Introduction to Maya 2012

In this lesson, we'll learn some really, really useful ways of working with the Maya shelf. OK, so in some of our earlier lessons we've touched just very, very briefly on basically what this shelf is. And essentially, that it holds some of the shortcuts for some of the tools that normally we would have to access either through the menus or through the the Maya hot box. Now what's really nice about shelves is the fact that we can actually start to customize these very, very heavily. So I'm actually going to use this same scene file that we had been working with in our previous lesson. And I'm actually going to go ahead and select this. Now if you open up the scene file, what you may have to do is select your object, press control-A on your keyboard to open up the attributes. Take a look inside this object's shape node. And down toward the bottom, inside the notes, I've left basically the same MEL command that we typed in our previous lesson. So go ahead and select that. Press control-C to copy this. Let's go back to my script editor. And I'll go ahead and control-V to paste that. All right, so now we're basically back to having this same MEL command that we had in our previous lesson. Now, again we saw how we could take this and maybe take our MEL command, middle click, and drop this up into a shelf so we could actually use this for later. Now what's nice is the fact that we are not necessarily limited to just applying MEL commands to these shelves. We can actually take any tool or any combination of commands, and apply them to our shelves. We can very quickly start to build up our own custom set of tools that we are going to use most frequently. So for example, let's say that I am a modeling person. And I like to usually, oftentimes, work with something like the insert edge loop tool just for demonstration. So if I were to switch over to my polygon modeling menu, let's go up to Edit Mesh, and insert edge loop tool. Now, as opposed to having to come in and find this command every single time, I can just take this and quickly add it to a shelf. So with this shelf active, my custom shelf in this case, I can now take this insert edge loop tool, control shift, and then click on it. And you can see now that command gets added on to my existing shelf or my current shelf. So now I can come in and instantly use that any time I want. So I can continue to do this with any of my tools. But I can also start to use this to populate things like windows and other areas that I may go into frequently. For example, let's say I very frequently am working in something like the UV texture editor. Again, control shift, click, and now it's been added into my shelf. So now I can instantly come in, click on it, and have access to my UV Texture Editor. So you can start to see really quickly how this can become very, very useful, to instantly have all of the tools that I use most frequently immediately accessible to me. And I don't have to go through any additional menus or any additional options to get to these. Now when it comes to working with a shelf, if we for some reason maybe don't want to have an object on our shelf any longer, what we can do is middle click on that command, drag and drop it up into this little trash can that's in the upper corner. Once I do that, you can see that command is no longer there. Now I can actually make my own shelves if I want to, just click on this little icon next to my shelf, and go to New Shelf. Now I can give this a new name. So something like dt_custom, and there we are. There's my new shelf. Now if I wanted to, I could continue to add new commands into my new dt_custom shelf, or, maybe if I wanted to just take some commands from any of my existing shelves, I could just maybe go back to my custom. Take my insert edge loop tool that I just created. Middle click, and just drop this up into my dt_custom shelf. And now you can see it's been moved over here. Now, I could even start to come in and customize things like my icons. So if I go back to my custom shelf, you'll notice that we do have again this MEL command that we've created for doing basically a custom revolve. So, selecting a certain object, revolving it, and then moving that a certain distance. Now, what if I actually wanted to make a special icon? Let's say I have multiple MEL commands. And I don't necessarily want them all to have the exact same icon. Well, what we can do is just right click on that MEL command, go to Edit. So in this area, we can actually see the MEL command that we are using. So at any point in time, we can come back and modify this if we want. If we go over to the shelves tab, we can control which actual shelf this is in. So in this case, we're looking in the custom shelf. And we have this shelf contents. Now, in this area, we can start to control things like the actual tool tip. Because right now, if I hover over this, you can see we get this basic MEL command in the tool tip. So let's say I wanted this to be maybe a little bit more descriptive. So let's call it something like bottle revolve. OK. And what we should see now is, once we hover over the tool tip, we now have something that is a little bit more descriptive. Now again, I could also maybe change this icon, if I wanted to, instead of using this little MEL icon. If I take a look inside the source images directory that I'm currently working out of, I've actually gone ahead and made a little custom icon to use. So it's just a little bottle plugged in here. Go ahead and press open, and there we are. Now in my case, I'm using a [? PNG ?] file, which does contain transparency. So if I've actually created this little thumbnail in something like Photoshop with a transparent background and then save that out as a [? PNG, ?] Maya will go ahead and read that transparency and make all these other areas transparent. So we can actually see this grey background behind here. And you can see immediately, this new icon has been updated. OK, very nice. And if I wanted to, I could maybe give this a basic label, call this maybe something like, revolve. And again, we can actually see that down here. There we are. Very nice. Now, an interesting thing about using a MEL command that's up in your shelf is the fact that we can actually have a separate command for just a simple click, and a completely separate command to be run whenever we double-click on that button. So let's say we wanted to do something a little bit different. I'll just take this MEL command, copy that, and then paste this over into my double click command. So let's say over in this move option, let's say I wanted this to maybe be moved instead of negative 10, zero, and negative 13, let's say I just put in some different move coordinates whenever we double click. So let's test this out. I'll go ahead and just simply left click on my MEL command. You can see now it runs the bottle. If I double click, you can see now it runs it with a completely separate set of commands. And again, we can have actually a completely separate MEL command in here. These two commands do not have to be related to each other in any way. OK. So this has been just a quick look at the shelf feature found in Maya. Now, really this will bring us to the conclusion of this particular section of our training. So at this point now, we've had a chance to take a look at really just kind of a broad overview of Maya. And just kind of get familiar with how to move around, how to navigate, and really helping us develop just an overall familiarity with Maya, the user interface, where some of these features live, and how we can actually start to use them. So at this point now, I'm going to pass it over to Justin, who will begin showing you some of the modeling features found in Maya.