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Maya Beginner Basics: Interface Overview

September 17, 2010
Category: 3D Modeling

The following is a 10-Part series on Maya Beginner Basics. The tutorials are set up in-specific to game environment modeling.

Maya Interface Overview covers the basics of the user interface that you need to know for game environment modeling.

Tutorial Covers:

• Menu Bar
• Status Line
• Viewport Options
• Shelf
• Orthographic viewports
• Hotbox Controls
• Channel Box and Attribute Editor

10-Part Maya Beginner Basics Series:

1. Interface Overview
2. Setting Preferences
3. How to Create a Custom Shelf
4. Viewport Navigation
5. Geometry Modeling Basics
6. Geometry Modeling Basics - Exercise
7. Custom Polygon Display
8. Outliner, Hypergraph and Hypershade
9. Snapping and Pivots
10. How to Set Up a New Project

Maya Beginner Basics: Interface Overview

MENU BAR

Menu bar is context sensitive. Make sure to switch the drop down menu to Polygons when beginning to model game environments.

Menu bar is the drop down menu that you'll find in most software. These include File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display etc.

STATUS LINE

Main thing to note under Maya's Status Line is Snapping options. We'll be using the hot keys to enable and use the snaps, but you'll find the snap options here on the status line. These include snap to grid, points, curve etc.

SHELF

Shelf is important because it offers us a way to customize and put most commonly used functions in Maya for modeling within quick reach. We'll be customizing our shelf for game environment modeling at a later lesson.

VIEWPORT OPTIONS

Viewport options allows us to set various ways we view objects inside that viewport. The are numerous options to choose from. We'll cover then in more detail as we begin to model our environments.

ORTHOGRAPHIC VIEWS

Maya is very intuitive when you want to switch between main perspective viewport and four orthographic viewports (front, side, top).

Simply hit the spacebar to cycle through 4 viewports and 1 maximized viewport.

Depending where your mouse cursor is, by pressing the spacebar key, Maya will maximize that viewport where your mouse cursor is. No need to highlight and select the viewport first.

HOTBOX CONTROLS

If you hold down the spacebar, context sensitive menu will pop up. This allows you to quickly navigate around functions in Maya, without going up to the menu bar or the shelf.

Many modelers use Hotbox as their modeling workflow.

CHANNEL BOX / ATTRIBUTE EDITOR

Channel Box and the Attribute Editor are important when modeling in Maya. To switch between the channel box or the attribute editor you can simply hit the tabs or press the hotkey Ctrl+A.

Channel Box and the Attribute Editor gives you options for a specific object that is chosen within a viewport. Each object will have many options and all of these options will be visible through both the Channel Box and the Attribute Editor.

We'll cover more when we begin modeling our environments.

Here we have an object selected in the viewport. You can see the Channel Box now has various transformation options for our cube.

Press Ctrl+A to go to Attribute Editor while having the object selected, gives us another set of options for our cube.

LAYER EDITOR

Below the Channel Box and the Attribute Editor you'll find Layer Editor. Layer Editor allows us to place various objects on their own layer and conrol their visiblitiy in the viewport. This helps us to organize our scenes, especially when the viewport becomes cluttered with many environment models.

TIME SLIDERS / RANGE SLIDERS / MEL / HELP LINE

Bottom of Maya Interface we have various animation controls as well as MEL Command Line and Help Line.

We'll be turning off animation controls to free up some real estate in Maya.

Help Line often gives hints and errors which can be useful when something isn't working in Maya.

10-Part Maya Beginner Basics Series:

1. Interface Overview
2. Setting Preferences
3. How to Create a Custom Shelf
4. Viewport Navigation
5. Geometry Modeling Basics
6. Geometry Modeling Basics - Exercise
7. Custom Polygon Display
8. Outliner, Hypergraph and Hypershade
9. Snapping and Pivots
10. How to Set Up a New Project