Underneath the main menu at the top of the screen is the Status Line (remember you can show and hide this, or hover over the hide tools, to find it). This shows you which mode you are in: Animation, Modelling, Dynamics or Rendering. You may also have the Cloth mode available depending on your Maya installation. First make sure it is set to Modeling. If it wasn't, you'll see the menus at the top of the screen change to reflect the new mode.
Underneath the Status Line is the Shelf. This is where you can store commonly-used commands. You can add and remove items from the shelf as well as create new shelves and flip between them. Don't worry about the shelf for now, just find the Poly Cube tool and click it.
Notice how the cube is created at the origin. He's only a small 'un, our cube, so we're going to have to beef him up a bit. Before we do that, let's take a closer look at him. Press the F key. This will focus the selected viewport's view on the currently selected item, which is of course the mini-cube.
As well as using the keyboard shortcut, you can also frame your selection by choosing Frame Selection from the viewport's View menu. Other interesting items from that menu include Frame All which is equivalent to 3D Studio's Zoom extents all (frames the whole scene) and Look at selection which rotates the camera to face the selected object. Default home resets the viewport default location.
Now let's make the cube a bit bigger. Underneath the shelf is the Tool Box. Here's what each tool in the box does:
| Icon | Shortcut | Tool description |
|
Q | Select tool |
|
CTRL + Q | Lasso selection tool |
|
W | Move tool |
|
E | Rotate tool |
|
R | Scale tool |
|
T | Show manipulator tool |
With the cube selected (use the Select Tool to ensure it is), press
W or click the Move Tool. Three arrows, called
Manipulators appear at the centre of the cube. Left
click one of the manipulators and drag to move the cube in the
direction of the arrow. Middle click anywhere in the viewport
and drag to move the cube freely. Left clicking anywhere other than on a
manipulator will select the object under the cursor. In this case that's going
to be nothing because we only have the cube in the scene!
Press E or click the icon to select the Scale
Tool. Three different manipulators now appear. Just as you could use
the movement manipulators to translate the cube in the world, so the scale
manipulators allow you to resize the cube in a particular plane. Left
drag a manipulator to scale in one direction or middle
drag to scale freely.
Choosing the Rotate Tool (hotkey R) gives you yet
another set of manipulators. This time they allow you to rotate about a given
axis. Notice the grey angle which sweeps out as you rotate the
shape!
Will be covered in a separate section.
By now part of your cube is probably sticking out of the side of one or more viewports. Recall that you can use the Look at Selection and Frame Selection commands from a viewport's View menu to get a better view of the selected object. To focus the viewport manually:
Currently the viewport is in wireframe view mode. To change to a shaded view, press 5 to choose Smooth Shade All or select it from the viewport's Shading menu. Other interesting choices from that menu are Wireframe (hotkey 4) and Flat Shade All, which is like Smooth Shading but shows polygon faces clearly.
There are two other notable ways to edit an object's attributes. From the Channel Box, at the right of the main window, you can type directly into the various boxes to affect the cube immediately. You can also change its name from pCube1 to something more useful.
The second way is to use MEL. MEL is the Maya Embedded Language. It's a
fully-featured scripting language. Assuming your cube was selected, you could
type polyCube -e -w 100 into the Command Line box at the
bottom of the screen to set the cube's width to 100 units. Suffice to say MEL
is very powerful but I shall make no further mention of it here.
As I mentioned earlier, practically every menu or window can be detached from the main Maya window. From a viewport's Panels menu, choose the Tear Off Copy menu. A new window representing that viewport now appears. Click the Maya icon at the top left of this new window and uncheck Attach to main window. The new window now functions independently of its parent which means you can place it behind other windows as if it were a separate application. With Attach to main window selected the viewport will always be above the main Maya window.
Finally (for now), to change the view in a particular viewport, select a function from one of the triangles in this icon, which can be found at the bottom underneath the Tool Box:
By now you should have got the hang of the UI. Next time we'll take a look at editing faces and vertices instead of whole objects.
| intro | part 1: Setting the layout | part 2: Editing basics | part 3: Vertex manipulation | part 4: Face manipulation | part 5: Materials, texturing and UVs - (i) | part 6: Materials, texturing and UVs - (ii) | part 7: Materials, texturing and UVs - (iii) | part 8: Final notes |