Maya Tutorials

Movie 1: Zoom, Pan, & Roll: Navigations
This short film briefly demonstrates how to zoom, pan, and rotate along the perspective view. In order to do this, one must hold the alt key (Windows) or option key (Mac) and left-click the mouse to rotate, middle button to pan, and right-click to zoom.

Movie 2: Move, Rotate, and Scale
In this film, it shows you how to be able to see in all your orthographic views by simply using the space bar. It also shows the three manipulators: move, rotate, and scale; y-axis = green, z-axis = blue, and x-axis = red. It also gives advice that if you want to move an object freely, or scale uniformly, drag the central handle. Lastly, the video talks about how when you highlight an object it can be moved and if you want to move more than one object you just highlight the objects and it briefly states that you can also manipulate the components (edges, vertices, faces) of an object.

Movie 3: Create & View Objects
This film describes the type of objects that can be made in Maya such as NURBS and polygons. It then goes on describing that polygons are made up by faces that are flat and that NURBS are made up of curves and are smooth. Also, the menus of these objects are located by the create menu (NURBS primitive & Polygon primitive). In this movie, the channel box is introduced and they briefly state that it displays information for an object such as transform attributes (position, scale, rotation) and shape attributes (inputs). Lastly, the video shows you the 3 different ways to view an object: wireframe, smooth shade all, and wireframe on shaded. Also, by using the keys 1, 2, 3 you can see different views of the object however it doesn’t change the actual shape of an object.

Movie 4: Components
This video shows you right-clicking on the mouse your component menu pops up and you select on the specific part by clicking on it and you deselect by clicking on  nothing. If you want to add to your selection simply hold on to the shift key and to deselect faces you hold the control key. And to return back to the object you simply right-click again and go to the menu and hit select.

Movie 5: Discover Secret Menu
This describes the six different menu sets and how every time you click on each one menu item on the top menu updates. If you want to change the options for a particular action in Maya, you can click on the box that is shown in the end. Also, they talk about the Hotbox which is an advanced method to get to menus quickly.

Movie 6: Keyframe Animation
This describes that in order to make a key frame on the time slider on the bottom you must hit the “S” key and if you want to change the current frame, click another frame number in the time slider using the left mouse button and then manipulate the object press “S” again and you make another key frame. If you want to review your work you can press play to play back your frames.

Movie 7: Materials, Lights, and Rendering
Using the marking menu select assign new material. After selecting the material, the attribute editor appears and in there you arrange around the color and also assign a texture. In order to view the texture, you click on the “textured” button on the top. Lastly, they talk about rendering an object and also shows you where the render settings are located.

Overall, these Maya tutorials were review to me however, I did learn about using the keys 1, 2, 3 to view the objects; I didn’t know that the #2 was an option; I just thought 1 & 3 were the only ones.