Subtitles of the Movie

In Maya there are many categories of work, and therefore there are many categories of tools. So I like to think about that as layered or categorized functionality. The first way that this aspect of the software manifests itself is through the arrangement of the software into modules, which we'll see more in depth in the later part of these demonstrations. Let's just look at modeling and understand that there are two types of modeling - NURBS modeling and polygon modeling. There is also subdivisional surface modeling, but we are going to leave that out for now. And you can see that within the modeling module of the program, we have edit curve surfaces and edit NURBS, which is a NURBS modeling toolset. And then here we have polygons and edit polygons, these are devoted to an entirely different type of modeling. So you have NURBS modeling over here, polygon modeling here. In rendering, you can see that there is a paint effects toolset right here, which is a category or a set of work that falls outside of the general rendering workflow. Which is done not necessarily through menus but through a set of windows that allow you to edit your rendered scene. If we look at animation, the animation tools are divided into a number of categories. There are tools that allow you to for example set keyframes and work with your animation interactively from the animate menu, and that's a category of work. And likewise there are these other tools such as the skeleton toolset, which allow you to install joints inside of characters and setup characters so that they can be animated. So you can see that the animation module of the program is in fact broken down and layered into the actual keyframing tools within the animate menu. And then the character setup tools that are located here from deform to character. Finally we'll see that when we go to dynamics, you'll see particles here, which is a toolset that allows you to simulate natural phenomena such as smoke, fire and water. And here you have soft and rigid body tools, which allow you to simulate Newtonian mechanics. So they are related tools but are used very separately in fact. Also beware that with any given toolset or task there are many different editing windows. For instance, if we are going to be studying and working on our animation, we could be using anyone of these animation editors: such as the graph editor which is a graphical display of motion; the tracks editor, which we probably will not get to, but it's a way of applying stored poses to characters; the dopesheet, which is a layout of keyframes, a certain kind of layout of keyframes; and the blend shape editor. These are all different windows that allow you to interact with your animation, your animation material in different ways. So you'll see we'll be accessing and working with our material through different layers of functions.