Introduction to Maya 2012

In lesson, we'll take a quick look through some of the major areas of Maya's user interface. So as you can see, there are really a lot of different areas that make up Maya's user interface. Now, what we'll do in this lesson is take just a little bit of time to just explain what some of these different areas are. Really won't be going into a tremendous amount of depth because we'll be looking over these areas, really, throughout this entire course. So for now, I just want you to understand what some of these different areas are responsible for, and just where they live in the overall interface. Now, I don't want you to get in the habit of jumping through some of these lessons. This particular lesson is going to be a little bit long because you can see, we do have quite a few things to talk about, but throughout this lesson, we're going to be sprinkling in a lot of little tips and tricks that you may not otherwise find. So if you may be already somewhat familiar with some of these areas, again, don't jump through this lesson because we are going to be showing you some really, really neat things. So let's start with some of the basic user interface elements. Let's start by just turning these off, and we'll turn these back on one by one and explain these. So to begin, let's go up to display, user interface elements, and within this area, we can start to enable or disable these different areas. Now, one thing you may notice is that a lot of these menus have this little dotted line at the top. Now, this dotted line indicates that we can actually rip this menu off, and have access to this at any time. So again, I'm going to go to display, UI elements, and I'll take this menu, click up here at the top, and just rip that off. Very nice. So now it's in a free-floating window, and now we can turn these different features off and on. So we'll start by going to hide all UI elements, and you can see that now brings us into a very, very bare bones version of Maya. So let's start up at the top with something like the status line. Now the status line, if we turn that on or off-- you can see that's essentially this row of buttons right up along here. Now this is where we have access to things like being able to quickly start new scenes, open existing scenes, save scenes. We can start to open up particular views, we can use our selection masks to control objects that are or maybe not being selected. And again, we'll talk about some of these a little bit later in some of their own specific lessons. But this is probably an area that you do want to keep turned on because there are a few options and a few tools found on this toolbar they really cannot be found anywhere else. One of the nice things that Maya has is the ability to actually collapse some of these buttons sets that you may not need. So for example, if I'm working along and I really don't ever use the snap options, which are these little grouping of icons here, Maya gives us the ability to essentially collapse those. And we can do that through these little dividers here. So if I left click, you can see it now takes that entire grouping the buttons and just collapse those. Hides them away. Now if I click on that again, I could expand those, and get those back. So this could be a nice way of just elimination some of the visual clutter of some of these areas that you really may not ever use within Maya. But until you really do get familiar with the interface, I would recommend against hiding any of these things because sometimes you can hide these different button groupings and then you may completely forget that they're at all. So once you know that they're there, then you can maybe start to come in and hide some of these that you maybe don't use very frequently. Now within this top set of buttons, or this top set of menus, we have basically the different commands that are available to us for a certain set of tools. So you can see, we have file, edit, modify, create-- all the way up to window and assets. Now this grouping of menus will stay the same pretty much for all aspects of Maya. Animate, geometry cache, and so on and so forth, all the way up to pretty much the help menu-- these buttons or these menus can actually switch and sometimes change. Now what gets displayed up here depends on which module you're in. So you can see right now, we're in the animation module, which means we see all of the tools and all the menus that relate to animation. Now if we pull this down, we can switch to something like polygons. Once I click on this, watch what happens to these sets of menus. If I click on the polygons, all of a sudden, now everything from the assets, to help, has now changed. And now we see all of the menus that relate to polygons. And so on and so forth. And we can go to dynamics. Again, these menus now switch out. So this is a really nice way of making sure that we really don't have to work with a whole lot of menus that we may not ever need. If we're in a situation where we only are worrying about animation, just switch to the animation module. And now we only have the animation commands. Now there are some keyboard shortcuts for this-- so if we press, F2 that jump us to the animation module, F3 jumps us to polygons, F4 to surfaces, and F5 for dynamics. Now another area that we can turn on, which is turned on by default is called the shelf. Now the shelf, you can see once I turn that on that we have this whole new set of icons down here. And essentially, these just provide shortcuts for most of the tools that we can gain access to through these menus as well. So it just becomes a little quicker and easier way of just having a set of tools that are up and available to you. Now one of the things you may notice is that as I move my cursor over certain areas, my cursor actually changes. So you notice if I have my cursor kind of over in this empty area, it just looks like a normal cursor. But if I move my cursor over something in the shelf, you'll notice very quickly that it actually changes to this little cursor, with a little menu next to it. Now any time we see that, that's basically Maya's way of telling us that there are some options it we can access through whatever button we are hovering over. So if I were to come up to some of these other options up here, again, you can see that this cursor changes to the little menu indicator. So if I were to left click on one of these, that essentially will enable or disable this feature. Now if I right click on it, you'll see all of a sudden I have access to a lot more options within here. So now I can come in and very precisely enable or disable the selection of certain objects. And again, we'll talk about these selection masks in much more detail in one of our later lessons of this course. But just keep in mind that as you're moving around and getting familiar with Maya, keep an eye on your cursor because you never know when you may hover over some option that actually may have some additional options tucked away underneath. Now let's come in and turn on our time slider, as well as our range slider. Now these two areas will really come into play very, very heavily once we get into some the animation sections of this course. So this is where we can start to scrub through our timeline to preview any animation. We actually have playback controls for being able to play through our animation. Go back to our first frames, rewind, and so on and so forth. Now again, we'll talk about this in much more detail once we get into animation, but for now I just want you to sort of understand what these tools are, and where they live. We also have the command line, which is actually a really, really useful area for being able to come in. And if you want to be able to type in your own custom scripts for Maya, this is where we can actually type these in, and our results will be provided for us in this area. Again, we'll talk a little bit more about scripting and some of the things that go along with that in one of the later lessons of this course. Below this, we have the help line, which is actually, again a very, very useful area because this helpline, which comes in just below here, can actually give us some really, really useful tips as far as how to start to work with our objects and tools-- things like that. So as we start to pick tools, and pick different assets, we can actually-- when we cover over those, or whenever those become active, if we look down in this helpline, we can actually get some little indicators about just what this tool is, and how we need to use it. Below the helpline, we have the option to turn on the toolbox. Now, the toolbox is where we find a lot of the commonly used tools within Maya for being able to move objects, rotate them, scale them out, things like that. Again, we'll talk about all these in much more detail in one of the later lessons of this course. And then finally, we have the channel box/layer editor, editor as well as the attribute editor. Now these two areas will be very, very frequently used once we start to get a little bit deeper into Maya. And again, we'll have a chance to talk about both of these areas in their own special lessons within this course. So again, just a very, very brief overview of some of these major UI areas, and just giving you a basic idea of what's in these different areas are called, and where they live. Now, speaking of where some of these areas live, we actually do have the ability to customize the layout of our Maya interface. So for example, you'll notice that a lot of your interface elements have this little dotted or kind of a pitted line right in the front of the toolbar. And that means we can actually pick this up and move it, and you can see that my cursor actually changes a little bit when I move into these areas. So if I wanted to-- let's say move my timeline to someplace different, I could just click and drag. And I can actually pull that out. Now, if I let go somewhere out here, it will actually snap right back to where it was. But if I click and drag, and then try to reposition it somewhere else, sometimes you may need to move your cursor around for a little bit until you actually find that perfect spot. And then once I let off my mouse, you can see now my timeline is up here. And if I want to put that back, just again, click and drag. And try to find just the right spot. Again, sometimes it may take a few tries to get things back where they were. If I can find that. There we are. So again, pretty much all of these different areas can be picked up and docked over somewhere else, if we choose to. Now, for the sake of training, this is going to become really, really difficult. If I were to come in and start to customize my user interface. So for now, I'm just going to make sure that I keep everything at my default settings, so that way you don't have any difficulties actually following along as we get into some earlier lessons. So for now, that's just a quick look at some of the major user interface elements found within Maya.