Differences in Creating and Editing Models

Modeling: Maya offers NURBS, Subdivision Surfaces, and polygonal modeling. Maya's NURBS are more complex and full-featured than max's. Keep in mind that UV mapping is inherent to NURBS, but it must be applied to polygonal surfaces.

Splines: Maya does not offer the sort of Bezier spline creation and editing tools you're used to in 3ds max. Maya offers the option to build "curves" that have control vertex (CV) points to control curvature. They can be globally flat (curve degree 1), or you can create corners by placing three or more CVs (which appear as floating points) on top of each other when drawing curves of higher degrees. Obviously, building from splines is a technique more suited to 3ds max. In Maya, you tend to work directly from 3D surfaces.

Editing subparts of a mesh: Maya has no modifier stack, so to enter subobject mode, you right-click on a selected object to display its component modes in a pop-up menu. You can also enter the "subobject" mode with the F8 key or with the Component Selection mode button in the Status Line. In Component Selection mode, the selection filter buttons change from object types to the corresponding component types. For polygons, they include edges, faces, and vertices; for NURBS objects, they include isoparms, CVs, and so on. You then make selections, edit the selections (with the Move, Rotate, or Scale tools), and exit the mode by right-clicking and choosing Select or by pressing the F8 key again. F8 acts as a subobject mode toggle. You can right-click on the Selection by Component Type buttons at the top of the interface to include or exclude certain types of entities, as shown in Figure A.13. Buttons are brown if the entities are disabled.

Figure A.13. In Component Selection mode, the selection filter buttons change.

Adding modifiers to a mesh: Many of the typical max modifiers, such as bend, twist, and skin, are found in Maya's Animation mode options for Deform. In general, Maya divides the modes of editing and deforming an object between modeling and animation. However, Maya allows almost anything to be animated, just as max does.

Object history and modifier stack: Compared to max, Maya offers much more detailed object history; every edit is stored in the object's history, as opposed to max's quantum-style modifiers that contain all edits made by the modifier in the stack. Maya's Channel Box displays a stack-like list of tweaks and source object settings for the selected object. Just as you often collapse the modifier stack for objects in max to improve loading speed and file size, you should delete Maya's object history when you're done with primary editing (Edit | Delete by Type | History on the menu). Deleting selected parts of an object's history is usually called "baking history" because you're keeping the object as is and discarding all the construction records.