Subtitles of the Movie

One of the great things about working in Maya is that it allows you to create your own custom tool shelf. This really speeds up the workflow by giving you the necessary tools you use on a consistent basis. Maya comes with the full shelves with also default tools prepared for you however we can create our own custom menu and we're going to do that right now. The way we create a custom tool shelf is to go Window, Preferences, and to the Shelves editor. If you select on the Shelf tab you'll notice an icon that says New shelf, click on that and simply change the name to Games, hit Enter and say Save all shelves. We now have a new tab, essentially a new shelf and it's currently empty. The way we go about adding the tools to our shelf is by holding down the Control and Shift key and then selecting from the menu selections the tools that we're looking for. We're going to start with some primitive shapes and then continue on to editing and modifying tools. I'll start under Create, Polygon primitives, holding down the Shift and Control I'll select Sphere. You'll notice now the sphere icon shows up in the tool shelf. I'll continue to do this with several more shapes such as the cube, cylinder, and finally, the plane. Now moving on to our editing tools I'll select Extrude under Edit mesh, Split Polygon tool, and Merge. Coming to Mesh I'll select Combine, Edit mesh, Append to polygon tool, back to Mesh, Fill hole, under Normals, Soften edge, Normals again, Harden edge, under Modify, Center pivot, under Edit, Delete all by type history, under Window, UV texture editor, Window, Rendering editor, Hypershade, and finally under Display, Polygons face normals. In the next video I'll explain what all these tools do and what their functionality is. For now however these are the tools that will be necessary for you to use and we're going to use them as much as possible throughout this video. Obviously if we're working with a tool that is not on our tool shelf, I'll explain where it is within the menu system but for the most part you'll become very used to using these tools on a daily basis in your normal workflow for game design.