Subtitles of the Movie

Now that I've created these objects, I want to be able to save the scene. Instead of going directly to File, Save Scene As or Save Scene, I'm going to first set up a project to work in, and this is done by going to File, Project, New. What a Maya project is is a collection of folders or directories that each have a specific type of file that you'll save in them. For example, scenes will go into the Scenes file, if you have a sound that you're lip-synching to, that would go into the Sounds Directory. If you have images that you're using as a texture map, for example, the Images Directory or Source Images Directory. So it helps you keep organization for all your assets, rather than you managing manually where you're going to stick everything, you have a sensible place to collect stuff that Maya will find every time. So this project I'm going to call B project, and I'm going to leave the default location alone and then all of these fields here I can fill them in one fell swoop by clicking Use Defaults. This now says the name of each directory it's going to create for the different types of scene files and data that it wants to store. And now I'll click the big Accept button down on the bottom left, and what that does is head out to your operating system and create a set of directories for you. I'm going to go ahead and open up my Windows Explorer here and head to the My Documents, Maya, Projects, and here you can see some different projects that I have created. And now if I head into this B Project directory, here are all the new folders that it created. So there's my Scenes folder down there. I was talking about images and source images, and we'll get into some of these more later, but you can see that all these directories got created, and now if I head back over to my Maya scene and click on File, Save Scene, the path that it automatically goes to is that project, so I have the B project and Scenes Directory, so now I'll just type in a name. I'll call this Primitive B, and choose Save. If I head back out to that Windows Directory and look in the Scenes Directory, that's where it saved it. The advantage of of using these now is so that every time I'm working within this project, Maya will default to heading to that Scenes Directory for opening and saving files, and if I output a render, for example, those frames will go into the proper directory within the project and I won't lose the stuff. It makes it a lot easier to keep track of all your assets.