Subtitles of the Movie

All right, now we're going to take a look at the interface. This is the tour of Maya's interface. So across the top, this area is called the Menu Bar, and this is the section you're probably used to from every other application you use on a computer. And I'm not going to go through every single one of these one by one because you'd be bored to tears, but I will say that we'll be heading up here a lot as we learn how to find things in the interface. All of Maya's commands and tools are somewhere up in here. Hopefully, you will find there are a number of them that you will use shortcuts on your keyboard, such as Control C for Copy and Control V for Paste, but there are others that you don't use as often that you will need to learn where to dig through these long menus. Sometimes they're deeply nested menu sets. But everything you need is found up in here and one of the first ones to check out is the Help section. Any time you have a question, you can click over here on Help and then on the first entry, Maya Help, and you'll see the shortcut is listed off to the right if you press the F1, the Function 1 key on your keyboard. That'll pop up your Web browser with the Maya Help, and this is all of the manuals that come with Maya as well as a searchable database of commands and tools. Okay, the next section to take a look at here is called the Status Line, and that's what all these tiny little icons in this row are in this section called the Status Line. The first item in Status Line is the Menu Sets and this allows you to actually switch what some of the menu items are across the top in that menu bar that we saw first. So you'll notice now if I click on Polygons I get sections here including Mesh, Edit Mesh, Proxy. Now watch those will change when I click on Surfaces. So now we have new menu items that are specific to the type of task that you'll doing inside of Maya. The first ones don't change. It's the first five here: File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, and Window also, actually, I think that's six, isn't it? And then the last one will always be Help, but it's these middle guys that'll change out depending on what you'll doing. If I head to Animation, get a completely different set of menus along here in this new menu set. Okay, the next section in Maya is called the Shelf, and this shelf is actually a collection of shelves. Every one of these tabs I click here: polygons, subdivisions, deformations, they all have a different set of buttons associated with them. If I click on the Polygons shelf, now I have Items. If I hover over here for a second I can see a tool tip. It says polygon sphere, polygon cube, so this'll allow me to create objects without digging through the menus. Instead you can head straight to a little icon and choose the task that you want to do. It could be a command, it could be a tool, and it can also be a script that does some more complicated things. We'll get into that a little later. So you can think of the shelves as a nice place to stick things that you use frequently, things that you don't always want to dig through the menu for, but maybe you don't use them so much that you need a shortcut on the keyboard for them. Okay. In the next section we'll take a look at; I'm already doing things in there. You can see that this is the panel, the model panel or model window. Sometimes this is a called a view port, a lot of names for it, but it's the main work area that you find yourself doing stuff in 3D, so that's often going to be one single panel, but it's also possible using this icon here in the toolbox side of the interface to switch over to multiple views, and we'll take a closer look at this as we get into the next section, but for now, I'm going to focus on just one single window. Now each of these windows have their own associated menus, so I can see here there's the View menu that allows me to change things about the view port itself. Shading allows me to switch the modes of model representation; could be a wire frame, could be a shaded model, and you have a few others in there that we'll be looking at later. And there's also a section for lighting, choosing different types of lighting for your scene. There's a section in here; this is a long menu, so I'm actually going to tear it off so we can look at the whole thing. That allows me to change which types of objects are going to show up in my view port. So right now, I have a couple of polygon objects in this scene, and let me go ahead and create some nurbs objects as well. Again, don't worry about what those different geometry types are. We'll be covering them later. And right now I have some nurbs and some polygons and this little Show menu, which I tore off, and let me show you how I did that. Actually, I, on the menu item, and at the very top of that menu, I see a little double horizontal lines. If I click on those, and it rips off a little copy of that menu, and now I can keep it out in front. So right now, I am seeing all object types. If I'm focusing on my nurbs objects for some reason right now, I can uncheck this polygon, and while those objects are still on my scene, I'm not going to grab them accidentally and they're not in way, and I can always turn them back on to see them. There are a number of different ways to hide things in Maya and show them again, so we'll cover a lot of them, but ah, right now, it's really useful to know that if you have a scene that's just filled with junk you can isolate in on let's say, just lights or just the locators in your scene, just the polygon objects in your scene, and this is something you can do per window. Okay? And couple other items in the interface to look at: the Channel Box is this section off in the right. This is a little more interesting when I select something, so with this box here selected I can see some information about it, including where it is in the scene. So that's one of the things this Channel Box is used for. This is the Layers Window, which we'll cover later, but it's similar to layers in other applications like Photoshop that allow you to isolate objects for visibility. And then down at the bottom, we have some sections dedicated to animation. This is the timeline right here at the bottom, and some controls for playing that timeline. This is the range slider, which allows us to control how many frames of animation are in the scene, and the last section we'll look at here is the mel command line. This can also be a python command line for typing in commands that Maya understands. And a quick button to get us the ScriptEditor down here at the bottom right, which is sort of a more impressive version of this little command line thing here, and this gives me a history of everything that I've done in my Maya session as well as a section where I can type in commands, for example, this section here, LS dash SL, is a command in mel, and we'll go over some mel things a little later. But I can type in a command and get some output from Maya. It's telling my name of my current selected object. Okay? So now close that out and that is it for the interface tour.