements. We can also customize where these things are located. So with all of these elements or a lot of these user interface pieces, you may notice that some of these have these little dotted edges or this little kind of a riveted edge. So what this means is we can grab this area, click and drag, and actually move that around and drag it into a new position. So let's say I wanted this timeline to be somewhere else, maybe along the top of my screen. You can see as I click and drag this up, it will allow me to dock this somewhere else. As I let off, now my timeline is up here. Now I can also put this back. Sometimes these may take a little bit of trial and error to find out exactly where these guys need to go. There we go. So I'll pop that right back over there. We can also take, again, really any of these other elements-- the Channel Box, for instance. Some of these we can take and if we drag and let off, that will make this into a free-floating window. And then I could always take that, maybe drag it back over here, and dock that back in. So the fact we can come in and customize our user interface however we want is a really, really nice feature. Now, for the sake of training, if I were to come in here and start to mess around with my user interface, it's going to make it really, really difficult for you to follow along. So I'm going to make sure that I leave my user interface at its default setting. Now, one last thing that I want to point out before we wrap up this lesson is the fact that a lot of these buttons may have some hidden options. So you'll notice that, for the most part, my cursor looks like a standard little white arrow cursor. However, there are some instances where if you hover over a button that cursor changes slightly. You'll notice if I hover over something like the selection masks, my cursor changes to this little white arrow with this little menu box next to it. Usually, whenever you see this little menu next to my cursor, it means that there are some hidden options that can be found on whatever my mouse is currently over. So with something like the selection mask, this is where we can enable or disable the selection of certain objects in my scene. So let's say, for example, surfaces. So I could left click and disable the selection of any surfaces or any geometry that is in my viewport. However, if I right click on that, I all a sudden get a whole new set of menus where we can start to get really, really particular about exactly what types of geometry are able to be selected. And again, we'll talk a lot about these different types of geometry as we start to get a little bit further along in this training. But for now, what I really want to point out is the fact that as you look at your cursor, really be attentive to what your cursor looks like. Because you never know, if you start to come up on some kind of a tool that by simply left clicking on it doesn't give you the option you want, but if you right click you can sometimes find some additional options. OK. So that's a look at some of these major areas of the Maya user interface and how we can start to customize exactly which parts of the UI are displayed, as well as customizing our UI layout.