Differences in Viewport Navigation

Viewport manipulation: Maya has no buttons for zoom, orbit, pan, maximize, zoom extents, and so forth, like those in max's interface on the lower right. Instead, Maya relies on a three-button mouse and hotkeys. For orbit, pan, and zoom, you must press the Alt key and simultaneously press the left (LMB), middle (MMB), or right mouse (RMB) buttons while dragging in a viewport. max offers direct mouse+hotkey control of viewports, too, but many users aren't aware of them: Alt+MMB for orbit, MMB alone for pan, and scroll wheel for zoom. In Maya, you constantly use these zoom and pan functions for browsing almost every type of graphical dialog box graph editors, paint effects presets, and so forth. For Maya's Material Editor (called Hypershade), this feature is a big plus because you can see material swatches at any size you like in the Work Area.

Zoom window: In Maya, press Ctrl+Alt and LMB-drag a rectangle of the zoom-to area. Dragging the window from upper-left to lower-right results in a zoom in, and dragging from lower-right to upper-left results in a zoom out, in which the existing frame fits into the newly drawn window. The smaller the window you draw, the more extreme the zoom.

Zoom extents and zoom extents selected: All Maya panels have choices under the View menu for Frame All objects (hotkey: a) and Frame Selected Object (hotkey: f). Again, this same option works for all Maya's other editing windows, such as Hypershade and the Graph Editor. Shift+F and Shift+A are the hotkeys for Frame Selected in all panels and Frame All in all panels.

Minimize and maximize window (min/max toggle): You simply tap the spacebar in Maya. Regardless of which window is currently selected, the panel with the mouse cursor over it toggles to full screen.