The Maya Interface

When you start Maya for the first time, it looks like the window shown in Figure 2.1. I'll take you on a tour of the interface now and explain what it all means. Some elements of the interface are explained in more detail in the following sections. If the need or use for some features seems hard to fathom, just file it away for future reference. As you get the bigger picture, the logic of this layout will make more sense.

Figure 2.1. The Maya interface.

Coming down the left side of Figure 2.1, at the top is the title bar, followed by the menu bar features common to all computer applications. The Status Line contains most of the toggles and buttons used for object manipulation and frequently used functions, such as the Quick Render button (the director's clapboard icon). Below the Status Line is the Shelf, a Maya innovation for easily adding customizable quick buttons. Depending on the project you're working on, you might have several custom macros you keep visible in the Shelf to speed up your work.

Moving down the left side, next is the vertical Tool Box. The top half of the Tool Box consists of the select and transform tools, which are used constantly to move, rotate, and scale things (collectively, an object's position, rotation, and scale is known as its transform). The Show Manipulator Tool and the Last Selected Tool buttons round out this section. You use the Show Manipulator Tool button to adjust an operation's "history," such as when you previously applied a texture to an object and now need a manipulator to change where that texture is applied. The Last Selected Tool button is just that a quick way to get back to the last tool you used. It's helpful speed up your workflow. The icon in this box changes to match the last tool used.

The bottom half of the Tool Box consists of a set of Quick Layout buttons, which adjust the panel layout to several popular configurations. Next is the Maya News home page button, which pops up a web browser pointing to the Maya home page. Below those buttons is the Time Slider, which serves several functions: first, to show the current time point of the animation, and second, to allow the animation to be scrubbed (that is, clicking in the Time Slider and dragging the mouse left and right to see the animation move forward and backward).

Next is the Range Slider, which allows animators to focus on a specific part of the animation. Numerical entries at either end of the Range Slider set the overall animation start frame (from left to right), the focus range start frame, the focus range end frame, and the overall animation end frame. If you were working on a cartoon scene for TV that lasted 1 minute, you would probably set the overall start and end frames to 0 and 1800 because there are 30 frames per second and 60 seconds in a minute. If a problem occurred at the 12-second point, you would look at frame 360 and probably set the range to frames 300 and 420; this makes it much easier to see what's going on. Below the Range Slider is the Command Line and the Help Line. The Command Line is helpful because it's where Maya talks back to you, confirming whether things are working or letting you know when it's detecting errors with what you're asking Maya to do. The Help Line also gives you feedback, letting you know what Maya expects you to do next.

In the 3D panel (currently set to the Perspective view in Figure 2.1) at the upper left, you can see the panel menus. The grid is enabled, and the panel label at the bottom center displays the default perspective camera named "persp." The panel's axis orientation is shown at the bottom left. The selected object is set to be rotated, so colored circles circumscribe the object. These handles are the "manipulators." They change appearance for Move and Scale modes.

On the right side of the interface, at the far right of the Status Line, are three toggle buttons for picking what appears at the far right of the interface. You can also choose to have nothing at the right side of the panel, for maximum 3D panel space. The toggle choices are Attribute Editor, Tool Settings, or Channel Box/Layers, from left to right. In earlier versions of Maya, it was always the Channel Box, and many users will probably favor that mode. Here's what these features are used for:

• The Attribute Editor is another more detailed way to adjust the settings for an object. Most of the time, you use the Attribute Editor as a floating window.

• The Tool Settings dialog box is where you adjust such things as angle snaps for the Rotate mode.

• The Channel Box has a toggle at the top for adding the Layers dialog box to the bottom or switching entirely to the Layers dialog box. Two types of layers exist in Maya: Display and Render (accessed with the Layers menu at the top of the Layers dialog box). Display layers are used to organize your work; for example, you might put your guidelines for a model in one layer so that they can be hidden or locked (Template mode, in Maya's terminology) while you build based on the lines. With render layers, you can easily set some objects to be renderable or non-renderable, a technique that's often useful in complex scenes when you want to render only certain objects.

At the lower right are the playback controls for animation. The outermost buttons rewind to the start or fast forward to the end. The next buttons in move the time one frame backward or forward. The next buttons in go to the last or next keyframe, the adjacent point in time where the animator has set a "pose" for the object in question. In computer animation, the computer handles all the interim motion, and the animator sets only the most extreme or "key" positions. The two innermost buttons (the simple triangles) are the play forward and play backward buttons. The speed of playback is adjustable, and is set by clicking the Animation Preferences button. Two other buttons in this area enable Auto Key mode and the Script Editor. (Auto Key mode is covered in Chapter 11, "Animation Basics," and scripting is described briefly in Chapter 16, "Your Next Steps: Efficiency and Artistry.")

The Menu Bar

A few items are useful to note about the menu bar. First, the six leftmost entries in the menu bar File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, and Window always stay the same, but the other menus change based on the mode you are in. You set the mode in the list box at the far left in the Status Line. The four modes in Maya Complete are Animation, Modeling, Dynamics, and Rendering (see Figure 2.2). The hotkeys for these four modes are F2, F3, F4, and F5. Also, you can tear off any menu item that has double lines above it to create a customized mini-toolbox, so that frequently used tools can float on your desktop, as shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.2. Changing modes. Compare this to Figure 2.1 and notice that the first six menu items are the same, but the others have changed.

Figure 2.3. Click on the double lines to tear off a dialog box. Note the floating dialog box at the bottom right.

The Option Box

Many menu items have a small box to the right of the command name (see Figure 2.4). This is the option box, which you click to open a dialog box containing all the creation settings for the command. Whenever the option box is used, the settings become the new defaults for that tool.

Figure 2.4. Choosing the option box.

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When in doubt, you should always choose the option box and then reset it. Do this by default when you're following the tutorials in this book because Maya remembers option box settings even after restarting. That means you won't get the result you expect if the tool has been adjusted before by anyone using your copy of Maya! Simply choose Edit | Reset Settings from the menu bar in the option box to put it back to factory-installed values (see Figure 2.5). In the long run, you'll customize the tools you use frequently so that you don't need to always reset the option box. As a beginner, however, it's easy to forget that you previously changed the settings, and the tutorials you're following in this book do not always specify resetting the options for every single Maya function.

Figure 2.5. Resetting the option box.

The Status Line

Take a closer look at the Status Line shown in Figure 2.6 to learn about a few of its alien-looking controls. At far left is the mode selector, described previously in "The Menu Bar," to change modes.

Figure 2.6. Maya's Status Line, a collapsible bar of buttons.

Next is an arrow bar a collapser that's a clickable switch for hiding a section of the Status Line. Use these collapsers to display what you need and hide items that clutter the Status Line for your current work. When the vertical line has a right-pointing arrow in it, something is hidden within it. Next are the typical File icons for New, Open, and Save.

Next is another list box that controls masking "presets" for object selection, which tells Maya to ignore certain types of objects when you make selections in a 3D panel. The icons to the right of the list box show the masking selections that have been made. Because animating with Maya relies on selecting the right things in the right order, switching off the ability to select only certain types of items makes the process much easier. Your project often has critical areas that are crowded, and a single click selects many things or the largest thing if you don't use selection masks. The selection mask list box acts as a preset for the buttons in the Select by Type area farther to the right. For example, in Animation mode, only joints and handles can be selected (the character's "pull points" for animation) in the Select by Type area; you wouldn't want to select anything else when posing and keyframing.

The three buttons to the right of the selection mask enable you to switch between three modes: Hierarchy, Object, and Component mode. At the beginning of a project, you usually remain in Object Selection mode. In this mode, you can select entire objects and mask your selection to pick only certain kinds of objects lines, surfaces, lights, and so forth.

Component Selection mode enables you to adjust subcomponents of an object, such as pulling a sphere into a capsule shape by picking just the top half of the sphere and stretching it out.

Hierarchies is the animation term for linking one object to another. For example, you link a car's tires to the car body so that you need to animate only the motion of the car body the tires follow automatically. In this case, you say that the tires are children of the body, and the car body is the parent to the tire objects. Maya also uses a tree metaphor with the words root and leaf. In Hierarchy Selection mode, selection masks let you pick only the parent ("root") or only the children ("leaf") most helpful when you're setting up object hierarchies, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 11, "Animation Basics."

The range of buttons to the right of the Hierarchy/Object/Component switches changes depending on which of these three modes you have chosen. When a button describing a type of entity such as curves, surfaces, lights, or cameras (when in Object Selection mode) is pushed in, it can be selected. When it's not pushed in, it cannot be selected. For example, you might want to pick a vase object that was created from a profile spline, but you could accidentally pick the spline instead of the vase object because both coexist, even after the spline has produced the vase. One solution is to hide objects not being edited. However, it's usually more expedient to set the selection mask so that you can pick only surfaces, not curves. If many different kinds of objects are cluttering the scene, selection masks can become invaluable.

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Some selection mask buttons cover several things; for example, the Select by Object Type-Rendering mask covers lights, textures, and cameras. If you right-click over the button, you get the option to enable or disable each of these subtypes (see Figure 2.7). When some subtypes are on and some are off, the button turns brown. For example, if you keep lights selectable but not cameras or textures, the little sphere icon on the button has a brown background to indicate a partially enabled selection.

Figure 2.7. Right-clicking over a selection mask displays subtypes to enable or disable.

Next is the Lock Selection button, handy for avoiding accidentally clicking off an object and deselecting it. When you know you want to work on something for a while, you lock it. Next is the Highlight Selection Mode button, a toggle to highlight the selected object in the display, which is on by default. Next are the snap tools, which ease modeling and modifying objects by making it seem as though an object or part of an object is drawn toward another; when the mouse approaches within a certain distance, the entity being moved by the mouse jumps to the nearest snap-to element. The snap-to element could be curves, points, view planes, the grid, or any combination of them. The rightmost snap icon (the big U magnet by itself) makes an object "live," thus turning the object itself into a building template. With this mode, you might use a human face mesh to create a Lone Ranger mask; curves would automatically snap to the face surface.

You use the Operations List buttons to view upstream and downstream connections and enable or disable them. The Construction History toggle is next, and Maya uses it to record construction. All the parameters used to make an object are stored with the object, allowing you to change them later. Having Construction History enabled can make files large and slow to load, however, so you might opt to turn it off sometimes. More often, animators delete an object's history when the object has been built successfully, instead of turning off all history with this button.

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History is not related to the Undo operation. You can have history off and still use Edit | Undo to undo anything. History embeds only the construction history in an object, such as how many divisions are used to create an extruded object. With history on, animators can return to the project at any time and set more or fewer segments.

The hotkey for undo is Ctrl+z, as in nearly all Windows programs. By default, the Undo option records your past 10 edits, but it can be set to any value, including indefinite, by choosing Window | Settings/Preferences | Preferences | Undo.

Next are the Quick Render and Interactive Photorealistic Renderer (IPR) rendering buttons. Clicking them pops up a window, and the computer then takes a few seconds to a few minutes (or even hours) to compute a full-quality render. IPR rendering is slower, but when finished, it can update the rendering in nearly real time as you adjust lights and materials in a scene. Next is the Render Globals button, which controls the size of the rendering and many other parameters.

Finally, at the rightmost side of the Status Line is the Numeric Input tool. It can operate in four modes:

• Selection by Name Used to type in a prefix or common letters and select all the objects you want quickly. For example, typing in *Torus* selects any object with the letters Torus anywhere in the name.

• Quick Rename Used to rename the currently selected object.

• Absolute Entry Used to enter an exact value for the current highlighted transform. For example, you can select the Y move arrow when in Move mode, and it turns yellow. Entering a value then forces it to move immediately to that value for the Y-coordinate.

• Relative Entry Similar to Absolute Entry mode, but in this case, the amount entered is added to the current value.

Panel Menus

Every view panel you work in has a common set of menus at the top, as shown in Figure 2.8.

Figure 2.8. The panel menu that appears in any view of a 3D scene, shown here with the Lighting menu selected.

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If the panel menus do not appear, you can enable them in Window | Settings/Preferences | Preferences, and then click the Interface entry under the Categories list on the left side of the dialog box. Make sure there's a check mark in the Show Menubar In Panels check box.

These are a few of the more important panel menu items:

• Under the View menu, you'll see options for Look At Selected, Frame Selected, and Frame All. These options are helpful for finding an item and focusing on it. The Look At Selected option centers the selected object in the view. Frame Selected (hotkey: f) centers the object and zooms to the object's extents. Frame All (hotkey: a) centers and zooms the extents of all displayed objects in the currently active panel. These same hotkeys apply in other types of Maya panels, such as Hypershade.

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  All hotkeys are case sensitive. If your Caps Lock is toggled on, it will seem as though the hotkeys aren't working or aren't doing what you expect them to.

  
  

• Under the Shading menu, the first two entries are Wireframe (hotkey: 4) and Smooth Shade All (hotkey: 5). These options toggle a viewport between viewing objects as lines only or as Gouraud-rendered real-time shaded images. An important option to note is the NURBS detail mode. When you're working with NURBS, you can display them in three detail levels: low (hotkey: 1), medium (hotkey: 2), or high (hotkey: 3). These hotkeys work only with NURBS.

• The Hardware Texture mode (hotkey: 6) can optionally display textures applied to objects in your scene in real time, sending the applied images to your 3D video card memory, as shown in Figure 2.9.

  Figure 2.9. Enable hardware texturing to see texture maps of the materials you've applied to your scene in a 3D panel.

  

• The Lighting menu has an option for using existing lights in the scene (hotkey: 7) with this panel's Shaded mode. Normally, Shaded mode is automatically illuminated (with "default lights") in a crude way that serves to get some light in the scene for viewing or rendering a new model. Note that using the 6 hotkey for hardware texturing switches the lighting back to default lights, so if you want both scene lighting and hardware texturing, you have to use the panel menus.

• Use the Show menu to selectively hide all entities of a certain type. For example, you often use it to hide cameras and lights, just to clean up the view so that you can focus on objects. At the bottom of this menu is an option to hide the grid, which is useful when you want to simplify the view.

• Under the Panels menu (see Figure 2.10), use the top three options to select what the panel is seeing in a 3D view. The first option is for Perspective, with the option to use any predefined Perspective view or add a new one. If you do add a new one, you'll see it listed the next time you look at the Perspective view options. The second option is similar; for orthographic views, you have the option of existing Top, Side, or Front views, but you can create new ones. The third option, Look Through Selected, works with Directional and Spot lights so that you can see exactly where they are pointed. It also works with nearly any object type, merely placing you at the pivot point of the entity, looking in the negative-Z direction.

  Figure 2.10. The Panels panel menu.

  

  The next three options let you change the entire layout of the panels. The Panel item displays options for switching the selected panel to some other window, such as a rendered view or the Graph Editor. Note that all the other panel types can be activated as floaters under Window on Maya's main menu bar. However, any panel that's already open as a floater is unavailable in a fixed panel position and, therefore, grayed out in this dialog box. Next is Layouts, which determines how the view area is split into windows. Below it is Saved Layouts, which is similar to the Quick Layout buttons below the toolbox. Seventeen popular layouts are listed, as opposed to the six appearing as hot buttons below the Tool Box. You can create your own custom layouts, too.

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You can LMB-click and drag at the dividing line between any two or more panels and move it to favor one panel over the other. You can also do this at the center point of the four panels.

Tutorial: Interacting with Maya

The following tutorial gives you a chance to try out some of these hotkeys and key combinations. Because these actions are the most fundamental ones in Maya, run through this tutorial a few times so that it becomes more of an internalized skill, like typing or playing a musical instrument. As any typist or musician knows, repetition is the key!

1. Load the scene file ch02tut01.mb from the DVD. This scene has polygon, SubD, and NURBS primitives already created for you to interact with.

   On the DVD

   

   Chapter_02\ch02tut01.wmv

   
   

2. Hold the Alt key and press the LMB, MMB, and RMB buttons to navigate around the objects. Try to get a good view of the NURBS torus. Press 5 to switch to shaded view, 4 to switch back to wireframe view, and then switch back to shaded view again.

3. Select the NURBS torus. It should become outlined in green. Press 2 and notice the improvement in detail. Then, press 3 to see it improve again (see Figure 2.11). To put it back into its original state, press 1. Leave it in "3" mode the highest detail.

   Figure 2.11. A NURBS torus in high-detail mode.

   

4. Use the Alt key with the MMB to pan to other NURBS objects and adjust their display detail. Note that the plane and the cube do not gain detail despite the added divisions because they have no curved edges. Also note that the NURBS cube is created as six separate NURBS planes.

5. Repeat step 4 for the SubD objects. You'll notice that these objects have an inherent curviness to them, because Subdivision Surfaces objects by default create rounded objects. Also, note that they get smoother as you progress from 1 to 2 to 3, as this increases the number of subdivisions.

6. Press 4 to switch the panel to Wireframe mode. Press a to use the Frame All (also known as zoom extents for all objects) option. Hold Ctrl+Alt and drag a window to zoom in on the shapes at left.

7. Click on the polygonal cylinder to select it, and press f to use the Frame Selected (zoom extents of selected object) option (see Figure 2.12).

   Figure 2.12. Wireframe mode, zoomed into the polygonal cylinder.

   

8. Tap the spacebar with the mouse cursor placed over the Perspective panel to reveal the four views. Go to any of the four panels, and in the panel menu, choose Panels | Layouts | Three Panes Split Top.

9. Place your cursor on the horizontal split point of the panels, and LMB-click and drag downward to make the bottom panel smaller. Set the bottom panel to view the Front orthogonal view by choosing Panels | Orthographic | Front in the panel menu.

10. Right-click in the Top view to activate it. Notice that right-clicking enables you to activate a view without deselecting a currently selected object. LMB-click and drag a rectangle around the letters at the right of the geometric primitives, and everything within the selection rectangle (or touching it) will be selected.

11. Tap the spacebar with the mouse cursor placed over this panel, and the view switches to full screen. Press f to frame the selected letters. Press 5 to switch this view to Shaded mode. Press 1, 2, and 3 to watch the NURBS and SubD text display different detail levels. Notice that the polygonal text is unaffected and that the NURBS text looks crude, even at maximum detail. Click the Quick Render button (the director's clapboard icon at the upper right) and view the resulting render. Notice that the letters appear correctly in the rendering; more detail is added to NURBS objects when they are rendered.

12. Tap the spacebar to go back to the three-panel view, and then tap the spacebar with your cursor over the Perspective view. Frame the 18 geometric primitive shapes in the view with the Alt+mouse combinations. Press 6 to enable hardware texturing, and notice that some of the objects exhibit textures. Now press 7 to switch the lighting in the shaded view to use scene lights rather than the default lighting. The lighting changes, as shown in Figure 2.13. Because some scene lights are colored, the lighting changes to show the colored tints at the sides of objects. The added burden of using real-time textures and lighting might make your 3D interaction sluggish, so try orbiting the view and see whether it updates often enough to feel "interactive." If your video card is not up for this kind of display, you can disable the hardware texturing option and use all scene lights in the view.

    Figure 2.13. Hardware texturing and scene lighting are enabled.

    

13. Use the Alt+mouse controls to frame the view from the cylinders to the text. Select the D in the SubD text. Try to orbit by using Alt+RMB. Notice that the view rotates about some point in space that makes the D float around. Next, from the Top view's panel menu, choose View | Look At Selection to center the D in the view. When you orbit, the D will be the orbit centerpoint and won't move around the frame when you orbit. This technique is helpful when you need to examine something from various angles and don't want it drifting around the scene.

14. Select the SubD torus, and press f to center it in the view. In the Tool Box, switch to Move, Rotate, and Scale modes, and you'll see the manipulators appear for these changes. Use the and + keys (just left of the Backspace key) to shrink and increase the manipulator handle sizes. When manipulators are hard to see or are in your way, this is a fast way to change their size.

15. Click on the vertical line by the number 0 at the far left in the Time Slider and, while holding the LMB, drag the mouse slowly to the right. You should see the polygonal torus move. This object had animation applied to it when you loaded the scene. Drag the Time Slider back to the far left, and the torus should return to its original position. Now select the torus by clicking on it. In the Time Slider, vertical red lines should appear to indicate the frames at which keys have been created (see Figure 2.14).

    Figure 2.14. The Time Slider displays keyframes for the selected object with vertical lines.

    

16. Click the next key button at the lower right: the Play button pointing to the right, with the vertical red line at the point. This hops you forward in time to the next key point. Repeat to see the jumps. Then click the Play button, (the right-pointing arrow). View the animation playing back. The Play button becomes a red square during playback the stop button. You must click it to stop playback.

17. Change this view to the Perspective view by choosing Panels | Perspective | Persp from the panel menu. Play the animation again. Tumble, track, and dolly the view as the animation plays to center the action and get a good idea of what's going on. Stop the animation playback.

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    You can stop playback by pressing the Esc key or clicking the Stop button (the same button clicked to begin play).

18. Press f to zoom to the polygonal torus. Now bring in the time ranges to 250 to 320; to do that, type those numbers in the two inner number fields below the Time Slider, or LMB-click and drag the little boxes in the Range Slider (refer to Figure 2.1). Scrub the Time Slider to see what happens by LMB-clicking and dragging left and right. Begin playback again, and adjust the view during playback. If you like, load the file noted next to the DVD icon to compare it to your work.

    On the DVD

    

    ch02tut01end.mb

    
    

Going Further

Repeat the tutorial several times, and each time, try to manipulate things differently. Explore the zoom-window option for zooming in and out of a rectangular selection window you've drawn. Try some of the different panel layouts (in any panel, choose Panels | Saved Layouts), including Hypershade and Hyper-graph, and note how you can zoom and pan these panels the same as with 3D view panels.