Preserved Topic: A couple of Maya tuts..........

I've posted a couple of other place and thought I would put here. Hope they can help someone out-

Maya Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Workspace
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In order to become proficient at any program the first thing we need to do is become comfortable with the workspace. I'm going to show you how to setup something quick and functional. By the way, this is the setup I use. There's a buzzword going around nowadays, "workflow", and you're going to find that Maya has it in spades. Workflow refers to how easy it is to utilize an application through the clever use of context sensitive menus, hotkeys, marking menus, etc.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get started. Open Maya by double-clicking on the Maya icon on your desktop. Voila, we are now presented with a viewport and a few panels and icons and all sorts of things. We're going to simplify things for a minute here. At the very top you will find the standard Winows menu items. The items on the left will remain the same throughout the application while those on the right change as we work with the various parts of Maya. Click on Display, then UI Elements, and finally choose Hide UI Elements. If you've done this correctly you should now have a full-color video presentation with THX sound that will walk you through all aspects of Maya.

No? Oh my God, what have you done? Don't worry, I'm just kidding. What you have done is hidden parts of the workspace from view. They're still there, just not visible at this time. While we have this simple layout I will show you how to navigate in your viewport and how to switch between views. First, to switch from your single viewport to a 4 viewport setup press down on your spacebar and release. If you do it again you will return to a single viewport. In the 4 viewport setup if you click in any other viewport you can then make that your single viewport by the same means. Like all 3d apps, only one viewport is active at a time. Return to your perspective viewport and make it your single viewport. Now press the spacebar and hold down. You are now presented with a master menu onscreen. To choose an item you would hold the spacebar down and click on the item you need and then make choices from the submenus if any. Now call up that master menu and go to Hotbox Controls. In the marking menu that comes up go to Show All and release your mouse. You should now have the full master menu in front of you whenever you call it up. Time to navigate in our viewport now.

Navigation in the viewports is done through the use of the alt. key and the mouse buttons. In the viewport hold the alt. key down and the left mouse button at the same time. This is how to roll in the viewport. Now you can only roll in the perspective and camera viewports, not in the orthographic views (top, side,front, etc.). The difference between an orthographic view and a perspective one is that an orthographic view does not differentiate between objects at different distances. A perspective viewport is like looking at something with the human eye. We discern the differences in distance. Getting back to navigating, now hold tha alt. key down while using the middle mouse button. This is how we pan in our viewports. This does work in all viewports. The last tool is the zoom tool and we call that up by holding down the alt. key and the left and middle mouse buttons. Now we can zoom in and out of a scene. In the manual the mouse buttons are abbreviated as such- left mouse button LMB, middle mouse button MMB. So to recap it's alt.+LMB to roll,alt.+MMB to pan, and alt.+ LMB+MMB to zoom. It's time to put our workspace back together now!

I'll go through this quickly as later on I'll go through the various parts and what their uses are, but for now let's just get a good workspace setup. Go to Display at top, then UI Elements, then choose Status Line, then do the same to choose Shelf, then Command Line, then Help Line, and finally channel box. You now have the setup I use. That's about it for now. Next time I'll talk about what the uses are for these various parts and we'll create a simple object and start working with the transform tools. Maya is a very deep program so don't get discouraged if you aren't creating Disney motion pictures right away. Give it time and study and you'll be able to do anything you want. Maya the force be with you!

Darkon the Incandescent

Here's the second one-

Maya Wars Episode 2: Dr. Strangemaya, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Program
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Alright, it's time to create a simple object and learn how to manipulate it in our viewport as well as using a few hotkeys to make changes in how objects are diplayed.

Let's start by creating a simple Nurbs sphere. Go to Create/NURBS Primitives and click on sphere. You should now have a small sphere in the center of your viewport. In order to get a better look at it we're going to scale it in all three axis. On the right is our Channel Box, this is where we can edit any object or group of objects. Maya is based on Node architecture and all the Nodes are visible in this window for editing. I'll get into what Node architecture means for us later on, for now suffice it to say that we can change object attributes from here. First thing to do is to go to the Scale X box and left click. It now becomes active and is ready for editing. Now hold the shift key down and click in the boxes for the other two axis. In Maya you use the shift key to choose more than one item, whether choosing objects in the viewport or attributes in an editor. Now enter 5 and click the enter key. Now our sphere appears to have a simple structure but that is only for display purposes, the render of it is not affected. But if we wish to edit the sphere with certain tools it may help to have more sections and spans. A section is a line running from pole to pole with a span being the horizontal lines that divide the sections. We can leave the default settings for now, we won't be playing with the shape of the sphere for now. The sphere right now is in wireframe mode but there may be times when we want to see it in other modes such as shaded or textured. Now we could use the Shading menu item in the viewport but it's easier to just hit a key. There are hotkeys assigned to this task that are easy to remember:
4- Wireframe
5- Smooth Shade
6- Smooth Shade with Hardware Texturing

Now for NURBS objects there are three more hotkeys you'll be using a lot:
1- Rough
2- Medium
3- Fine
These refer to how well the object is defined in the viewport but doesn't affect the render of the object. When a scene becomes very complex it's easier to keep most things simple except for the objects that you will be directly modifying in some way.

Go ahead and hit the 3 key and then the 6 key. Whoa! Looks like we're getting somewhere now! Now there's one more hotkey I'll introduce you to now:
7- Scene Lighting

Whenever we start a scene Maya creates some default lighting for us to model in but it's not good for rendering. 6 will give us the model smooth shaded in default lighting whereas 7 will give us the same model with the actual lighting that will be rendered. Hit the 7 key now and see what happens. Notice how the object becomes black. That's because we haven't assigned any lighting to our scene so if we render now we will wind up with a black screen! Just a little thing to remember as a troubleshooter. Hit the 6 key again so we can see our sphere again. Now we're going to learn how to use the transform tools as well as the boxes in the Channel Box to move, rotate, and scale our object.

Now one way to accomplish any transforms is to directly input values into the boxes in the Channel Box. This is fine if you know where you want to put your object but to have a little more hands-on control you should use the tools provided. The first thing we will try is the move tool. On the left hand side above the viewport are 5 icons for the transform tools. The first one, the arrow, is the Select Tool. You will use this any time you wish to selct items without affecting their position. The next tool is the Move Tool. Now by now you will have noticed that by leaving your pointer above something you will get a little popup with the name of the Tool. This is especially helpful when you're looking to do a certain thing and several of the icons look the same. Now let's click on the Move Tool and then go into the viewport and notice we now have a transform axis centered on our object. Now the arrows are color coded as such-
Blue- Z-axis
Red- X-Axis
Green-Y-Axis

This is the Move Manipulator and the arrow size is completely adjustable. The + and - keys will increase and decrease the length of the arrows. But we won't worry about that for now. Let's try moving our sphere by clicking and dragging on one of the arrows. Whatever axis you tug on, the object is constrained to movement along that axis. This is an easy way to keep our object from floating all over the place. Now if we should want free movement we just click on the yellow box at the center of the Move Manipulator and we have the freedom to move in any way we wish. Now lets try the next tool above. This is the Rotate Tool. This works much the same way only instead of arrows we now have Manipulater Rings to click and drag on. The colors are the same and in order to rotate freely we need to simply click somewhere in the middle of the rings. The next tool is the Scale Tool. Once again the colors correspond to the same axis and we would use this much the same way as the Move Tool. Scaling by any of the axis boxes would in essence squash our object along one axis while using the yellow box in the center would proportionally scale our object up or down. The last icon is the Show Manipulator Tool and we needn't worry about that for now. Of course there are hotkeys assigned to the transform tools to make manipulation quicker and easier.
q- Select
w- Move
e- Rotate
r- Scale
t- Show Manipulators
y- Recalls the last active tool

The y-key is important because any tool we use besides the transform tools will appear in the empty spot next to the Show Manipulator Tool. The y-key shortcut will just make that tool active again if we have deactivated it. And for any mistakes, the ctrl+z hotkey will undo for you. A little tip here, when using the manipulator tools. When using the left mouse button you must be manipulating directly the axis representation in order to achive the effect. If you use the middle mouse button you can click on the axis and then continue manipulating while constrained to that axis anywhere in the viewport. I think I'll leave off here for now. Next time I'll talk about object versus component selection, creating lights and cameras, and setting up for rendering. The frequency and amount of material presented will depend on the interst here. I don't want to take up a lot of space with info that can be gleaned from the manuals if no one is interested, but if you are I will do all I can to share all the knowledge I have ascertained to this point. Now go back to your regularly scheduled lives...this is only a test..........


Darkon the Incandescent




[This message has been edited by Darkon the Incandescent (edited 04-16-2001).]