Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 9/17: Saving, Opening and Starting New Scenes

Category: Maya

January 29, 2025

The following tutorial series is directly from Module 1 of 3 of "Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course" tutorial course.

I've released this entire Module 1 of 3 completely free. It is focused on teaching you how to get started learning Maya completely from scratch in 4 hours. Start with all videos in order within Maya Beginner Series here.

The full "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" contains 3 Modules and 18+ hours of tutorials.

Module 1 is focused on interface overview for game environment modeling.
Module 2 is focused on environment modeling techniques (27 videos, 8+hrs).
Module 3 is focused on UV mapping and UVing (21 videos, 5+hrs).

In this tutorial you'll learn how to start, save and open scenes in Maya.

Video Tutorial

Start New Scene

To begin a new scene to work in go to File > New Scene:

Ctrl + N = New Scene

Saving Scenes

There are 3 options for saving scenes.

First you need to save a scene so you can open it later. Go to File > Save Scene As and define a name:

Ctrl + Shift + S = Save Scene As

All scenes should be saved into your scenes folder within Maya project directory.

Once you saved the scene, you can save anytime by going to File > Save:

Ctrl + S = Save

You can also save increments of your scene. This will save the scene as new file save and assign a number to the file name. This allows to have additional version of the scene to be saved. To Increment and Save go to File > Increment and Save:

Ctrl + Alt + S = Increment and Save

Auto Save

If you want to enable Auto Save go to Window > Setting/Preferences > Preferences > Settings: Files/Projects and enable AutoSave:

All auto-saved files will be placed inside autosave subfolder:

Open Scenes

To open existing, saved scenes, go to File > Open Scene and continue working on it:

All auto-saved files will be placed inside "autosave" subfolder:

Opening scenes will navigate to a scenes folder inside Maya project directory. But you can navigate anywhere else if your scenes are stored elsewhere.

Ctrl + O = Open Scene

Next Tutorial in the Series

Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 10/17: Geometry Modeling Blockout Exercise

Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course

Learn how to environment model and UV with Maya better than anyone else. Become a modeling master with it. In "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" I will show you how.