Subtitles of the Movie

Working in Maya is a pleasure, I'd like to take a moment to give you a quick tour of the interface and show you where all the different menu systems and panels lie. At the very top of the Maya interface we have different menus with drag down tools. These menus can also be torn away, what we call a tear-away sheet. At the very top you'll notice a double line, by clicking on it that allows you to remove the entire menu system and put it off to the side while working. From File to Window, Maya will remain the same. The menus after window will change depending on the working mode. For example, in Polygons we'll have select, mesh, edit mesh, and so on. Once we change to Surfaces you'll notice we now have edit curves, surfaces, and edit nerves and again so on. These once again will change as the working modes change however File through Window will always remain the same. The next line down is our status line. Many of the different commands within the status line such as choosing objects by object type, component type, hierarchy, locking out different values and also snapping functions you can also find within hot keys and you'll find the hot keys work much more efficiently than working with the status line. The next line down we have the tabs for working within the different tool shelves. Maya comes with predefined tools however we're going to create our own custom tool shelf for the project we'll be working on. This way all of the tools that we'll need for all of the lessons that I'll be providing you will be right within your tool shelf. The main window is obviously the View panel. On the upper right hand corner we have the view cube, which allows us to automatically switch to many of the different views from orthographic to perspective view. Some modelers have found however this view cube not to be as efficient as the old compass. I have a work around script that I will be providing you that you can simply upload as a custom tool button, I think you'll find very handy. The panels also have different view selections for controlling cameras, shading, and so forth. Once again, we'll cover those in detail as we go through the lessons. On the left hand side we have the tool box. The tool box provides us with many different selection tools such as the move tool, rotation, scale, universal manipulator and so forth. Once again, key commands allow us to do this very quickly. In the lower left hand corner, we can change our different views, from perspective to fore panel by hitting the spacebar we can actually ping pong back and forth. We also have holding the Spacebar allows us to bring up the hot box. Maya's hot box once again gives us the ability to change our views. On the right side of the interface we have out channel controls and layers. By selecting an object for example you'll notice that within the channels, this shows us our world space on our object. The moment that object is moved the different values will change depending on what we're changing. It's very easy to zero out your objects on the grid by simply typing in a value of zero and bringing your object back to center. And to isolate this object within the scene, we isolate lighting, joints, just about anything, we can create a series of layers. Put the different objects on their own layer channel. To do this, we create a new layer, right click on that layer and choose add selected objects. Now we're able to turn off visibility, change our object from template mode which allows us to view the wire frame but not select the object, reference mode which allows us to view both shaded and textured mode, but once again not select the object and then finally removing that brings us back into editing mode. By double clicking on a layer we can also change the name. on the lower left side we have the MEL Command Line. MEL Command Lines allow us to actually type in custom MEL script commands. For example, I can type in views, create a button which happens to be a MEL script that I use and this allows me to now use my new script for viewing. Again, I'll show you how to install scripts later on for creating your own custom tools on the tool shelf. Next up, I'll show you how to change the preference settings throughout Maya to give you more versatility within the program.