Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll talk about the importance of using projects inside of Maya. So as you start to work within Maya, and you start to work on lots of different scene files, what you want is some kind of organized structure to the files that you're working with. You really don't want to have just one folder that has basically every single thing that you've ever worked on. That just starts to become an organizational nightmare. So what Maya has is an ability to create a new project directory, or new project structure, for every project that you work on. So the idea here is that once you stop working on a project, and start to move on to another project-- whether it's another student project or a course-- then at that point you basically make a new project directory inside of Maya. So let's first take a look at what this is going to entail. And then that'll give you a little bit better idea of exactly what a project is. So to set up a project, or to build a project, what you need to do is go to File, and then down to the Project Window. So this is we're going to go to create a new project. So the default project will be inside of your Documents directory. So in my case, I'm going to make a new project. We're going to click on New. Here we can define a location. If you want, you can browse to a certain directory, if you know exactly where you want this to be saved. In my case, I'm going to put this just on my C Drive, on the root of my C Drive. And now I can come in and choose a name for this project-- we'll call this Introduction to Maya 2013. And the folders that we have listed below here, typically you won't need to come in and make any adjustments to these. What Maya is going to do is make a new directory, or a new folder. And inside wherever we want our scenes to be saved, it's going to make a scenes folder. Wherever we want things like our renders to be saved, it's going to make a new folder called whatever we want. Again, typically I like to leave these just at their default. And once we have this done, we hit Accept. Now at this point, it really doesn't look like anything that's happened. But if we take a look on our C Drive-- you can see I'm right now looking at my C drive. And here is the Introduction to Maya 2013 project that we just made. Now Maya automatically made this folder for us. Now if I double click on this, you can see that there's a whole set of folders in here for us. So we have a folder called Scenes. Now this is where Maya will automatically save all of the scenes that we create. Things like Images, this is where Maya will automatically render any images or movies that we want to get out of Maya. We have things like Source Images, which is where Maya will automatically look for any textures or anything like that that we're going to be using with this project. So now at this point, if I went to, let's say File, and Save Scene, you can see it's going to automatically try to save this inside of my project, and inside the Scenes directory. So making a proper project is, again, going to be really, really important. Because now we can keep the scenes, the textures, the renders, of one particular project isolated. And then when it comes time for us to start a new project for a client, or for student work, then we make a new Maya project to save all of that information. And so one and so forth as we start to get into new projects. So again, let's say our project is done and now we're moving on to the next one. So we're going to go to Project Window. Let's make a new project. And this one I'll just call New Project. And just hit Accept. Now once again, if I go back to my C Drive, here's this new project that was just created, and all of the corresponding folders for that. So to jump back and forth between the different project, if we already have one built-- so at this point, if we were to go to Open Scene, you can see now it's going to work out of this New Project, because that's the one I just made. If I wanted to switch, we go to File, and then Set Project if we already have a project in mind. So we could just go to Intro to Maya 2013. Hit Set. And now when I go to Open, it's automatically now going to look in this project, inside the Scenes Directory. So again, it becomes a really, really nice way of working and organizing your scenes, and all the different assets that are related to a particular project. Now here's where this gets really, really important. In order for you to follow along with the files that are provided with this training, you're going to have to make sure that you go in and set the project that we are giving to you. So when you download the project files for this course, and unzip those, whatever directory you unzip those to, what you need to do is go up to File, down to Set Project. And what you need to do is, wherever you've unzipped this Introduction to Maya 2013 folder, you need to navigate to this directory, double click on the folder, and then hit Set. Now at that point, any time you go to open a file, it's going to look inside that Introduction to Maya 2013, inside the scenes directory. And this is where you're going to find all of the different scene files that we're going to be providing you for the remainder of this course. And this should also ensure that any textures that we include with this, any images, or anything like that-- everything should be included inside of this project directory. And Maya automatically knows, any time we're using a project, it's going to look inside of that project's folders for the proper resources. So if we have this set to Introduction to Maya 2013, then Maya is automatically going to look inside that folder source images directory for things like textures, and things like that. So again, if you want to follow along, if you want everything to work properly, very, very important that you go in and set up your project. Or set your project to match this folder that we're going to be providing you. OK, so now we have our project set to this directory, we can now start to save our Maya scene files out into this different scenes folder. And, more importantly, you can now open up all the scenes that we are going to be providing you in these project file courses. So what we can start to do now in our next lesson is look at the process of saving out a Maya scene file.