Subtitles of the Movie

When you're working with Maya you'll soon find that relying on the menus and icons is a little bit slow when you're using the tools frequently, so you'll soon want to find out about some of the hot keys or shortcuts that are available. A couple to check out: first I'm going to hit my spacebar to maximize the view that my cursor is hovering over. Next, I want to be able to switch the mode of the screen from a wire frame, which is four to a shaded view, five, into a lit mode seven. I'll go back to wire frame for a moment, and now if I select this sphere, and I want to lower it's resolution at least it's visual representation on the screen, I can press one, and if I look at that in shaded mode, five. I can see it looks a little bit blocky now, but it's faster on screen. This mostly will impact your scene if you have a lot of dense nurbs objects. So one, two to go to a medium resolution and three to a fine resolution or a high resolution. One, two, three, four for wire frame, five for shaded, and we'll jump to seven for lit. Now when you're ,manipulating objects, you can use the next row down on your keyboard, which is Q and gives you the Select tool, W gives you the Move tool, E for rotate, and R for scale. So that's the Q, W, E, R keys. Okay, a couple of tricks to know when you're using these manipulators; I'm going to head to the Move tool, hit W, if I want to constrain the movement to two axes, so right now, let me go to a shaded or wire frame, rather, mode. If I want to constrain this movement so that I can't accidentally lift the ball up and down but instead just slide it around on the ground. Actually I'll switch to five for a moment so you can see this a little better. I can press the Control key and then click on one of the axes. So in this case, I clicked on the Y-axis, the green arrow, and you'll notice that the center of the manipulator is now a yellow box that's constrained to the ground plane access. So as I'm dragging this around, it's only moving on X and Z, and I can't move accidentally on Y. If I want to get back to the regular mode I can hold Control and click just in the center of the manipulator, and now I'm back to being able to manipulate on all three axes. With the Scale tool, if I want to press R to get the Scale tool, normally if I click on one axis I can scale non-proportionally on one single axis. If I click on the box in the center I will do a proportional scale, so all three axes at once. If I want to constrain that to just two axes, I can hold Control and then click on the handle that I don't want to scale on. So it's a little confusing at first, but I'm holding control and clicking on this green. You can see I'm scaling up just on Z and X, the blue and red axes, but not on Y. So this, this tube, you can see, isn't getting any larger. On the Y-axis, this is instead only increasing its scale on X and Z. And this works for any of the three axes. Another thing to know about the hot keys is that you can create your own. So we looked at the outliner before. If I want to be able to open my Outliner window rather than heading up to Window, Outliner, I can instead create my own hot key for that. And I'll do this by clicking on Window, Settings, Preferences, Hot Key Editor. And here I'm going to look through the categories for Window, so you can see there's a long list of possible categories; click on Window and then the commands that appear, and here I'm looking for Outliner window. Now I'm going to head over to the Assign New Hot Key and let's say I want to use Shift O to open up my Outliner. I can type Shift O in this field, and then I'm going to click the Query button to make sure that that's currently assigned to something else, and it spits back this answer: O, capital O that is, is assigned to nothing. So I'll go ahead and hit Assign and then I can save and close this window. All right now, any time I want to open up my Outliner, I can just press Shift O on the keyboard, and there it is.