Introduction to Maya 2013

In this lesson, we'll learn how we can start to use shelves inside of my Maya. OK. So in one of our earlier lessons, we had mentioned the fact that this area of our shelves is where we can start to access some commonly used tools. And most of these tools and features are things that can be found in some of Maya's various menus. Now the nice thing about the shelves is the fact we can start to add to our own custom commands, our own custom tools, into our own shelves. So for example, we could make our own shelf, if we start to maybe use a handful of tools, that we are going to be using very frequently. We can make ourselves a custom shelf to hold those special commands that we need. So you could rely on something like this custom shelf here. Or you could, actually, make yourself a completely new shelf and have yourself a whole new set of shelves set up to work from. In my case, I'm just going to use this custom shelf. And we'll just see quickly how this works. So to add anything to a shelf, what we need to do is first have that shelf active. And then we simply choose a command that we want to add to the shelf. So let's say we wanted to add something like the UV texture editor. Let's say we don't necessarily want to go into this menu to get to it. Any of these commands what we see here we can Control Alt and Shift, or rather just Control Shift click. And by Control Shift clicking on any of these menu commands, you can see it now adds that into your currently active shelf. So now I can just simply click on that button and call up the UV texture editor. And we can do this for pretty much anything. So if we go to surfaces. Let's say we wanted to add maybe something like that revolve command that we looked at in our previous lesson. Again Control Shift click. And now that has been added to this shelf. And we can, again, populate this shelf with as many tools as we want. And we can set up as many of our custom shelves as we want. Now if we have a tool or something that we want to maybe get rid of from the shelf-- we no longer want that on here-- it's just a matter of taking this object, middle click, drag it up to this little trash can. And as soon as we let off our middle mouse button, you can see that item is no longer on the shelf. So like I said, this becomes really, really useful for taking a lot of custom tools, custom windows, things that we like to have open and jump back and forth between. We can start to stack all of these up on a shelf. And we have quick and easy access. Another nice thing about the shelf is the fact that we can actually come in and start to add our own custom tools and commands to this. So for example, if we go back to the scene file that we used in our previous lesson. So this scene file that I'm using is called 14 Begin. So in my script editor, I still have this same script that I typed up in my previous lesson. Now if you don't have this, if you select your curve here and press Control A to go into the attributes, if you look inside this shape node, I have actually copied this MEL script in here. So if you want, you could copy that and paste it back into this MEL area, if you don't currently have this in your scene. So what we can do is we have this MEL command, which we built in our previous lesson. Now I could take this and add this up into the shelf. So I could have instant, immediate access to this any time I want. So to do that, just take any section of your MEL script, middle click, and drop that up into your shelf. You can see that makes a new little icon for that. So now what we should see is if I just simply click on that little shelf icon, now it runs that script that I had pasted in there. And I can just click on this several times to continue writing that script and generate random objects at random positions. So very, very nice feature that we have here. We can also come in and start to customize this shelf appearance. So if we right-click. And let's go into Edit for this. If we go over into the Shelves tab, we have this Custom button. And we have the shelf content. So right now, we have one shelf icon for the Texture Editor and another one for this Select Curve Random Revolution. So if we want, we can start to customize things like the tool tip. So what we should start to see right now is if we hover over this, you can see my tool tip appears. And it just says, basically, what the MEL script says-- select curve one, revolve around the axis, and then move random. Now we can control what this says, through this little tool tip area. So if we wanted to give this a special name, something like random revolve, and go back over here and take a look at that now. You can see the tool tip has been updated. We can also give this a custom icon, which we could easily make ourselves. So in this case, I've just built a small little 32 pixel by 32 pixel image, just a simple little icon. This can be a tiny little render. This could be a graphic that you make by hand. In this case, I have a nice little transparent background on this. And what I can do is save this out. And I'll save this in the Introduction to Maya 2013 folder inside the source images directory. And I'll save this out as a pong file, a PNG. And we can call this something like shelf icon. There we go. And back in Maya, what we should be able to do is now browse to that image. Again, looking inside the source images directory, here's our little shelf icon. And open that up. And you can see now my random revolve has been replaced with this little icon. So like I said, you can really start to see where these shelves become very, very beneficial, if you have several tools that you're using very frequently. But they may be scattered across several different menus, maybe scattered across several different modules. And even using something like the hotbox can sometimes be a little bit daunting, because you've still got to find exactly what it is you're looking for. Well, you can take those handful of tools or those handful of commands that you're using for your particular project, save those into a shelf, and now you've got one-click access to those whenever you want. OK. So that's is going to pretty much wrap us up with this introductory section of our training. So starting in our next lesson, Justin is going to start walking you through some of the modeling features in Maya. And we're going to be using those to build out the little aircraft that is going to serve as the central focus of the remainder of this course.