Maya doesn’t exactly have the most intuitive interface, but this guide will try to give an overview of the most important parts in a few pictures and words. Note that this guide uses Maya 2020, and primarily focuses on the Modeling — Standard and Maya Classic Workspace (don’t know what a workspace is? You’ll find out soon!).
— 1.First Glance
— 2.Setting Up for Modeling
— — Switching workspace
— — The Outliner
— — Turn on Interactive Creation
— 3.Creating Your First Box
— — Basic Interactions
— — Modifying the Parts
1. First Glance
When you open Maya for the first time here’s what you will see:
This is the Maya Classic set-up, it’s designed to be like a one-for-all solution.
Let’s explore the different area of the screen:
A. The Viewport
This is where you will be seeing and modifying your model. Here’s how you navigate inside the viewport:
Rotate — (hold) ALT + Right Mouse button
Pan — (hold) ALT + Middle Mouse button
Zoom — Middle Mouse Scroll
B. Left Menu Bar (Toolbox & Quick Layout)
On the top are common tools that you will use: selection, move, rotate, and scale. At the bottom are quick access to different ways to view your model.
The Four View is the one you will frequently use, as it provides orthographic views from different angles to your model.
The Orthographic view of an object is representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions while negating the influence of perspective. Imagine swatting a fly on a paper, and what you are left with is the 3D projection of the fly onto a 2D plane — that’s an orthographic view. We will talk about why it is useful in the box modeling guide(not published).
C. Channel Box
The Channel Box lets you edit attributes and key values(such as rotation, location, scale, etc) for selected objects.
D. Panel Toolbar
Here contains options to let you adjust what you see in the Viewport (A). You don’t have to worry about it now.
E. Shelf
The Shelf contains icons for common tools(such as creating and modifying objects), organized by tabs based on category.
Feel free to poke around and see the different things you can create with it. You can also customize them to your preferences.
F. Menus & Menu Sets
On the very top are common tabs that can be opened, just like in most other programs.
The small option box allows you to open different sets of menus suited for different tasks: Modeling, Rigging, Animation, FX, and Rendering. The most common thing you will access here is the selection options and the symmetry box.
G. Workspace
Here are different layouts created by Autodesk Maya optimized for different tasks, such as modeling, UV editing etc.
I find it helpful to switch between different workspaces to speed up my process. Note that you can customize the overall layout as you desire as well.
H. Animation timeline
A timeline to use when you’re animating, you don’t have to worry about it until you get to the animation section(not published).
2. Setting up for Modeling
Switching Workspace
In our modeling section, we will actually be using the Modeling Standard Workspace. Don’t worry! It’s basically the same as the Maya Classic :)
Go to the workspace tab (G, top right corner), and select “Modeling — Standard”. You should be brought to a page that looks like this:
There’s a different looking panel on the right, it’s split into the Modeling Toolkit and Attribute Editor tab — we will use them in the next section:
Modeling Toolkit — Like its name, these are common tools that you use while creating a 3D model.
Attribute Editor — Clicking into it will give you an empty page now, but this is used to edit the attributes of any object in the scene (much like the Channel Box).
Before we start to create our first model, there’s one more thing we need to do. We need to add another window to our scene.
The Outliner
Navigate to the top menu -> Windows -> Outliner. You should see another window pop-up on your screen.
This is the outliner, which is a list of all the objects that you currently have. Right now it is empty except for the default objects put there by Maya.
Turn on Interactive Creation
One final thing, navigate to Menu -> Create -> Polygon Primitive and check the Interactive Creation Box.
Let’s start modeling!
3. Creating your first box
Go to your Shelf and click on the cube icon. Drag on the screen to create the base of your cube, then drag up for height.
Basic Interactions
Great! You created the one shape to create them all! Here are some basic things you can do with it: Select(Left Mouse Click), Move(W), Rotate(E), Scale(E)
To model efficiently, it’s important to remember the hotkeys for these basic actions.
Also notice the different colored arrows and squares that show up when you use any of these tools, they represent the respective axis which the object can move around. By default these are set to align with the object’s orientation. You can modify it to different options by opening the tools settings (by double clicking on their respective icon Left Panel), or by clicking the settings at the bottom of the Modeling toolkit. This may become useful for you as you’re modeling.
Modifying the Parts
So far we’ve been doing everything on the entire object, we can also do these interactions to parts of the object. In Maya, we can modify Faces, Edges, and Vertices that make up each individual object.
To modify these different parts, you’ll need to go into respective “Modes” (not an official term). You can do so by
a. Clicking the respective icons at the top of the Modeling Toolkit Panel
b. While your mouse is over an object, click-hold the right mouse button to bring up a panel, and slide towards the option you want. (This is faster and you’ll get used to it the more you model)
Also! Apparently in Maya 2020 they added this new Feature called Multi-Component (located as a button at the top of the Modeling toolkit), which allows you to select and modify vertices, edges, and faces at the same time! Guess they finally learned from Blender how to make things more user friendly!
That was a lot! But congrats! Now you know the basics of navigating the Maya interface and some modeling! To learn more about common tools used in modeling, head over to 02- Basic Tools(not published)!
